Jill Kargman talks about the upside of death, how her sartorial penchant for dresses led to shopping at Hasidic stores, and her feature film Influenced.

Words by Jacob Brown
Photos by Elrun Rose
Hair: Jackson Simmonds

Famously, Jill Kargman does not wear pants. A trawl through the dressing room of her 19th-century Upper East Side, New York townhouse will reveal not a single pair of jeans. No sweatshirts. No yoga tights. And certainly nothing that might fall within the yawning catchall jaws of athleisure.

Sitting in her home office, casually slouched in a Gucci maxi dress, she heartily agrees with this characterization of her personal style. “My mom says I dress like a Sicilian widow. Other people say a Victorian ghost. I don’t even know what that means,” she laughs. “I guess that I’m pale and have black hair and wear long dresses? I do favor long. I never wear anything above the knees. I like a high collar and a long hem line. I’ve actually shopped at Hasidic stores before. I’m not religious. It has nothing to do with that. I just think, like, having your tits out is so unsexy. It’s fine for some people, but not for me.”

Indeed, she had a fairly secular Jewish upbringing. “My parents did honeymoon in Israel, and I grew up looking at their pictures,” she recalls fondly. But while her formative years involved a lot of travel to Europe, particularly France, she didn’t make it to Israel herself until a few years ago. “My husband and his parents went all the time. I think as Jews, they were appalled I hadn’t been.” So an immersive family trip was planned, a falling in love kind of grand tour. They hit all the highlights together, except when her husband and daughters went to the West Bank while she and her son went on an archeological dig. “A real Jewish mom moment for me,” she says. “That worrying probably took a month off of my life.” 

It’s worth mentioning, that childhood travel to France was in part because her father was a high level executive at Chanel, an early association with fashion that clearly left an impression. For Jill, dressing up isn’t for special occasions. She puts on a dress first thing every day. She sits at her desk and writes in a dress. She runs errands in a dress. If she’s doing it, she’s doing it in a dress (or at least a skirt). Indeed, should you find yourself lucky enough to be invited to one of the rollicking parties she hosts on East 62nd Street, or simply spot her at the grocery store, you’ll be struck by the omnipresence of her sartorial intensity.

“People are like, where are you going? They think I’m going to a party later,” she laughs. “Just recently I showed up at a meeting in a wildly long black dress with like these witch buckle boots, and everyone else was in jeans. I don’t know, I feel like, why not overdress? We’re all going to be dead one day anyway.” 

And there it is. An essential Jill Kargman personality trait. She is peculiarly, curiously morbid. “There have been studies that the most morbid people on earth are the happiest, and I fully see why. I don’t sweat the small stuff. I come home, turn on the lights and turn on the music,” she says, smilingly. “If a friend of mine comes to me upset because so-and-so is a jerk, and this mom at school said this, or whatever, I’m like, ‘Hey, we’re all going to die. So let’s not worry about all these kind of things.’ It’s not that I’m insensitive. It’s not that at all. But embracing death frees you.”

Hers is a cheerful, life-loving kind of morbid. Macabre with a cherry on top. She wears a lot of black but also a lot of bows. Every few minutes she says something that’s just a tad outré. But every turn of phrase is as well formed as it is bracing. Jill Kargman is filterless, verging on provocative. If she thinks it, she speaks it (or writes it into a TV show). But hers is a heart-on-the-sleeve, vulnerable directness. And the flip side of her directness is intimacy. Yeah, sure, her recent Air Mail column might have been about pelvic floor exercises, but she’s not talking about her vagina to shock. She’s sharing her inner world. She’s comfortable saying whatever comes to mind, and in so doing she makes those around her comfortable.

One exception might be the zone of politics. She describes her own views as radically centrist, and while she doesn’t use her platform to preach, those views do sometimes find voice. When she wrote and starred in Odd Mom Out on Bravo, which was not a Jewish show per se but did reflect her Jewish upbringing, she lost tens of thousand of followers and received “really gross” DMs from an endless supply of online antisemites. After October 7th, similar vitriol. And more recently, her erstwhile “allies” on the pro-Israel right have been none too pleased by her vehement anti-Trump takes. 

The humorless one-sidedness of politics is as draining to her as it is to us all, despite the necessity of engagement these days. “I love things that are sort of contrasts,” she says, “like naughty and nice, sugar and spice, leather and lace, or even romance and violence. Though I hate violence, in the context of art, it can bring something to the romantic.”

Indeed, hidden away in her bedroom hangs a striking still life by the Dutch painter Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrechts. “I love Dutch Vanitas,” she says of the 17th-century work. “The flowers that are going to wilt, the jewelry you can’t take with you, the fruit that will rot. I have ‘tempus fugit’ [time flies] tattooed on one arm, and a pocket watch on the other arm. They’re all reminders. Time is truly the only luxury.”

At fifty years old, Jill is only growing more prolific in her creative output. During Covid, she began publishing quick comedy sketches to her social handles — selfie video send ups of the uptown world she herself both inhabits and doesn’t quite fit into. One character in particular, that of Dzanielle, got a lot of traction, including a write up in Vogue with the headline “How Jill Kargman Created Dzanielle, the Quarantine Comedy Character We All Needed.”

“With my books and and with my show on Bravo I was sort of having fun satirizing rich people, which was so easy. Geographically, I live in the Upper East Side. But I never want to hurt someone’s feelings. I feel like the difference between my Odd Mom Out and some other shows is that I was really just trying to hold a funhouse mirror to the Upper East Side,” she says. “When people talk about an acid-tongued roman à clef, that’s never been my voice because I don’t want to be mean.”

The character of Dzanielle is now the basis for a feature film titled Influenced that’s in the final stages of postproduction. Along with actors  like Drew Barrymore and Gwyneth Paltrow, Jill portrays a woman lost in the artifice of rich-mom influencer culture. “She is an influencer who appears to have all the trappings of an amazing life, but is in fact miserable,” she explains. “Very early, in the first ten minutes of the movie, you have a glimpse of these online friendships, groups of women who are all besties and hash tag everything. But that’s not what real friendship is. You have to be able to cry to your friend or ask advice because you’re hurting about something.”

Chasing brand deals and followers can get dark quick. As she puts it, the “nefarious side” of young people having body image issues or dysmorphia is something she’s seen first hand through friends and acquaintances. And while it makes great comedy, it’s also something delicate, a universal struggle society has to face. “It can be fun, social media. I don’t hate follow anyone. I approach it from a healthy, firmly planted stance. I do it for the memes, to take the edge off,” she says. “I was raised to think, if the grass is always greener, then it’s probably astroturf.”