How Tom Wolfe Made Clothing a Man’s Deepest Trait in “Bonfire of the Vanities” / Max Lakin In: Garage Aug 10 2018

By 1987, Tom Wolfe had been explaining his white suit for 25 years. The Bonfire of the Vanities, his debut novel after establishing himself as a grandee of New Journalism, had just come out, and Wolfe was smugger than ever. In an interview with Time around then, answering a question about his clothing—because there was always a question about his clothing—Wolfe called his taste “counter-bohemian,” the result of a happy accident. And who among us hasn’t ordered a bespoke suit in cream, summer-weight wool only to find you have—hilariously!—chosen a heavy worsted? He wore it anyway, which he found irritated people. It was, to him, a “harmless form of aggression.” If he was feeling particularly jaunty, he’d add a homburg, which made him look like a patrician soda jerk, or a Dick Tracy villain.
Bonfire is about many things: social stratification in Reaganomics New York, 1980s boom-boom Wall Street excess, the hot pot of racial tension in the city (characters have opinions about black and Jewish people, and air them), class anxiety, real estate anxiety, the Kafkaesque futility of the justice system, cool Tribeca restaurants. All these threads run alongside a parallel frequency, tuned to what men wear. And it is chiefly men; women’s clothing is perfunctory here, always either accentuating thighs or breasts or “the lubricious declivity” of lower abdomens, or cracked about as something ridiculous (the protagonist, Sherman McCoy, and his wife hire a town car to take them to and idle outside of a dinner party six blocks away because McCoy’s wife is wearing a dress with “short puffed sleeves the size of Chinese lampshades” that she can’t walk in). Wolfe was not a fashion journalist, but because of the attention he paid to what men wear, and the rigor with which he approached his personal appearance, everything he wrote about was, in a way, about men’s fashion. He believed clothing was the easiest way to understand what a person was about, because clothing ultimately represented decisions. Accordingly, much of Bonfire reads like a proto-Styleforum. ... [mehr] https://garage.vice.com/en_us/article/ne59aq/tom-wolfe-menswear-bonfire-of-the-vanities