Nearly every morning of the year, an 88-year-old man wearing a felt hat and dressed in an elegant Italian-made suit leaves the townhouse he occupies on New York's chic Upper East Side and quietly heads to a workspace nestled beneath his front steps. There, amid a meticulously organized clutter of boxes filled with handwritten notes, lit by a desk lamp, he sits at a long varnished desk and begins typing on a computer keyboard that seems unearthed from the dawn of computing. Gay Talese is a writer. He is also a legend—a name invoked across anthologies, columns, and speeches from newsrooms to university lecture halls.
Gay Talese is undoubtedly the figure who secured the legacy of the famous New Journalism, that literary genre where journalistic storytelling is infused with the techniques of fiction. Whether in books or articles, everything here is a matter of finely crafted staging, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed descriptions of the shapes of things and people.
"I can never afford to look ordinary, never. I am an elegant man and I believe in elegance in all circumstances”
After honing his style in the columns of The New York Times and Esquire magazine in the 1960s, Gay Talese built up an extensive bibliography. It includes Honor Thy Father (1971), which takes us inside the inner circle of a powerful New York Italian mafia boss, as well as The Voyeur's Motel (2016), the gripping encounter with the owner of an inn deep in the American heartland who took pleasure in observing the intimacy of his guests through ingenious stratagems. In “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”, a sprawling portrait of the foremost American crooner, Gay Talese writes: “Sinatra was wearing a charcoal-grey Oxford suit, cut quite conservatively on the outside, with a flamboyant silk lining; his English shoes were impeccably polished, right down to the soles”. A wealth of detail that reveals the author's obsession with sartorial elegance, both in others and in himself. “I must always be impeccably dressed. When I leave my house just to grab a sandwich down the street, I dress well. Why? Because people are going to see me. I can never afford to look ordinary, never. I am an elegant man and I believe in elegance in all circumstances”, Gay Talese stated in the latest issue of L’Etiquette magazine.
Truth be told, clothing has always been part of the author's life. Gay Talese is the son of an Italian tailor from Ocean City, a modest town in the shadow of New York, and spent his childhood and adolescence watching local notables preen before his father’s mirror. While in Europe completing his military service, the young Talese travelled to Paris, where his uncle Antonio was a renowned couturier near the Opéra district. “I then became devoted to the suits made by my uncle,” he explains. “In the years that followed, I managed to earn enough money to become one of his clients.” Impeccably tailored pieces in cream or ocean blue shades costing 2,500 or 3,000 dollars, even with a family discount.
Today, Gay Talese owns nearly a hundred suits crafted by his uncle, as well as by Brioni, Zegna, Battaglia, and Melandri—the masters of Neapolitan tailoring. Some are double-breasted and feature a belt. All are at least twenty years old and echo the style of the 1930s, Gay Talese's favourite era. “They are timeless pieces that assert their own style,” he remarks proudly. To be able to wear vintage suits, with their body-skimming cuts, it is essential to maintain the same physique, notes Gay Talese. “Since I love wearing old clothes, it is important that I don't gain weight. For fifty years, I've managed to weigh exactly the same. I exercise, and I don't eat ice cream.” The ultimate advice for wearing your clothes for a lifetime?