JKR

Can you name any of the famous authors above?
The only one I would confidently recognise is Tom Wolfe, for the simple reason that he has been wearing his famous white suit since 1962. As you can see below, over time the suit has been augmented with other props – spats, a cane, a hat. But the basic image has become the man’s trademark.

Wolfe claims that the outfit disarms the people he observes, making him, in their eyes, “a man from Mars, the man who didn’t know anything and was eager to know.”
But it’s equally true that the outfit has helped make Wolfe the centre of his own stories, a visual distinctive shorthand picked up on in book and magazine covers and helping further boost his standing.

Wolfe turned eighty yesterday, and he offers in his persona a simple lesson about branding: that single-minded and repetitive consistency is much more effective than  make-overs which revamp the image in pursuit of whatever the current zeitgeist happens to be. I hope his dry-cleaner sent him a nice card.

The other authors, by the way, are (l to r) Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen and Gore Vidal.