Authors have the write kind of style
Who knew there were so many snappily dressed authors? From Donna Tartt’s glamorous tailoring and jewel buckled Roger Vivier pumps, Samuel Beckett’s fishermen’s jumpers and soft, suede Clarks Wallabee boots – very Margaret Howell – to Tom Wolfe’s attentionseeking three-piece white suits, they’re featured, in all their sartorial glory, in a new book that scampers past the books to the important stuff: clothes.
Some minted their own style genre. Zadie Smith: turbans, tweeds … a graceful collision of ethnic and West End; Fran Lebowitz: boy meets man; Edith Sitwell: Mad Medieval Monk. Others, such as Jacqueline Susann, author of the sensationalist Sixties best seller, Valley of the Dolls, and perpetual champion of bell bottoms, bouffants and Pucci, seem content merely to be consistently well dressed.
Joan Didion’s chic eclecticism – Armani suits one moment, Mexican peasant the next – is so celebrated, she recently starred, aged 82, in a Céline ad. Given the quality and quantity of writers featured, where does this reputation for the badly dressed literary giant stem from? George Eliot perhaps, who in her novels gives the impression that an interest in clothes, beyond the dutiful ambition to be modestly and well turned out, is a sign of moral weakness.
Simone de Beauvoir? She wrote, “dressing up is feminine narcissism in concrete form… by means of it the woman who is deprived of doing anything feels that she expresses what she is”. When you read the description of her in a 1947 edition of The New Yorker (“the prettiest Existentialist you ever saw”) you begin to sympathise.
Other writers freely engage with the revealing detail of clothes. Nancy Mitford made no secret of her love of French fashion while lamenting the frumpiness of the actual French woman. Dorothy Parker did a stint on American Vogue while James Joyce worked as a cloth salesman. “Personality
is closely connected with how you dress,” observes Terry Newman, the book’s author. Can’t argue with that, although Gertrude Stein’s correlation between hat and nation is probably pushing it a bit.
“Two years ago,” she wrote, in Paris France, published in 1940, “everybody was saying that France was down and out… And I said, but I do not think so because not for years since the war have hats been as various and lovely and as French as they are now … I do not believe that when the characteristic art and literature of a country is active and fresh that country is in decline.”
Newman doesn’t claim to draw any great conclusions. We are told that Sylvia Plath, who worked at Mademoiselle Magazine shortly before her first suicide attempt, cloaked her internal chaos with a wardrobe of Fifties twinsets and twirling skirts. That’s about as psychological as it gets. Also, I wonder, how did this stylish bunch look when hunched over the page/screen/typewriter? What did Newman wear while she was slogging over this? In the absence of this information, we must content ourselves with parsing the many revealing portraits. Is it too pat to observe Donna Tartt’s bob is as sharp and precise as her prose and, some critics might argue, more concise? Possibly. At any rate, the conclusion we should draw is that working from home is no excuse for slobbing out.
Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore by Terry Newman (Harper Design, £20)