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FASHION
THE bestselling author suggests key novels to help you through life. FASHION matters. It is a branch of aesthetics, like fine art and architecture, and should be respected as such.
Some folk think they’re too clever to care about it: their minds are on higher things.
Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII’s famous adviser, questioned how anyone could be ‘silly enough to think himself better than other people because his clothes are made of finer woollen thread than theirs? After all, those fine clothes were once worn by a sheep’.
Well thanks, Tom, but you can stick to the God stuff. Leave the serious business of fashion to us.
It’s life-enhancing to gaze upon people who really know how to dress. Even reading about them will do.
In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, sweet Kitty spends all day getting ready for the ball. Her dress is an elaborate tulle over a pink slip, she’s all lace and rosettes, her hair is piled high with a flower and two leaves. But she makes her entrance as easily and simply as if she’d been born like that. She exudes pure style and it lights up the page.
Of course, Kitty, a princess, is on quite a good budget. But a true icon can rock it on tuppence. Topaz, the stepmother in Dodie Smith’s heavenly I Capture The Castle, is extraordinary.
Her long, silver hair trails down her back, she’s an angel in confections of scarves. One night, she tries dressing like everyone else.
The family is dining with the love interest, and she wants young Rose, her stepdaughter, to shine. So she wears make-up and a traditional black dress, and looks almost unexceptional. Not just a literary fashion icon, but also thoughtful and kind.
Style can also mask something more sinister. Patrick Bateman, in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, might be a narcissist, misogynist and murderer, but he dresses frightfully well.
He spends hours on his beauty regime, mixing his cologne, obsessing about labels. Through his tailored suits down to his crocodile loafers, he reflected his ‘yuppie’ generation’s obsession with image and brands.
Hmm. I wonder if he and Thomas More would’ve got on?