BEST BOOKS ON... VANITY
MANY novelists encourage wariness of those who exhibit a flamboyant interest in fashion. Game Of Thrones’ Cersei Lannister is a consummate power dresser. Heroines, in contrast, tend to be attractively dishevelled types like mud-hemmed Elizabeth Bennet, or puritanically focused on loftier realms, such as Jane Eyre or Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke.
It starts early, this authorial semaphoring to be wary of those with recklessly expensive tastes and a bloodlust for pomp and finery.
Think of the mysterious fate of the magnificiently named James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree’s mother after she dons a golden gown and ventures to the edge of town in AA Milne’s jokily cautionary children’s poem Disobedience.
Edith Wharton’s Undine Spragg, the gloriously monstrous antiheroine of The Custom Of The Country, exploits her physical beauty to propel herself from a Midwestern backwater to Fifth Avenue then Parisian high society, acquiring and discarding husbands, as their usefulness expires. Vain and self-regarding, she is never quite sated. ‘She saw the blaze of her rubies, the glitter of her hair...But under all the dazzle a tiny black cloud remained.’
Few characters signal the danger of pursuing aesthetic pleasure and decadent luxury, above all else, more hauntingly than the narcissistic title character of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray. A beautiful youth, he throws himself into the corrupting swirl of demimonde Victorian London, breaking laws, hearts and promises. Over 18 years, his looks remain flawless, but a portrait painted of him ages unrecognisably.
David Nicholls’s One Day offers a portrait of Nineties lad culture in Dexter Mayhew, the preening, selfregarding mockney presenter of TV pop show Largin’ It. Actually, he is losing it as he hangs out at the Atlantic Bar in designer clobber. Luckily, his oldest friend, Emma Morley, can still locate the good in him.
Fashion is fun and clothes necessary, but people, just like books, should not be judged by their covers.