Can you believe that we’re in the throes of fashion month? Have you placed your bets on who will wear Tomo Koizumi to the Met Gala this year? To be honest, I’m still in cycles of contemplation after viewing the earlier Spring Haute Couture shows for 2019. Iris Van Herpen was my favorite. Shift Souls is incredibly refreshing: its architectural quality, coupled with its lightness of form and tone that emphasized the body, emphasizes Iris Van Herpen’s commitment to redefining couture. Her use of 3D printing challenges how we think about bodies and movement. It reveals how clothes and style have the power to shift paradigms. So I thought to myself: what does literary style (double entendre intended) reveal about sartorial style in all its forms?

Fiction’s own cup runneth over with characters of memorable styles and personality: Hercules wearing the hide of the Nemean Lion; Countess Ellen Olenska in black satin; Sebastian Flyte in his pyjamas, bathrobe, and teddy bear; Maria Wyatt Lang in her silver vinyl dress; I cringe to admit that Ayn Rand’s Dagny Taggart deserves a shout-out for her showstopper wardrobe (think Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in the form of a bias cut)—the list could go on, and I haven’t even dipped into the world of cinema and TV. Do we have time to talk about Joan Holloway or James Bond or Patsy Stone? It’s a semiotic field day.

I touch base on semiotics because it guides me to a quote from the legendary Diana Vreeland:

“You gotta have style. It helps you get down the stairs. It helps you get up in the morning. It’s a way of life. Without it, you’re nobody. I’m not talking about lots of clothes.”

So clearly, there’s more to style than tweeds and tails. It’s about attitude and personal identity. One might even say it’s tied to one’s raison d’être. So what does clothing have to do with our identity? What does literature have to do with an art form that is so visual and so materialistic?

Here’s my take.

Style in fiction teaches us first and foremost: There is no such thing as neutrality. If you are a human and you have a body, you are either wearing or not wearing clothes. Not wearing clothes is a political statement. And wearing clothes is a social quagmire that feels impossible to get out of. If clothes have the power to express literally everything—from one’s mood to one’s social class—then no matter what you wear (or not wear, or even if you go nude) you are making a decision in relation to your body and how you want to present yourself to your own reflection and to others. We never escape the contradictions of the court of public opinion. One of my favorite examples of this is Viscount Goring of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. Lord Goring is a dandy if ever there were one. His love interest, Mabel, discusses him with his father in Act I:

Mabel Chiltern (to the Earl of Caversham). Why do you call Lord Goring “good-for-nothing”?
Earl of Caversham. Because he lives such an idle life.
Mabel Chiltern. Why? He rides every day in the morning, goes to the Opera three times a week, changes his clothes at least five times a day, and dines out every night. You don’t call that leading an idle life, do you?

This is hilarious—did you ever think that changing clothes is an activity of equal weight to horseback riding? We often thing of getting dressed as a passive, thoughtless exercise (or the nine-to-five of fashion models) but Arthur, Viscount Goring, disproves this notion. His father calls this idle, but Mabel jokes that it is the opposite. And in Act III, Lord Goring spends a majority of a scene fussing over clothes. Below is merely the beginning of that buttonhole bit:

[Enter LORD GORING in evening dress with a buttonhole. He is wearing a silk hat and Inverness cape. White-gloved, he carries a Louis Seize cane. His are all the delicate fopperies of Fashion. One sees that he stands in immediate relation to modern life, makes it indeed, and so masters it. He is the first well-dressed philosopher in the history of thought.]

Lord Goring. Got my second buttonhole for me, Phipps?
Phipps. Yes, my lord. [Takes his hat, cane, and cape, and presents new buttonhole on salver.]
Lord Goring. Rather distinguished thing, Phipps. I am the only person of the smallest importance in London at present who wears a buttonhole.

Is this not a tell-tale sign of a detail-oriented personality? In fact, the problem of the play is solved thanks in large part to Goring’s observant attitude when it comes to clothes and jewelry—he saves his best friend, Sir Robert, from the clutches of a conspiracy through the careful maneuvering of a gold bracelet. At the end of the play, an idle man has saved an ideal husband. Lord Goring’s obsession with clothing reveals an acute personality—through this example, we realize that as a whole, clothing expresses qualities and versions of us even before we ourselves express who we are through word or action, just like Lord Goring.

So if every clothing decision we make expresses a version of us (whether we mean for it to or not), then deliberate decisions on clothing can speak even bigger volumes both about our personality. Literature shows that style is not about glamour, but how we use clothes to present ourselves. In fact, one of the most iconic examples of the power of sartorial choices as personality manifested is actually one of the least “glamorous” moments in literary history.

“The moss-green velvet curtains felt prickly and soft beneath her cheek and she rubbed her face against them gratefully, like a cat. And then suddenly she looked at them.”

This is the turning point of Chapter 32 of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. The protagonist Scarlett O’Hara is at her weakest—poor, starving, and unable to pay the taxes on her family estate, Tara. But she is not a wilting Southern belle. Scarlett is ruthless and pragmatic. She decides that she will ask for the money for the tax from Rhett Butler. She loathes the ideal of going to him while looking like a peasant, but there’s no Kardashian glam squad available to her in impoverished Reconstruction Georgia. When she spots her late mother’s green curtains, she finds the solution: she tears the curtains from the rails and creates a dress. Even Rhett briefly falls for this façade, and when the truth (or, her calloused hands) is revealed, he’s more focused on admiring her brazenness and grit.

“…he had never known such gallantry as the gallantry of Scarlett O’Hara going forth to conquer the world in her mother’s velvet curtains and the tail feathers of a rooster.”

This dress is not about Vivien Leigh looking trés chic in green velvet and gold tassels (or Carol Burnett looking just as iconic.) It is a testament to the sheer force-of-will of an immensely unsympathetic character (especially one in a moral framework that is the rallying point of Lost Cause grumbling.) She uses clothing as armor in her bid for survival. What’s more, she uses the most mundane of things—green curtains—to perpetuate her aristocratic brand. This effort is so convincing that it tricks even Rhett (temporarily) into believing her ruse. This literary moment shows that personal style is a potent combination wherein the external materiality of clothing complements (or, hides) our own personality and interior lives and becomes a visual thumbprint that we present to the world.

I think it’s why we smell the desperation off of people who dress in head-to-toe off-the-rack Gucci or are obsessed with dumb Veblenesque hype brands—without actual thoughtfulness, these “styled” looks feel inauthentic and uninspired.

So it may seem counter-intuitive, but I guess that in the end, style within literature shows us that when it comes to style, it isn’t what we wear as much as it is how and why we wear it, and what that makes others feel. Literature’s use of clothing shows that style reveals and occludes our inner lives and manifests an external image for others. This a paradox for a daily activity that is supposed to be intrinsically personal.

And I’m not just talking about the Kate Effect. This paradox seems exacerbated in these contemporary times on nonroyals too. This is because we’re becoming more conscious about ourselves as individual consumers in a global economy. In a world where we’re more aware of eco- and ethically-deliberate alternatives, even making personal clothing choices regarding our style seems like an impactful moral decision.

So I think the first step to more authentic style is just being conscious about how motivations and goals drive our sartorial choices—how do we want to present ourselves to the world? How do we carry ourselves? Are we dressing authentically for ourselves? Are we wearing what makes us feel comfortable, excited, and confident? When we wake up tomorrow, let’s do ourselves a favor and dress for ourselves. Every day is a chance to improve ourselves. So let’s be self-honest about what we want from our clothes and practice better intentionality tomorrow morning and ever after. After all, tomorrow is another day of style.

—

Coda

Alternative ending sentence: As God as my witness, I’ll never wear sweatpants to brunch again!

Mrs. Tependris is an original character by the great Konstantin Kakanias. She’s witty and couture-obsessed with heavy moments of superficial preoccupations. Nevertheless, her sense of style and commitment to her personal spiritual fulfillment are nothing short of indomitable.

There is something reassuring and empowering about Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie.

To begin with, Haroun and the Sea of Stories is first and foremost a fable—at least, it’s presented as such. Surely, its premise reads like one. It is the story of the young Haroun Khalifa, whose father, Rashid, is a renowned storyteller. When Rashid suddenly loses his ability to tell stories to his adoring audiences, Haroun embarks on an epic adventure to un-pollute the Sea of Stories, which is the source of his father’s magical talent and the source of all the myriad stories in the universe. But Rushdie turns the typical fable trope on its head: the conceit masks allegorical underpinnings that become socially significant when understanding the context of the novel’s publication.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories was published in 1990. This was the first novel that Rushdie published after the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran declared the infamous 1989 fatwā as a response to the controversial reception of Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. The resulting fatwā made Rushdie a target of violence, and he was obliged to go into hiding in the wake of riots, book-burnings, and violent attacks on his associates. This incident became known as the Rushdie Affair. With this in mind, I realize that this novel’s place within the context of immediate/relevant post-Rushdie Affair literature reveals a defining trait of Rushdie: an untraditional approach to voicing his defiance against conformity.

Anguish, revenge, and violence—there is a vein of literal fire-and-brimstone motifs that run commonly amongst stories of exile. (We see it in an endless parade of works that include Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, Homer’s The Odyssey, Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, Euripides’s Medea, the list goes on and on.)

But with Rushdie, we see hilarious puns, fantastical creatures, and magical kingdoms filled with gossip-loving eggheads.

This is what makes Haroun and the Sea of Stories so significant: before you read Joseph Anton, and before reading the essays of Imaginary Homelands, read this novel first. Because in publishing this novel immediately after his fatwā, Rushdie defends his cause before he defends himself and thus shows how important this is to him as a writer and as a father separated from his son due to the fatwā. All the more importantly, Rushdie does it in a way that is accessible in its humor and exuberance. Rushdie presents to both children and adults a paean to artistic free speech. Haroun asserts the power of story-telling as a way to celebrate diverse views in the face of homogeneity. Rather than putting his enemies in the third circle of hell as Dante did, Rushdie renders the censors and fanatics silly and obtuse in this new fable for the modern age.

I think this is what I love the most about this novel. Its very literal existence is a testament to the power of what narrative-telling can do in the face of cynicism and censorship. Rather than respond with equal fury—or worse, disappear from the public life altogether—Rushdie fights fire with flowers, neutralizes hatred with humor, and exposes fanatics as flimsy façades. I think that this is an approach that we can all get behind too.

With all this in mind, I had a lot of thinking to do. It’s time to ask ourselves—In an age where fights happen in comment sections and inflammatory memes can go viral within 30 seconds, are we more invested in tearing others down than we are in building up the positive merits of our own beliefs?

—

Coda

I want to include one of my favorite excerpts from this book. It is a scene when Haroun is riding on the back of a telepathic mechanical hoopoe and meets a character that would become on of their allies, named Mali the Floating Gardener (‘mali’ itself literally means gardener):

“At that moment the high-speed vegetation actually reared up out of the water and proceeded to wind and knot itself around and about, until it had taken something like the shape of a man, with the lilac-coloured flower positioned in its ‘head’ where a mouth should be, and a cluster of weeds forming a rustic-looking hat. ‘So it is a Floating Gardener after all,’ Haroun said (Rushdie 82, 1990).”

This is a little late, but I wanted to put this up before January ends. In no particular order, here are my favorite reads from 2017!

The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)

This meditation on what it means to lead an honorable life in the face of passivity, lost opportunities, and fear of sunk costs really resonates with me at a time in my life where I too am trying to make sure that I establish a life and career that I am proud of.

I read this book on my commutes from between my house and Los Angeles City Hall, and the parallels of an up-and-coming graduate like myself with Mr. Stevens’s own mental gymnastics that he has to do to justify his life is a reminder that regardless of who we are connected to, we are our own persons. Most importantly, we must remember that to inhabit a role we think is noble is not noble in and of itself—that it is our own actions that define our nobility of purpose of self.

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (Salman Rushdie)

Behind all of the farcical humor and the dark undertones of this novel is a fascinating position Rushdie takes— that in the absence of turmoil, violence, and hardship, humans lose the ability to hold hope and to imagine/dream. Rushdie clearly argues that the great sciences and philosophies developed by humanity are developed in response to, in spite of, and in the midst of conflict. But this isn’t a dark assertion he makes. In fact, it’s a reaffirmation of the resilience of the human spirit.

It’s also ridiculously funny and sharp in its characterization of people and institutions. (One instance: the story of Baby Storm, an infant who, upon coming into contact with corrupt people, has an involuntary magical ability to cause their skin to deteriorate. Naturally, half of New York City Hall flees the five boroughs when the Mayor of New York takes Baby Storm for a tour of the building.)

Call Me By Your Name (Andre Acíman)

I haven’t been so moved by a novel since I read The Moor’s Last Sigh (read in 2016 while on holiday.) Proustian in its manifestation of Elio’s consciousness and lucid in its portrayal of a coming-of-age narrative, this book captures the joys, fears, and foibles of first love—something universal to the human condition beyond the love story between Elio and Oliver.

What I love most about fiction is that the genre is about making readers feel invested in the characters and in the plot, and often, this is done through a concerted effort to get into the minds of the characters. The medium of the novel thus becomes a practice that lets us as humans rediscover our emotions (and our humanity) by having us relate to other human narratives. Acíman does this masterfully and shows that powerful fiction hinges on being able to promulgate and enshrine empathy to elicit an emotional/intellectual investment from people. But this moves beyond fiction. In reading novels like Acíman’s, we reaffirm that empathy—that being the ability and need to connect with others—is of paramount importance to our human existence.

Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)

This is technically a re-read, but I wanted to mark the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s passing by revisiting one of my favorite novels. This time, I was particularly fascinated by how embedded realism, and I couldn’t help but notice that even non-scholarly critics are seeing this and trying to re-interpret this into relevance for a millennial readership where attention spans last as long as a Vine video—we’ve all seen comparisons of the Bennets with the Kardashians, but then we have to ask ourselves, who to us is the character that upends the status quo a lá Blac Chyna? Is it Wickham? Elizabeth? Lydia? Jane? Are we revealing our own inner selves when we make this sort of judgment by forcing parallels? Most importantly, we ask ourselves: why do we need to re-translate works into more contemporary versions of itself? This may be difficult to answer, but it also speaks to the timelessness of the issues Jane Austen herself was writing about: the recklessness of youth, the desire to have it all, and the joy of hope in the face of great and dark odds.

It is this realism that also strikes me on re-reading of the novel. The novel ends with Austen tying up so many loose ends—every person is accounted for. And while this can be read as just a convention of the time (Samuel Richardson’s Pamela doesn’t reach a happy conclusion until Mr. B ensures that Pamela is financially stable), it also can be read as a signal that even fantasies are grounded in the needs of reality—these fairy-tale endings are the result of a reality that did not look favorably upon women with agency. But this is what makes Jane Austen’s works as a whole so powerful—her ability to find equilibrium in situations of great social/power imbalances is a model for how we too can find hope and positivity in trying situations.

Honorable Mention: Rich People Problems (Kevin Kuan)

Definitely my favorite beach read of the year- in all honesty, I only really liked Crazy Rich Asians (the first of the trilogy) but as a whole, it’s refreshing to see a trilogy of books concerned with dominant characters that are immensely relatable to both Asians and to AANHPIs. The plot of this novel (like the other two) has a lot of issues, many of which involve ridiculous deus ex machina, but we don’t read this trilogy for lively turns of phrase or for perfect structure. We read it because Kuan has a talent for writing sassy dialogue and for cataloguing Veblen goods that makes you feel like you’re in a reality show with gilded interiors.