The most sartorially resplendent character in a work of fiction?
Several blogs have recently pondered just this question. It has also forced several library types to stop, think and scratch their immaculately coiffed heads. C’est très difficile!
One complicating factor is the unholy number of novels which have been subjected to film or television treatment and therefore the meddling attention of a costume department. Was Holly Golightly a bonafide fashion plate? Or is she merely the cinematic creature of Edith Head and Hubert de Givenchy?
The other worrying aspect to fashion and fictional characters is that, generally, well-dressed characters are portrayed as vile and vapid; I’m thinking here of the Land of Plenty’s favourite psycho Patrick Bateman and Runway magazine editor-in-chief Miranda Priestly in The devil wears Prada.
I shudder to imagine what subtle character traits my own modish (or not) choices would indicate if, heaven forbid, I was dropped into a novel. Would my penchant for corsages and other floral accessories reveal me as a trivial female popinjay, a mere fribble and shallow coxcomb?! But back to the well-dressed…
Some genre contenders might include:
- Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane -The fashion forward Deco sleuths showed stuffy Oxford dons just how to achieve stylish perfection in Gaudy night.
- Hercule Poirot- Perhaps fastidious rather than fashionable, Hercule’s clothes like his little grey cells are sharp and immaculate.
- Lestat-Anne Rice’s vamp is a noted snappy dresser and I am reliably informed that fangs=fashion.
Rather more authoritatively Booker short-listed novelist Linda Grant -The clothes on their backs picked three outstanding “Paper dolls”:
- Dorothea Brooke, the “finely formed” heroine of george Eliot’s Middlemarch
- Duchesse de Guermantes from Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu
- Orlando, not the Bloom boy, but eponymous hero/heroine of Virgina Woolf’s Orlando: A biography
So all you stylistas who’d make it down the catwalk on your best-dressed literary list?
23 August 2010 at 12:29 pm
As an avid lover of fine fabrics I was thrilled to discover Frances Fyfield lately and read about a character who was more than a dry-cleaner and worked to restore vintage clothing, and another character (the deceased one) who collected vintage designer treasures (Blood from Stone). But the best bit was in another of her novels (Safer than Houses) featuring a particularly beautiful feathery silk scarf in the public humilitation of the nasty male – you have to read it to find out.
But have you wannabe movie-makers ever considered the importance of including a scene involving the makeover of curtains into something sartorial? Think Sound of Music and Gone With the Wind!
24 August 2010 at 10:35 am
Ooooh, I read Blood from a stone too, I had no idea blood stains in vintage clothing were so bothersome!
I’ll give Safer than houses a go next.
23 August 2010 at 1:37 pm
My very favourite fashion plate is Linda, from Nancy Mitford’s Love in a cold climate. I love the section of the book that begins when Fabrice finds Linda sitting crying on her suitcase at the Gare du Nord and takes her out for lunch, where he observes that “this dreadful linen suit you are wearing has ready-made written all over it”. Then he installs her in a flat in Paris, where she occupies her days buying clothes which he takes an intense interest in. Just like Richard Gere in Pretty Woman, only classy.
24 August 2010 at 12:28 pm
I think there are two Holly Golightly. One created by Truman Capote and Imagined by me and the other created by the costume designers and brought to life by Audrey Hepburn.
I like gorgeous costumes, but I really don’t like it when the costume doesn’t match the era. Death on the Nile was set in the 1930′s and filmed in 1978. The women’s clothing was gorgeous and ever so slightly 1970s-ish.
As for what role joyciescotland would play if dropped into a film – I can’t say, but as I wear jeans and have a fondness for sleeveless vests and colour co-ordinated specs, I would get to play the part of Lady On Park Bench.
25 August 2010 at 1:40 pm
Jeans, sleeveless vests and colour co-ordinated specs…sounds like an undercover operative to me, or a forensic archeologist or maybe even a crime-solving librarian.