Richard dons his best jacket of “beautiful.Irish wool, gray with flecks of mossy green” that he had bought with “nearly every cent” from a summer job in San Francisco. In fact, one of the first the very first things Richard says of himself is that in his youth his “clothes were cheap and haircut too short and no one at school seemed to like that much.”Įarly on, Richard is invited to a lunch by Bunny, the friendliest of the five (and, it must be said, the least erudite). Against the cool distance of this “unapproachable” group, he begins to ingratiate himself by playing the part of some West Coast aristocrat, attempting to mime the wealth and peculiarities in “adolescent emulation” of his new peers-an effort largely undertaken with a wardrobe change. Lewis wearing during their Oxford glory days-a kind of idealized college experience in which the clothing is as much a part of your education as the classes.Īfter much spectating and scheming, Richard is eventually accepted by Julian on the unorthodox condition that he let his new professor dictate the entirety of his four years of studies. The others have killed him.) They’re the type of clothes you imagine J.R.R. (When we begin the novel, of course, Bunny is already in a ditch, dead. The twins, Charles and Camilla Macaulay, dress in decadent all-white outfits, and Edmund Corcoran, better known as Bunny, is always in “knee sprung trousers” and a fraying “shapeless brown tweed” jacket. Francis Abernathy, “the most exotic of the set,” wears “beautiful starchy shirts with French cuffs magnificent neckties,” and occasionally, to Richard’s delight, a false pince-nez. Henry Winter can always be found in dark English suits.

Each of the five students, Tartt writes, present “a variety of picturesque and fictive qualities”-an aura of romantic peculiarity largely supported by clothing. After he’s denied entry to an ancient Greek class taught by cultish professor Julian Morrow, who is “very particular” about his students, Richard becomes entranced with the small clique that has managed to get inside Julian’s rarefied course. Richard Papen has recently transferred to Hampden College, a small fictional school set in the hills of Vermont, based on Tartt’s own alma mater, Bennington College.

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