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Mark Twain, 1905.
In his 1905 essay “The Czar’s Soliloquy,” Mark Twain remarked: “There is no power without clothes. It is the power that governs the human race.” Twain’s favorite clothing color was white. At the age of seventy he wrote in his autobiography that abandoning his white suit in October was saddening to him: “Little by little I hope to get together courage enough to wear white clothes all through the winter, in New York.” It was an outfit Twain cherished and that he in turn used to represent his favorite characters. In his landmark 1884 novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck describes Colonel Grangerford, the refined gentleman who takes him in, wearing a suit “made out of linen so white it hurt your eyes to look at it.” Twain valued an impressive outfit.