Photographed by Jack Mitchell on the set of Dracula, he wears them with CVO sneakers, a striped rugby and a denim jacket.
Not the most traditional progression, it was nonetheless an indicator of his status as an artist that he coordinated workwear in ways that today prompt thousands of #ootd likes. Although we regretfully can’t see the colors, it’s apparent that Gorey was no goth in hot weather.Īs an author, illustrator, and designer living in New York, Gorey was an early adoptee of jeans. As seen in the 1963, Gorey’s love for fastidious patterning on the page also extended into madras jackets. A fair question then, yet not an uncommon sight for contemporary times. His father Edward Sr., a journalist who divorced Gorey’s mother to marry Casablanca cabaret singer Corinna Mura, could never quite understand why his son would pair Brooks Brothers suits with battered Keds sneakers. Beneath the raccoon, Gorey wore what has become the trad trousseau post 2000, the year of his demise. These often caricatured attributes are only part of the eccentric whole. It was also during this time that Gorey began to wear multiple rings on his long, tapered fingers, and grew the beard that would stay with him long after the rest of his hair was gone. In later books, Gorey would cloak his self-portrait as The Author in beehive-like furs, showing very little of the outfit underneath.
#Edward gorey masterpiece skull plus#
Here Gorey adopted the raccoon coat by which he could be easily spotted in his six foot plus frame, popular on campus thirty years before and briefly following his departure. His wardrobe was consistent with the timespan of his career, beginning at Harvard College (‘50). Less examined than his prolific corpus is Gorey’s personal style, which is starkly incongruous with his dark Victorian and Edwardian imaginings. For the uninitiated, his marked influence appears in Tim Burton’s gothic fantasies and can even be found amongst the heavily curated, contained worlds of Wes Anderson, present in each character’s deadpan delivery. From designing the Tony Award-winning set and costumes for a 1977 Broadway revival of Dracula, to the opening sequence of WGBH’s Mystery! to his many small books featuring disastrously unfortunate children, each age group has a different association. Even for the former, the breadth of his work is generational. The humiliating descent into mercantilism’s boiler room.The name Edward Gorey (1925 – 2000) is almost as elusive as the man himself, conjuring either immediate recognition or hesitant diffidence.
One pressing issue Gorey and Updike don’t address is what to do with the book after you’ve had your final Christmas poo?ĭon’t under any circumstances attempt to return it to the shop, else you’ll face the ‘Fear of Returns’ and ‘the embarrassments, the unseemly haggling. Shops would probably stack it amongst the Christmas novelty books, titles bound for the toilets of the world. It’s probably not really a children’s book at all. But what he does do is plant a seed in the mind of the master, one which sprouts, then withers and dies before our eyes, like a supermarket Christmas tree trapped in a cavity insulated bungalow. So it’s not surprising that his text doesn’t quite match up to the genius of Gorey’s own sparse writing style. The text is provided by John Updike, a man not exactly known for his brevity.
In The Twelve Terrors of Christmas he questions the true meaning of Christmas and casts suspicion on its protagonists, starting with the ‘funny rummy smell’ of the shopping centre Santa.īut it’s not Father Christmas you need to look out for, ‘what is really going on’ with his so called ‘helpers’? ‘Underclass masochism one day, bloody rebellion the next.’ That’s what. He re-imagined A Christmas Carol as The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas, and who can forget his dark masterpiece The Gashleycrumb Tinies, which chronicled the fates of 26 unfortunate alphabetical young people (‘ D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh’). Edward Gorey has previous when it comes to the anti-Christmas tale.