Getty Images: Venturelli
Bret Easton Ellis attends the premiere of The Canyons, for which he wrote the screenplay, at the 70th Venice International Film Festival, 2013.
In 1984, when Bret Easton Ellis sold his debut novel, Less Than Zero—named after an Elvis Costello song—he was only twenty-one and at Bennington College in Vermont. In true 1980s style, Ellis wore a wide-shouldered suit and looked more like a yuppie than one of the wasted L.A. kids of his book. Style, satire, and substance, however, are Ellis’s forte, and the suit has become one of his trademarks—along with provocative, decade-defining literature, including American Psycho, a satirical overview of modern life and all its designer-styled decadence. Ellis himself has confessed that his favorite going out to an event suit is a “low-end” Hugo Boss.