The genius of Tom Wolfe’s white suits
Wolfe, who died Monday at 88, wore white suits in public and in the solitary time he spent writing. The white suits were a constant visual contradiction. They made him look courtly at a time when irony and sarcasm were the rules of conversational engagement. He had the appearance of an awkward outsider as well as that of a man who was the star of his own play. The suits were beautifully tailored but desperately out of fashion. The white suit was a Southern affectation that Wolfe did not succumb to until he called New York City home. It made him the center of attention in any room even though his journalistic profession was best served by his ability to be the unnoticed observer.
The suits gave him a rather old-fashioned appearance even as his journalism boiled with news, freshness and the sense that he was seeing the dawn before anyone else. He was not the daring adventurer in black, the rebel in leather or the man’s man in tweed and lumberjack plaids. He was the fop — a man who appreciated style and iconoclasts. That white suit announced that he did not plan on rolling into the muck; there’d be no roughhousing. There would be decorum.
His strike would be witty, charming and precise. Bloodless yet deadly
The wearing of the white suits began, according to a 2015 profile in Vanity Fair, when Wolfe moved to New York in the summer of 1962 after quitting his job at The Washington Post and taking one at the New York Herald Tribune. At the time, wrote Michael Lewis, Wolfe “owned two sports jackets. Herald Tribune reporters all wore suits, and so he went out and bought a suit: a white suit. The suit wasn’t some kind of statement; it was what you wore in the summer in Richmond, Virginia,” where Wolfe grew up. “The first time he wore it, however, he realized the suit wasn’t of summer weight. It was thick enough to wear in cold weather, too. That’s how strapped for cash he is: he wears his white suit into the fall so he doesn’t have to buy another.”
