{"id":2283,"date":"2013-12-20T13:24:29","date_gmt":"2013-12-20T12:24:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?page_id=2283"},"modified":"2017-02-18T19:34:37","modified_gmt":"2017-02-18T18:34:37","slug":"the-perfect-white-shirt-for-a-writer","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?page_id=2283","title":{"rendered":"The Perfect White Shirt For A Writer"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A special commission for the 25th anniversary of GQ Magazine (the one with Rihanna wearing a snake on the cover. \u00a0No white shirt – but then she’s not a writer and the snake might eat it…) <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n
‘The Perfect White Shirt For A Writer’ by Hugh Thomson<\/strong><\/p>\n
Writers don’t need much in the way of presentable clothing compared to other jobs<\/strong> \u2013 if you can call writing a job, let alone a living \u2013 but the one essential item is that perfect crisp white shirt<\/strong> which suggests the clean sheet of paper.<\/p>\n
I once saw Niall Ferguson<\/strong> command a literary festival. He was giving an interview to an attractive woman journalist at lunch, while other, sadder writers were hunkered down and getting their free meal; moreover, he was jacketless and wearing a white shirt so crisply laundered it could have been flown in from the designer that morning.\u00a0 No one else could get close to that commanding presence.<\/p>\n
Tom Stoppard, Michael Palin, William Boyd,\u00a0 AA Gill<\/strong> – all can wear a white shirt with some style.\u00a0 It has a long literary pedigree:\u00a0 from Hemingway<\/strong> and Fitzgerald<\/strong> in the Thirties, Byron<\/strong> and Keats<\/strong> in the romantic heyday, an open white shirt suggests a mind open to new thinking, but one that is also unbuttoned – \u00a0maybe, in Hemingway\u2019s<\/strong> case, with a touch of chest hair.<\/p>\n
Choosing one is not as easy as you might think.\u00a0 Too Marks & Spencer’s and you\u2019ll look like an office worker having their lunch; too blowsy and, unless you’re Byron<\/strong>, you won’t get away with it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\nByron by Richard Westall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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In this celebrated \u2018author portrait\u2019 of him by his contemporary Richard Westall, even Byron<\/strong> doesn’t quite get away with it;\u00a0 but then he is wearing a cravat and broach as well.\u00a0 Maybe his publicist had pushed him too hard.<\/p>\n
The modern writer has to content with the distressing development of the “slim-fit” cut: Paul Smith<\/strong>, for instance, sells far more of these that it’s “classic” (i.e. roomy) version. Writers are not designed for a slim-fit world, any more than they are for skinny jeans, unless they\u2019re still \u00a0living in a garret \u2013 when they won\u2019t be shopping at a Paul Smith anyway \u2013 or they\u2019re Geoff Dyer<\/strong>, who irritated fellow writers by proclaiming in the Sunday Times <\/i>how hard he found it being slim. (What\u2019s your other problem Geoff?\u00a0 Too many awards?)<\/p>\n
Long periods of sloth, inertia at a desk and eating too many free lunches mean that a more than generous cut is required.\u00a0 Preferably with box pleats on the back for added ventilation:\u00a0 creativity may be 90% perspiration, 10% inspiration, but the sweaty armpit look will never convince a publisher, literary editor or fan.<\/p>\n
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