Soapy Sponge and His Sartorial Successors

“Clothes, if not the whole man, are a large part of him, especially when it comes to uniform,” says Anthony Powell in The Soldier’s Art. In the first volume of Powell’s epic, A Dance to the Music of Time, the ghastly Kenneth Widmerpool appears in an overcoat that although it is never described, subtly does not conform to what is acceptable at his school and is mercilessly mocked by his contemporaries, Peter Templer and Charles Stringham. Powell justifies his view about the influence of clothes by having this shaming exert such an influence on Widmerpool’s personality that when he is in a position to do so he has his tormentors sent to their deaths during the war.

Without going quite as far as that, many writers of novels and biographies define powerful aspects of their protagonists’ personalities by descriptions of their attire. There is probably a whole book in this, or at least a PhD thesis, but in this more superficial survey I want to illustrate this proposition…