Celebrating Edward Gorey, Style Icon

Gorey was an introvert, but his style was expressive, individual, and informal. Silent movies, many made during the Jazz Age were one of his many passions (he was known to track these in his “Interesting Lists”) and his own style nodded to that era. His fur coats were like the ones popularized by Ivy League swells in the 1920s.

In later life he became involved with animal rights and abandoned fur. In 2010, 10 years after his death, his Trust auctioned 14 of his fur coats, among them one of his own design. This is how Vogue announced Gorey’s entrance into fashion in 1979: “Edward Gorey, the invariably fur-coated illustrator, set designer for Dracula and master of ghoulish charm, has branched out from his grizzly-business stories and illustrations into the fashion business: Fur-maker Ben Kahn is so taken with Gorey’s way with furry animals that Kahn is coming out, this spring, with a complete collection of Edward Gorey fur designs. For men. . . .”

The 1970s of Ziggy Stardust and The New York Dolls was an expansive time for men’s dressing, and Gorey was in on the act—or was he? “His whole New York City getup with the jeans and the jewelry and the fur coats and making big entrances and waving bejeweled hands around was, by his own admission, a bit of a put-on,” says a friend of Gorey’s in Mark Dery’s biography, Born to Be Posthumous. Truly, a man of many mysteries.