A few posts ago I wrote about Little Lord Fauntleroy and the fashion for Fauntleroy suits that existed. Immediately after I found a reference to it in another book, The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald!
“[The picture] showed a dandy of the nineties, spare and handsome, standing beside a tall dark lady with a muff and the suggestion of a bustle. Between them was a little boy with long brown curls, dressed in a velvet Lord Fauntleroy suit.”
How fun! The book is said to be a bit autobiographical but since Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1894 it is doubtful that he is speaking about himself here, or maybe the Fitzgerald family was a bit unfashionable and wore Fauntleroy suits and bustles into the 1900s.
Speaking about fashion, here’s something funny I found on La Mode Illustree
Fitzgerald’s reference to a dandy of the nineties is a reference to his father. FSF was born in 1896, and it is well-documented that he thought of his father as exceptionally well-dressed and well-mannered, but poor in all other measures of men.