Descriptions Of Outfits From Books

[bels]

When you see a description of an outfit in a book.

[bels]

His distress was great; it still lasted as he moved mechanically towards the door to receive his guest. When he saw him, however, his agonies were somewhat eased. Though perfectly adequate as a political demonstration it was obvious that, as tailoring, Don Calogero's tail-coat was a disastrous failure. The stuff was excellent, the style modern, but the cut appalling. The Word from London had been most inadequately made flesh in a tailor from Girgenti to whom Don Calogero had gone with his tenacious avarice. The wings of his cravat pointed straight to heaven in mute supplication, his huge collar was shapeless, and, what is more, it is our painful but necessary duty to add that the mayor's feet were shod in buttoned boots

From The Leopard.

[skunk ape]

And here the sweltering air thickened before him, and a transparent citizen of the strangest appearance wove himself out of it. A peaked jockey's cap on his little head, a short checkered jacket also made of air.
... A citizen seven feet tall, but narrow in the shoulders, unbelievably thin, and, kindly note, with a jeering physiognomy.

Here, just at the exit to Bronnaya, there rose from a bench to meet the editor exactly the same citizen who in the sunlight earlier had formed himself out of the thick swelter. Only now he was no longer made of air, but ordinary, fleshly, and Berlioz clearly distinguished in the beginning twilight that he had a little moustache like chicken feathers, tiny eyes, ironic and half drunk, and checkered trousers pulled up so high that his dirty white socks showed.

Now the busybody had perched on his nose an obviously unnecessary pince-nez, in which one lens was missing altogether and the other was cracked. This made the checkered citizen even more repulsive than he had been when he showed Berlioz the way to the rails.

At the deceased’s desk sat an unknown, skinny, long citizen in a little checkered jacket, a jockey’s cap, and a pince-nez... well, in short, that same one.

' ...with some son of a bitch on his arm,' the girl went on, 'hailing from nobody knows where, in wretched checkered trousers, a cracked pince-nez, and ... with a completely impossible mug! ...'

Коровьев is my favorite bastard from The Master and Margarita and, as his slowly-revealed outfit shows, he dresses like a real doofus, too. He's great.

[rjbman]

it's not a book but fuck it

shawty had them apple bottom jeans (jeans) / boots with the fur (with the fur)

them baggy sweat pants / and the Reebok's with the straps (with the straps)

[thewisdomoftime]

Spoiler:

from Cortazar's "Blow-Up"
[[...]] What I'd thought was a couple seemed much more now a boy with his mother, although at the same time I realized that it was not a kid and his mother, and that it was a couple in the sense that we always allegate to couples when we see them leaning up against the parapets or embracing on the benches in the squares. As I had nothing else to do, I had more than enough time to wonder why the boy was so nervous, like a young colt or a hare, sticking his hands into his pockets, taking them out immediately, one after the other, running his fingers through his hair, changing his stance, and especially why was he afraid, well, you could guess that from every gesture, a fear suffocated by his shyness, an impulse to step backwards which he telegraphed, his body standing as if it were on the edge of flight, holding itself back in a final, pitiful decorum.

All this was so clear, ten feet away -- and we were alone against the parapet at the tip of the island -- that at the beginning the boy's fright didn't let me see the blond very well. Now, thinking back on it, I see her much better at that first second when I read her face (she'd turned around suddenly, swinging like a metal weathercock, and the eyes, the eyes were there), when I vaguely understood what might have been occurring to the boy and figured it would be worth the trouble to stay and watch (the wind was blowing their words away and they were speaking in a low murmur). I think that I know how to look, if it's something I know, and also that every looking oozes with mendacity, because it's that which expels us furthest outside ourselves, without the least guarantee, whereas to smell, or (but Michel rambles on to himself easily enough, there's no need to let him harangue on this way). In any case, if the likely inaccuracy can be seen beforehand, it becomes possible again to look; perhaps it suffices to choose between looking and the reality looked at, to strip things of all their unnecessary clothing. And surely all that is difficult besides.

As for the boy I remember the image before his actual body (that will clear itself up later), while now I am sure that I remember the woman's body much better than the image. She was thin and willowy, two unfair words to describe what she was, and was wearing an almost-black fur coat, almost long, almost handsome. All the morning's wind (now it was hardly a breeze and it wasn't cold) had blown through her blond hair which pared away her white, bleak face -- two unfair words -- and put the world at her feet and horribly alone in front of her dark eyes, her eyes fell on things like two eagles, two leaps into nothingness, two puffs of green slime. I'm not describing anything, it's more a matter of trying to understand it. And I said two puffs of green slime.

Let's be fair, the boy was well enough dressed and was sporting yellow gloves which I would have sworn belonged to his older brother, a student of law or sociology; it was pleasant to see the fingers of the gloves sticking out of his jacket pocket. For a long time I didn't see his face, barely a profile, not stupid -- a terrified bird, a Fra Filippo angel, rice pudding with milk -- and the back of an adolescent who wants to take up judo and has had a scuffle or two in defense of an idea or his sister. Turning fourteen, perhaps fifteen, one would guess that he was dressed and fed by his parents but without a nickel in his pocket, having to debate with his buddies before making up his mind to buy a coffee, a cognac, a pack of cigarettes. He'd walk through the streets thinking of the girls in his class, about how good it would be to go to the movies and see the latest film, or to buy novels or neckties or bottles of liquor with green and white labels on them. At home (it would be a respectable home, lunch at noon and romantic landscapes on the walls, with a dark entryway and a mahogany umbrella stand inside the door) there'd be the slow rain of time, for studying, for being mama's hope, for looking like dad, for writing to his aunt in Avignon. So that there was a lot of walking the streets, the whole of the river for him (but without a nickel) and the mysterious city of fifteen-year-olds with its signs in doorways, its terrifying cats, a paper of fried potatoes for thirty francs, the pornographic magazine folded four ways, a solitude like the emptiness of his pockets, the eagerness for so much that was incomprehensible but illuminated by a total love, by the availability analogous to the wind and the streets.

Spoiler:

This biography was of the boy and of any body whatsoever, but this particular one now, you could see he was insular, surrounded solely by the blond's presence as she continued talking with him. (I'm tired of insisting, but two long ragged ones [[birds]] just went by. That morning I don't think I looked at the sky once, because what was happening with the boy and the woman appeared so soon I could do nothing but look at them and wait, look at them and . . .) [[...]]
pp.118-120 in Blow-Up and other Stories, New York, Pantheon ['67].

[deadkitty]

By the southern edge of the park, a wind shear swept across the grass. A woman was getting out of a silver Audi SUV when the gust took her by surprise—she wore a full-skirted gingham dress, and shifted her purse to hold down the fabric of her skirt, which flapped upward. Amy owned a dress like that. Actually, Amy owned that exact dress. That was Reese. Reese was wearing her dress.

A wet dream of a housewife dress, with a structured nipped-in waist and the discrete petticoat that gave it the curves of an inverted goblet. It was the kind of dress in which men picture Betty Draper, waiting docile at home with a drink and a blow job at the ready. And that was how Amy saw it too—her own jerk-off fantasy bent back and draped over her own body. Except that the very male gaze of that vision had always poisoned the dress for her: No matter how many people told her she looked great in it, somewhere deep down her very joy in it made her feel like a man. Reese, however: Full, soft Reese, appeared to wear it psychically unencumbered, as though she not only could thoughtlessly kneel at the door to deliver an ice-clinking drink and a BJ, but had plans to.

Spoiler:

(reece and amy are transsexuals)

[khayandhi]

[…] Harriet, though not too old to care for her personal appearance, was old enough to prefer convenience to outward display. Consequently, her luggage was not burdened by skin-creams, insect-lotion, silk frocks, portable electric irons or other impedimenta beloved of the ‘Hikers’ Column’. She was dressed sensibly in a short skirt and thin sweater and carried, in addition to a change of linen and an extra provision of footwear, little else beyond a pocket edition of Tristram Shandy, a vest-pocket camera, a small first-aid outfit and a sandwich lunch.

Spoiler:

—techwear?

[seesaw]

He does take a guest: Seaman Bodine, who has caused to be brought him from the Panama Canal Zone (where the lock workers wear them as a uniform, in amazing tropical-parrot combinations of yellow, green, lavender, vermilion) a zoot suit of unbelievable proportions--the pointed lapels have to be reinforced with coat-hanger stays because they extend so far outboard of the rest of the suit--underneath his purple-on-purple satin shirt the natty tar is actually wearing a corset, squeezing his waist in to a sylphlike 42 inches to allow for the drastic suppression of the jacket, which then falls to Bodine's knees quintuple-vented in yards of kilt-style pleats that run clear back over his ass. The pants are belted under his armpits and pegged down to something like ten inches, so he has to use hidden zippers to get his feet through. The whole suit is blue, not suit-blue, no--really BLUE: paint-blue. It is immediately noticed everywhere it goes. At gatherings, it haunts the peripheral vision, making decent small-talk impossible. It is a suit that forces you either to reflect on matters as primary as its color, or feel superficial. A subversive garment, all right.

[rjbman]

i wonder if it's klein blue like hubertus bigend

[foxtail_grass]

Celine recommended the Pillow Book yesterday and I started it. The descriptions of lush, hyper seasonal court dress in roughly the year 960 is really indulgent.

https://archive.org/details/the-pillow- ... 7/mode/2up

[brücke]

Time cannot be related to the coat as value or incarnated human labour, without being related to tailoring-labour as the immediate manifestation-form of human labour. The aspect of the use value, coat, however, which is of interest to the linen is neither its woollen comfort, nor its buttoned-up essence nor any other useful quality which marks it out as a use-value. The coat is of service to the linen only in order to represent the linen’s value-objectivity as distinguished from its starchy use-objectivity. It could have attained the same purpose if it had expressed its value in assa foetida or cosmetics, or shoe polish. The tailoring labour, too, has value for the linen, consequently, not insofar as it is purposeful productive labour, but only insofar as it exists as determinate labour, form of realization, manner of objectification of human labour in general. If linen expressed its value in shoe polish rather than in the coat, then polish-making would count for it as the immediate form of realization of abstract human labour instead of tailoring. So a use-value or commodity-body only becomes a form of appearance of value or an Equivalent by another commodity’s relating itself to the concrete, useful species of labour contained in it, as the immediate form of realization of abstract human labour.

Spoiler:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/w ... modity.htm

[wiggly-woo]

The three of us, Todd Hamlin and George Reeves and myself, are sitting in Harry’s and it’s a little after six. Hamlin is wearing a suit by Lubiam, a great looking striped spread-collar cotton shirt from Burberry, a silk tie by Resikeio and a belt from Ralph Lauren. Reeves is wearing a six-button double breasted suit by Christian Dior, a cotton shirt, a patterned silk tie by Claiborne, perforated cap-toe leather lace-ups by Allen-Edmonds, a cotton handkerchief in his pocket, probably from Brooks Brothers; sunglasses by Lafont Paris lie on a napkin by his drink and a fairly nice attaché case from T. Anthony rests on an empty chair by our table. I’m wearing a two-button single-breasted chalk-striped wool-flannel suit, a multicolored candy-striped cotton shirt and a silk pocket square, all by Patrick Aubert, a polka-dot silk tie by Bill Blass and clear prescription eyeglasses with frames by Lafont Paris. One of our CD Walkman headsets lies in the middle of the table surrounded by drinks and a calculator. Reeves and Hamlin left the office early today for facials somewhere and they both look good, faces pink but tan, hair short and slicked back.

if you've never read american psycho, unnecessarily long descriptions of everyone's (often terrible) fits are about 50% of the book

[bels]

Critical theory books would be better if they had more descriptive of outfits

[edmund]

finally finished blood meridian and came back to this description of the comanche warband that massacres captain white's troops:

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

[bels]

I love this thread.