From the Guardian: Off the page: fashion in literature.

As a book-obsessed suburban adolescent, Iread Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller and the fantastical neogothic fiction of Angela Carter, and attempted to cultivate the dress and persona of a woman who drank her coffee black and her scotch straight. Iwanted to hang out with artists and go to wild, all-night parties where everyone listened to jazz, smoked cigarettes and understood poetry. There didn’t seem to be much of that at my sixth-form – though Idid acquire a boyfriend who was taking art A-level and had read Naked Lunch – butI was determined at least to look the part. Apparently channelling one of Miller’s Parisian lowlifes crossed with a Carter character circa 1977, for some time I wore a lot of black eyeliner and dressed only in a short, crimson petticoat, brown T-bar platforms and a long, strangely smelling sheepskin coat from Camden market. (The coat was the closest I could get to the fur my fantasy outfit demanded, which doesn’t really excuse it.)