How to look like the new best-selling author

September has come and it’s harder to look smart with a few choice accessories in the city than on the beach. Forget the Moleskine and the Montblanc pen: here are six ways to get your literary season grooming style on point.

Be proud like Baudelaire

Baudelaire had an issue, according to every picture of him: he was a bald man. He also had an advantage over other men: he was one of the most prominent French dandies of the time, and as such, theorized what elegance should be. In his journal, he wrote this note-to-self: « An abridgment of wisdom. Grooming, prayer, work », and was proud to spend at least two hours at his toilette every day.

This meticulous concern over aesthetics explains his clean and perfect look. Baudelaire wore his hair quite long over the sides, with a very romantic flow and an agressive side parting. He wore his strand of hair sometimes backwards, sometimes to cover his baldness, in a very studied manner, and always had a clean shaven face. But in order to really look like Baudelaire, you’ll need to commit. We’re not talking about the emotional poems and two-hours-a-day grooming, but about the eyes, this penetrated, nearly mad look that surely helped Baudelaire take hold of the French poetry scene as much as his words.

Camus, the movie star

In popular culture, Camus doesn’t look like any other writer on the back cover of his book, seating at his desk and writing about matters of the mind. If, in pictures, Hemingway was the outdoor writer, Camus was the urban writer, forever remembered in the streets, a cigarette between the lips, head slightly turned sideways, his dark eyes looking at who-knows-what in the background.

He wears his signature look: not a hair on the cheeks, layered sides, and medium hair on the top of his head, all of it styled backwards with wax, probably. The result: a very modern and cinematic strand of hair that waves and curls (like the writer’s style if it was Nabokov’s hair). Forgotten were his jutting-out ears, as proved his success with women that always made Sartre jealous. Literary legacy is easier when you’ve got the brains and the looks.

The sensitive macho : Hemingway

There are many Hemingways, and, every year since 1980, admirers flock to Key West to compete in a look-a-like contest. The last edition even saw a man named Hemingway triumph for the first time. Pictures of the event show a clear preference towards a certain Hemingway: not the smooth-faced soldier, not the mustachioed Spanish with the long hair, but the white-haired, white-bearded sailor of the later years.

The look resides, for once, as much in clothes as in hair: chose a fisherman cable-knit sweater in winter and a safari shirt in the summer, wear your hair parted to the right side, not long, but with just a shade of movement, and of course, a full white beard. But don’t pay to much attention to it: Papa wouldn’t have. If you want to look like him, just aim for one impression: noble, like his prize. And go easy on your friends.

Avoid the F. Scott Fitzgerald

There is much to say about Scott Fitzgerald: Zelda, drinks, depression, Gatsby, financial woes… And much has been said about all that. But not much was ever said about his hair. Let’s keep it short: no one should ever wear his hair parted down the middle with two backward curls that look like something out of a Tim Burton movie. Literary legacy can happen even if you lack the looks.

Seduce Lady Chatterley

If D.H. Lawrence was to come back in 2016, no one would bat an eye at his look. It’s surprisingly modern and subtle. The writer wore a full and trimmed beard, longer on the chin and around the mouth. The result is a more pointed, sharper beard than Hemingway’s. Combined with longer hair on top, with a very round lock on his forehead, and short sides, David Herbert’s look is the perfect combination of manly and groomed. Lawrence wouldn’t look out of place in a Horace editors' conference.

Follow Thomas Pynchon's steps

If being a writer was as easy as putting your head in a paper bag, we would all be. If looking like Pynchon was as easy as putting your head in a paper bag, we would be anxious every year to see our name on the Nobel Prize list. But it’s not. The brilliant writer so often described as « elusive » is indeed hard to describe. We know he probably used to have a teeth problem, one that could easily have been taken care of since. People looked for him in vain in the cinematic adaptation of his book Inherent Vice. Of this anecdote, there’s only one lesson to keep : looking like a writer is more a case of being one than of copying one. If you want to be recognized in the streets, find your look and make it happen.