Haruki Murakami writing essays about his unpretentious collection of t-shirts, Charlie Porter taking us on a journey through what artists wear, and analysing an entire film from a sartorial point of view… That’s how complex style is. That’s how simple it is to understand its importance. I love an occasional writing on style and these three books listed below make for the best inspiration.
“The Japanese magazine Casa BRUTUS interviewed me about my record collection for a special edition”, begins Haruki Murakami the introduction to his book, The T-shirts I Love, “and when I happened to mention that I also kind of have a T-shirt collection, the editor asked me if I’s consider writing a series on that. So I went along with the idea, and over the curse of a year and a half, I wrote a series of essays spotlighting T-shirts in Popeye, a Japanese men’s fashion magazine published by the same company. These are the essays collected here in this volume. It isn’t like these are valuable T-shirts or anything, and I’m not claiming they have any particular artistic value. I simply bought out some old T-shirts I’m fond of, we took photos of them, and I added some short essays. That’s all there is to it. I doubt this book will be useful to anyone (much less being of any help in solving any of the myriad of problems we face at present), yet, that said, it could turn out to be meaningful, as a kind of reference on customs that later generations could read to get a picture of the simple clothes and fairly comfortable life one novelist enjoyed from the end of the twentieth century into the beginning of the twenty-first. But then again – maybe not. Either way works for me. I’m just hoping you can find some measure of enjoyment in this little collection.”
Murakami, who gave us Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore, Murakami about whom Patti Smith writes in her A Book of Days that he “has said that there is no such thing as perfect writing, just as there is no such thing as perfect despair”, proclaiming him the “exquisitely imperfect Murakami”… Murakami writes about t-shirts as a thing he collects because he likes wearing them. There is not much to it, he says, but the simple simple act of choosing a T-shirt, time and again, I feel, could amount to more than that. They become tool for more freedom and richness. For a t-shirt in itself possesses ease and an effortless yet thoughtful disposition. The T-shirts are usually connected to other things the writer likes, like vinyl records and used-record shops, or his youth days of surfing, or simply because the lettering is nice. And just reading about each one of them can be simply fun, but can also become a reason to turn a mundane situation into a spontaneous moment of exhilaration.
“Most of us live our lives in our clothes without realising their power. But in the hands of artists, garments become pure tools of expression: canvases on which to show who we really are.” In What Artists Wear, writer and journalist Charlie Porter takes us on a liberating journey through the clothing of artists, whether at work or wherever, and the way their clothing relates to art, authenticity, freedom and power. Because in defining their aesthetic, artists discover themselves. “Denim is a fabric of commonality. It is clothing for an era in which the artist can be everybody. In jeans, an artist can disappear. Maybe this part of the book shouldn’t be ‘What Artists Wear’, but ‘What Artists Can Forget They Are Wearing’”, writes Porter. He continues: “‘Andy wore jeans every day,’ said Bob Colacello. He was talking about Andy Warhol. Colacello was Executive Editor of Interview magazine from 1974 to 1983, which had offices in Warhol’s New York studio, the Factory.” Haruki Murakami also mentions Warhol in his book, recounting how photographer Elena Seibert, who specialises in author photos, when Murakami showed up in one of his usual t-shirts with a design on it, showed him a photo of Truman Capote “in a solid grey T-shirt, and said: ‘Pretty nice, huh?’ and I had to agree. Ever since then I always wear solid-colour T-shirts to photo shoots.”
About Georgia O’Keefe, Porter writes: “In 1934, Georgia O’Keeffe stayed for the first time at Ghost Ranch, a 21,000-acre holding just west of Taos in New Mexico. She would come to spend her summers there, buying a small isolated residence on the ranch in 1940. Here she is hitching a ride to Abiquiu, a small town nearby. She is wearing Levi’s. The expression on her face says everything about how it must be to live and create within air and sky and land and horizon. Her jeans would have cost less than three bucks.”
I have written about Cary Grant’s Suit: Nine Movies That Made Me the Wreck I Am Today before, and with good reason. There are many good books about film that I have read, but this is by far one of my favourites (it is also beautiful to look at – how could it not be, bearing the title it does?). It has humour in it. Just like a good film (that is not a comedy) has humour in it (like Hitchcock’s). Just like life (amidst hardships, tragedy, rises and falls) has humour in it. Todd McEwen writes from a very personal point of view. Movies are truly woven into his life and it’s absolutely thrilling to read how he meanders through some of the movies that have marked him in one way or another. He makes you live the movies, make them part of life. A film lover just knows. And the way he writes about, yes, Cary Grant’s suit in North by Northwest, well, is the best writing about the most written about suit in the history of film.
