Is Your Underwear Purple Too?: Post-Fashion Week Musings on Style in Literature
It’s all over. Fashion Week is back in the closet until spring. As this year’s cast of models kicked off their heels and moved on with a shrug of their padded shoulders, there was at least one place where the flame of fashion still flickered: The Museum at FIT. Ivy Style, their latest exhibition, presents an entertaining panorama of college clothing, from rakish raccoon coat to basic Brooks Brothers blazer.
Every preppy should know the classic Fitzgerald line about Gatsby’s “gorgeous pink rag of a suit”; visitors to the FIT exhibit will see emblazoned on the wall a quote from his first novel, This Side of Paradise, less well known but equally unforgettable: “Is your underwear purple too?” Literature can provide the fashion addict with her fashion fix: As New York Review of Books contributor, and fervent fashion writer, Anne Hollander put it, “literature has always been the handmaiden of fashion.”
With our plaid in check, The Observer checked in with a cross-section of the city’s fashion writers and novelists to talk about the ways in which literature—that quintessentially private pursuit—collaborates, clashes and collides with the very public spectacle of fashion. Read More
