Tom Wolfe’s Other Legacy

Wolfe looked dandified and absurd. I suppose one could compare his sartorial misadventures to his over-the-top prose, but at least his over-the-top prose worked. Good writer, yes, but Jack G.'s "foppish" is about the best one can say of his taste in clothes.

Hemingway could dress. Twain could dress. Proust could dress. H.L. Mencken could dress. Samuel Beckett could dress. Joan Didion and Susan Sontag could dress. Tom Wolfe could … well … prance. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/fashion/what-writers-wear-joan-didion... Legendary authors : and the clothes they wore Newman, Terry (Fashion journalist) New York Harper Design 2017.

Perhaps Mr. Wolfe, like many geniuses, was a victim of "Decision fatigue" -- being mentally worn out by making menial choices. Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Albert Einstein have/had chosen to wear similar clothes each day to reduce the decisions they have/had to make in the morning, enabling them to get on with the real work.

I had some business correspondence with Mr. Wolfe and have saved the beautifully inscribed envelope he addressed to me in response to this day. Such gallant handwriting!

The killer, says-it-all line, as Wolfe observed, "Coming across a group of working journalists . . . was like encountering 'the shape-up line for the homeless’' waiting for a free food giveaway at church." Like, even the WH press corps and red carpet paparazzi have enforced dress code standards and why? Read above paragraph.

"Imagine him entering a room with Norman Mailer, dressed as a boxer’s cornerman or some old salt in a fisherman’s cap, and you get the idea." I got it! Irresistible. So why resist?

Tom Wolfe created a Brand for himself through his clothes. How very smart of him. Out of the thousands of writers and journalists know how many others can say that? Not many, if any. Brilliant. And yes, of course it helped that he was a great writer.

Tom Wolfe opened our reading minds in a new way with writing and persona that were both stylized in the same consciously vivid, lightly self-mocking and joyfully self-aggrandizing fashion. New parts of our brains were activated, and the trend to cinematic novels (since Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith) owes much to him-of-white-linen. Thank you!

It doesn't take great talent to wear a suit, just a straight spine because that's who they cut them for. Quasimodo may of been a better writer but it could never be known because with his back he'd never fit into a snappy suit.

Wolfe's dress was more "organic" to his time than those, seeing it now, might realize. Rather than setting him at odds with prevailing male costume--I'm talking about the sixties and seventies--his dress was an apotheosis of the peacock trend that gave us mods and Carnaby Street, for example. Only he put the kind of care and knowledge--and dough!--into his dress that few others could. His special insight, common to all successful dandies, was to realize that the style, once established, had never to be departed from only built upon.

Tom Wolfe should not be receiving this fluff treatment. His sartorial statements, if we may call them that, are as much an example of self-promotion as are any of the self-promotion we have grown accustomed to getting from Donald Trump. Likewise, the snappy sentences relying mostly on bizarre typography which excited us back in his early days, did more than mask the banality of his message. His style flim-flammed the reader by masking his true agenda -- but I suppose, in hindsight, that was our own fault for going ga-ga over what appeared to be avant-garde and missing his actual intent. He only came out as a Conservative when the political winds had shifted. But of course the same can be said of Hunter S. Thompson.

I remember walking into the Isle di Capri restaurant on the UES behind Mr. Wolfe and he held the door open for me with eye contact and a smile. That same week, I was walking out of a Joe's cafe while Malcolm Gladwell was walking in and when I held the door open for him he stared straight ahead like a zombie and said nothing. The peacock had manners to go with his style. The mannerist wore black jeans, black shirt, black sneakers and had bad posture. The man makes the clothes.

most awesome semantic calligrapher ever danced among inkdrops most nuanced bristle strokes ever from linotype brush bye...

He understood that historic truth was best served wrapped in fiction.

I once read that Truman Capote when he was starting out working at he New Yorker would waltz back in from lunch carrying a fancy bag from some expensive eating emporium. He was trying to make an impression. Wolfe never stopped making an impression. And he mist have handled his money VERY well to live as he did and dress as expensively as he did. I'd love to know who advised him over the years.

Wolfe's unusual appearance went beyond clothes. In the years when I lived in Southampton, on Long Island, in the nineties and the naughts, I shared a gym with him for a while, to which he drove in either an early '90's white General Motors station wagon or a white Cadillac of roughly the same vintage. Each had been modified so that many more of its surfaces were white than as had come from the factory, and the tires sported white sidewalls that ran from the rim almost to the tread. They were unmistakable, conspicuous, and flat out garish, even for the Hamptons. Having been raised to leave celebrities alone, I, of course did so, and interacted with him only as I would have with any other patron of the gym. Once, however, he noticed me looking sidelong at his car in the parking lot with what I imagine was a quizzical expression on my face. He caught my eye and returned my expression with something between an amused grin and a smirk, waited a beat, and then turned and went on into the gym. I am not sure to this day whether the joke was on him for driving such a peculiar automobile, or on me for being taken in by it. What is certain is that the man was truly eccentric, even as he was a razor-sharp observer of those masters-of-the-universe who were his neighbors in Manhattan and in Southampton.

Sorry, but I'll take JP Donleavy in his tweeds standing before his country house any day. "Writing is turning one's worst moments into money." JPD

How can you write this and *not* reference his '66 essay "The Secret Vice"?! Search it and enjoy the read!!

It's a delicate dare to make, that one can brand oneself so distinctively as did Wolfe, but not let the clothes and the spats do all his talking for him. He backed it up with good work. Today's writers are mostly about their looks but not their books.

It's a delicate dare to make, that one can brand oneself so distinctively as did Wolfe, but not let the clothes and the spats do all his talking for him. He backed it up with good work. Today's writers are mostly about their looks but not their books.

"Had all the arodynamic properties of a set of car keys" was one of the more wonderfully descriptive lines I remember from "The Right Stuff," as Wolfe described the horifying experience of the legendary Chuck Yeager whose aircraft tumbled in the upper atmosphere, and whose cool under pressure got him nearly intact back on the ground holding his parachute. That sort of appreciation was part of Wolfe's wonderful tribute to the courageous men who flew the "outer envelope" and nobly advanced the progress of modern aviation.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/08/specials/wolf... It is nice that you are canonizing him now. It is beyond me that a newspaper that seems to hold him in such high regard would neglect him as a critic of art and architecture. It might have changed the trajectory of art in America so we are not celebrating the current "We Come in Peace" monstrosity currently laying waste to The Metropolitan Museums' roof.

TW wonderful in everyway.

Late in the 1980's Wolfe was approached by an elderly Virginia gentleman who had been an assistant baseball coach at Washington & Lee when Wolfe was a pitcher there. The gent said, "Hey, Wolfe, I'm writing a book about your pitching career at W & L." (Wolfe looked puzzled.) The gent explained more about the book: "It's called THE WRONG STUFF." Wolfe was the first to start laughing at that punch line and the last to finish.

When Mr. Wolfe first blazed onto the literary scene, many, if not most, male writers persisted in dressing like hardscrabble characters from a Clifford Odets play or possibly denizens of the cartoonist Al Capp’s mythical Outer Slobovia. Name those writers please.

To borrow the term, not everyone can pull something, like Mr. Wolfe's style, off. However, if you can, you always should.

Why no mention of his affinity to the other great male dressers of his era, black men, particularly out of Harlem? Wolfe was a great over-dresser and really one of the only white guys who could pull off the wonder excesses of black sartorialism. There is something of the Cake Walk in Tom Wolfe, and not just in his clothing. Wolfe paraded the subjects of his essays in front of us as archetypal figures of Americana. And he did it with humor. Wolfe's carnivalesque essays are exemplary of the satirical lesson of black mimicry of white fools in cake walking. Tom Wolfe carried that off with the same aplomb that he carried off the sartorial frisson of black fashion.

What a wonderful tribute to an obvious talent, needless to say- and his distinct wardrobe and sense of personal style. And I'm thrilled that you've quoted Sean Crowley, a phenomenal authority on menswear history.

My late professor William Goetzmann was college roommates and good friends with Wolfe. He told me Wolfe recognized early on how his wardrobe helped enlarge his persona. Wolfe was a great writer, but he also knew he needed an edge, so what he wore was a carefully crafted effort.

His sartorial splendor extended to his distinctive calligraphic script, too. He penned a thank you letter after some of my articles were published about him. It took me a while just to decipher it but it remains a cherished gift framed and prominently displayed on a wall.

I admit to only seeing Wolfe in the neighborhood occasionally, and never recognizing any other writers. (I do have awful vision) However, this is the absolute first time I have ever heard that writers-ptrofessional or not-successful or not-gave a fly's left front leg about what clothes they wore, or whether they were fasionable or not. I suspect that clothes men wear are usually the result of powerul influence of the women in their lives-or their men-take your choice. (Actually, I noticed that wolfe's clothes became as predictable as his prose and the numerous words written in caps and bolded.) It is incredibly difficult to be productive and good at something as deeply personal and introspective as writing if one constantly thinks it more important to choose the right color shirt and to have expensive hand made suits from countries which are known for selling such.\ All the best writing by all the writers I admire the most, was usually done in private where no one would be aware if the composer was nude, or dressed in a torn bedsheet.

The rumpled masses of journalists packed into press conferences shouting at Mayor Lindsey. The air stinking of coffee breath and stale cigarette smoke-imbued shabby clothes. This was not Tom Wolfe. For this alone, he became my favorite writer. It also helped he was quite good.

It was on a sweaty day in Florence, in a molten-hot Basilica di Santa Croce, that I met Tom Wolfe. My wife called to me and said, "Your hero is here." Sure enough, floating in what seemed like a lily in white linen over a pool of tourists in hopeless shorts and scuffed running shoes was the man himself, his tie knotted--a battle flag at full staff, in defiance of the heat--and his vest fitting like a second shirt. He and I later corresponded over an incident I had while heading into the Bronx—in which our driver made the same turn as did Sherman McCoy in Wolfe's novel Bonfire of the Vanities, striking a local man (who came away unhurt), but that meeting in the Franciscan church will always stand out in my mind as the most sublime grand entrance ever made by another writer into my life. His tailor should be proud. The clothes did indeed help define the man.

Very insightful observation regarding someone with brilliant intention.

i suppose you might say clothes made the man along with his ability at choice Words

Imagine being trapped like that in his "signature look" forever. How horrible. Oh, for some color! He illustrated in life what he wrote about.

"The suit was green Cheviot tweed so well worn that it was shiny as a tuxedo lapel." How do you wear a woolen tweed down to a shine?

Over the past ten years or so I've recommended Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers to dozens of people. Nothing has better captured and extortion and hypocrisy of the racial activist movement. Nothing has changed a bit. It's amazing how many people don't know what we are experiencing today is nothing new, including activist anti-Semitism, anti-white racism, false narratives, and extortion. This book could have been written today about current activists- BLM, Shaun King, Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory and it would be exactly the same.

Only three photos? If ever there was an article deserving of a slide show, this is it.

It's Lower Slobbovia, not Outer Slobovia.

What a wonderful inciteful entertaining writer. I read everything he wrote that I could get my hands on. When he wrote “A Man in Full”, I was a commercial real estate lawyer at the largest firm in Texas and was blown away by his perfect characterization of the big time over extended real estate developers with their trophy second wives. Even the legal details, the descriptions of the negotiations with his lenders was spot on. I laughed myself sick reading it because I was engaged in the same mess on the lender side. Of course, he had a lawyer assist him, but you’d never know it. I will miss him. Condolences to his family.