The New York Times recently had an interesting article about Terry Newman's new book, Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore. The connection between literature and style isn't obvious. Indeed, writers are often portrayed in the media as solitary figures, holed up at home, wearing slippers and pajamas as they bang away on their keyboards. But even Emily Dickinson - perhaps the most famous reclusive writer of all time - had a strong interest in fashion.
In the NYT article, the book is described as drawing a connection between each writer's personal style and the work they created - a thesis that's admittedly a bit tenuous when you read through the text. In actuality, each profile is short and you only get ankle-deep in literary analysis. Instead, you get a sense of each writer's relationship with his or her wardrobe, as a personal matter, which isn't too dissimilar from any of ours. Most people use clothes to both hide and show their true identities - they're badges for tribal associations, as well as armor to protect us from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune ( as Bruce Boyer once put it). An excerpt:
Sylvia Plath's work revealed her troubled soul; however, her wardrobe enabled her to appear in control and well balanced - she wore precise, neat, and prettily prim 1950s separates and print dresses that worked as a shield for her psyche. She used clothes to hide what she was feeling; dressing preppily disguised her anxieties. Clothes concealed and guarded the reality of her emotions - by wearing a twinset and pearls, she was able to fit right in with normality even when she was experiencing the worst depressions. [...] William S. Burroughs, meanwhile, was a wild transgressor who lived life to the tune of his own song and rarely cared or concerned himself with what the mainstream thought of him or wanted. His words were avant-garde elegy that gave insight into his madly hallucinogenic sensibility and vision. To keep suspicion at bay, he looked conversely straightedge, nerdy, and conformist: a total disguise, and a uniform that let his imagination do the wandering.
Some writers had little interest in clothes at all. Perhaps the most stylish male figure in the book, Samuel Beckett, was famous for not caring too much about his appearance. While he's often photographed stylishly wearing shrugged-on tweeds, thick turtleneck sweaters, and his signature, round-frame spectacles, much of his look is really about his natural handsomeness and perfectly quiffed hair. In 1959, when Trinity College Dublin was thinking about awarding him an honorary degree, Beckett wrote a letter to his friend Abraham Leventhal: "I have no clothes but an old brown suit, if that's not good enough, they can stick their Litt.D. up among their piles."
The strength and weakness of the book is in its selection of figures. Thankfully, we don't have to endure reading more about how Ernest Hemingway shopped at Abercrombie & Fitch and favored simple leather loafers (a topic too well trodden). At the same time, I wish the profiles on Gay Talese and Truman Capote were a little fuller. Talese's rich history with French tailoring is reduced to a short paragraph about how he wears bespoke suits; Capote's love for eveningwear is barely mentioned.
The profile on Fran Lebowitz is also disappointingly thin. Newman mentions how Lebowitz used to buy her button-downs from Brooks Brothers until they stopped making them the way she liked. Now she gets her shirts from Hilditch & Key and suits from Anderson & Sheppard, both of which she likes to wear in a distinctively androgynous way with straight-legged jeans and cowboy boots. For anyone familiar with men's style, however, this may be old news. You'd get more from reading this interview Lebowitz once did with Elle (it's very good).
I also wish Newman included Robert Lowell instead of John Updike for her preppy, Northeastern writer. Updike produced some great work, but his personal style was little more than today's underwhelming business casual (e.g. khakis with button-ups, sweaters occasionally thrown around the shoulders). Robert Lowell, on the other hand, is an often under-appreciated style figure. Born into a prominent New England family, Lowell was a manic depressive who swung between bouts of mania and depression, spending much of his adult life in mental institutions. Between those struggles, he created some of the most beautiful and influential poetry to come out in the last hundred years.
He also was a great dresser. His slightly off, rumpled suits made him look stylish, but in a way that also felt relatable (see photos immediately above). So many menswear sites today show men in perfectly tailored clothes that look like they've been pressed within an inch of their life, giving people the impression that an errant wrinkle here or there is a sign of a bad fit. Lowell, however, reminds us that style and life are often messier than they're depicted in magazines, and that's OK.
That said, the book has many great moments. I love how Newman includes playwright Joe Orton, whose rugged casualness fits in so perfectly with today's love for vintage workwear. "He refused to fit into the 1960s stereotype of a fey gay man," she writes. "Orton's regular uniform was denim jeans worn with enormous cuffs, tight white t-shirts, leather jackets, army surplus caps, and Converse sneakers." It's a simple look, but one that works really well for a lot of guys. In some ways, it's the opposite of Hunter S. Thompson's mishmash of clothing signals - mid-thigh shorts with track jackets and Aloha shirts, worn with odd accessories such as safari hats, aviator sunglasses, and shark's-tooth necklaces. That kind of sleazy look is coming back, but it takes a certain kind of character to pull off in a way that Orton's style doesn't.
Naturally, the best parts tend to be about women, who are often better dressed here than their male counterparts. My favorite chapter is the one on Joan Didion, who encapsulates what clothes really mean in this beautiful excerpt:
Didion's 2005 memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, written after the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was sadly followed by a 2011 sequel, Blue Nights, in the wake of the passing of her daughter, Quintana Roo. It's a searching volume that takes the reader through the lawless emotions that materialize when a child dies. Again, Didion uses the metaphor of clothing as memory to fathom a dialogue she can delve into: "There is no drawer I can open without seeing something I do not want, on reflection, to see. There is no closet I can open with room left for the clothes I might actually want to wear. In one closet that might otherwise be put to such use I see, instead, three old Burberry raincoats of John's, a suede jacket given to Quintana by the mother of her first boyfriend, and an angora cape, long since moth-eaten, given to my mother by my father not long after World War Two. [...] In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.
Clothes are often valuable only insofar that they're connected to memories, culture, and identity. And in that sense, maybe it's not so strange that writers are important to our understanding of style. It's something that I think is often easily lost in fashion magazines and on online forums, where people focus all too much on aesthetics and quality alone. At their best, clothes are about stories.
You can find Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore on Amazon. The profiles only go so deep, and I wish there were more photos showing each writer's style (I've dug up some below for those who want an accompaniment). That said, for $20 and a few hours on a lazy afternoon, it makes for a fun read.
