The writers whose kit is as stylish as their wit
LEGENDARY AUTHORS AND THE CLOTHES THEY WORE by Terry Newman (Harper Design £20)
‘I MUST remember to write about my clothes the next time I have an impulse to write’, the novelist Virginia Woolf noted in her diary. ‘My love of clothes interests me profoundly: only it is not love; & [sic] what it is I must discover.’
The popular image of a writer is of someone reluctant to waste intellectual effort on the trivia of fashion. But fashion journalist Terry Newman argues: ‘Strands of fashion run through literature, both in the words writers put on the page and in the clothes they put on their backs.’
The 30 stylish authors featured in Newman’s book fall into three categories. Firstly are those whose appearance is inseparable from their work. The 1968 memoir The Naked Civil Servant, by Quentin Crisp, recorded his courageous use of clothing and make-up to make a statement in the days when homosexuality was illegal in Britain.
Novelist and journalist Tom Wolfe coined the phrase ‘radical chic’ and praised the ‘secret vice’ of sartorial elegance, while Oscar Wilde’s glittering wit was matched by his extravagant turn-out — in 1882, a New York Times interviewer found him dressed in ‘a low-necked white shirt, with a turn-down collar of extraordinary size . . . a turban was perched on his head. He wore pantaloons . . . and patent leather shoes’.
Secondly are writers for whom clothes have intense intellectual and emotional resonance. Nancy Mitford gave her heroine, Linda Radlett, one of the most exquisite garments in all fiction, a ‘ravishing ball-dress made of masses of pale grey tulle down to her feet’.
Mitford wore Parisian haute couture, and is pictured in the book, aged 66, looking formidably elegant in a chic mini-kilt, white woollen tights and black patent ballerina pumps.
Lastly, there is a group of writers on whom stylishness has been projected by others. Samuel Beckett, James Joyce and poet Arthur Rimbaud would be astounded (and probably appalled) to find themselves included in a book of literary style icons, but in each case a powerful sense of self informed their appearance as well as their work.
‘Reading is fashionable,’ Newman writes, citing catwalk collections inspired by authors and books sold in fashion stores, and her volume is an elegant chronicle of the collision of two creative disciplines.
She is evidently more at ease with the fashion aspects than the literary, but this is nevertheless an intriguing account of the idiosyncratic relationship of writers with their wardrobes.