David Caplan in Ivy Style:
Students, colleagues, and friends all saw how seriously Edward Said took clothes. “Our usual ritual upon meeting after some time apart,” a friend remembers, “was for him to look me up and down and pass withering judgments on the condition of my shoes, and to berate my obstinate reluctance to engage a proper tailor.” Said insisted another friend, a colleague at Columbia University, buy a jacket he “didn’t need (and couldn’t afford) . . .. but I couldn’t withstand the force of Edward’s solicitude, and finally went and bought one. Black. Cashmere. Very nice. I wore it for ages.” In all these accounts, Said’s clothes set him apart. “[O]ne of the features that distinguished him from the rest of us,” a fellow seminar participant recalls, “was his immaculate dress sense: everything was meticulously chosen, down to the socks. It is almost impossible to visualize him any other way.”
…After the publication of Orientalism, Said and the leading scholar of the academic field he condemned, Bernard Lewis, filled pages upon pages of The New York Review of Books with charges and countercharges. “The tragedy of Mr. Said’s Orientalism is that it takes a genuine problem of real importance, and reduces it to the level of political polemic and personal abuse,” Lewis asserted. Said responded, “Lewis’s verbosity scarcely conceals both the ideological underpinnings of his position and his extraordinary capacity for getting everything wrong.” Said also launched ad hominem attacks against less prominent scholars who disagreed with him, ridiculing their professional accomplishments and impugning their sanity, even their humanity. “They let me get away with this because I dress so well,” Said was fond of saying, referring to his employer, Columbia University. Even when I disliked Said’s politics, I loved the way he dressed.
More here.
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