It’s been over 40 years since a young writer named Bret Easton Ellis jolted the literary world awake with his debut novel Less Than Zero, and it was in 1987 that Ellis’s tale of shiftless Angelenos Clay, Blair, and Julian made the jump from the page to the silver screen. And while the film adaptation was contentious at the time, it is impossible to watch it all these years later and not view it as a time capsule of the era’s style. Ellis’s world was—and is—populated with sartorial touchstones like big shoulders, skinny ties, and flashy designer names; It’s a vibe that is being pushed back into the zeitgeist with today’s release of Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of The Shards.
Since his days as a burgeoning author at Bennington College through 2023, when he returned to the same subject matter in his novel The Shards, Ellis has always explored the money-hungry Designer Industrial Complex that fueled the pomp and circumstance of the ’80s. Through his unique form of unsentimental, glassy-eyed voyeurism—though it is perhaps the subject he knows best as a born-and-bred Angeleno—he has understood, better than any contemporary author, the importance of consumerism in American life and our modern-day obsession with appearances. Designer names are littered throughout—Polo Ralph Lauren, Armani, Calvin Klein, Gucci, Ray-Ban Wayfarers—almost as asides, as such nonchalance towards wealth was so wholly expected. One New York Times review of the novel put it succinctly: “They spend a truly astonishing amount of time shopping, going to the hairdresser, and worrying about such pressing questions as ‘are my sunglasses crooked?’”
Less Than Zero (1987)Photo: Everett Collection
For a young Clay, the juvenile perception of these labels was simple: What was hot and what was not. For Ellis, such descriptions served as precursors to the intense precision he developed in his other works, most notably American Psycho. “The suit I wear today is from Alan Flusser. It’s an eighties drape suit, which is an updated version of the thirties style,” reads one of Patrick Bateman’s wandering inner monologues. “The favored version has extended natural shoulders, a full chest and a bladed back. The soft-rolled lapels should be about four inches wide with the peak finishing three-quarters of the way across the shoulders. Properly used on double-breasted suits, peaked lapels are considered more elegant than notched ones.”
