Marc Chevalier
Gone Home
- Messages
- 18,192
- Location
- Los Feliz, Los Angeles, California
.
Arnold Gingrich, the legendary editor who created Apparel Arts and Esquire, was a personal friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Here's what Mr. Gingrich wrote about the way the two dressed:
"Scott [Fitzgerald] in my eyes always had an elegance surpassing even that of the Arrow Collar Man, who had been the model we all grew up admiring. I can see him now in my mind's eye as he looked that day in Baltimore, in the early spring of 1935, just before we were sitting down to lunch. ... I can't remember a damn thing that the other three of us wore, but I can see every detail of what Scott was wearing. He turned away to put on an old heather tweed jacket, and his clothes are as plain to me now as if I were looking at them in a shop window: white shoes with a dark brown saddle, pipe-clayed like a British soldier's belt, grey flannel slacks -- supremely well cut, venerable, but gracefully aged -- and a black pullover that, aside from being vastly becoming, contrived to make him look as if he could never seem to be more than six or seven years out of Princeton -- and he was then almost thirty-eight."
"(In contrast, a mental snapshot of Ernest [Hemingway] at about the same time ... shows a hulking creature bulging out of a blue tweed suit -- cut by O'Rossen in the Place Vendome -- with the sleeves and the pant legs both too short, an oatmeal flannel shirt whose collar is unevenly turned down, a russet wool tie askew, and pebbly grained thick-soled shoes of a wrong shade of liverish brown. The general effect is that of items left over from a rummage sale.)"
If you have any literary references to writers and their clothes, please share them here.
Thanks!
.
Arnold Gingrich, the legendary editor who created Apparel Arts and Esquire, was a personal friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Here's what Mr. Gingrich wrote about the way the two dressed:
"Scott [Fitzgerald] in my eyes always had an elegance surpassing even that of the Arrow Collar Man, who had been the model we all grew up admiring. I can see him now in my mind's eye as he looked that day in Baltimore, in the early spring of 1935, just before we were sitting down to lunch. ... I can't remember a damn thing that the other three of us wore, but I can see every detail of what Scott was wearing. He turned away to put on an old heather tweed jacket, and his clothes are as plain to me now as if I were looking at them in a shop window: white shoes with a dark brown saddle, pipe-clayed like a British soldier's belt, grey flannel slacks -- supremely well cut, venerable, but gracefully aged -- and a black pullover that, aside from being vastly becoming, contrived to make him look as if he could never seem to be more than six or seven years out of Princeton -- and he was then almost thirty-eight."
"(In contrast, a mental snapshot of Ernest [Hemingway] at about the same time ... shows a hulking creature bulging out of a blue tweed suit -- cut by O'Rossen in the Place Vendome -- with the sleeves and the pant legs both too short, an oatmeal flannel shirt whose collar is unevenly turned down, a russet wool tie askew, and pebbly grained thick-soled shoes of a wrong shade of liverish brown. The general effect is that of items left over from a rummage sale.)"
If you have any literary references to writers and their clothes, please share them here.
Thanks!.
