Why conmen like Tom Ripley are so preoccupied with fashion

There is a scene towards the beginning of Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film, The Talented Mr Ripley, when Jude Law’s character, Dickie Greenleaf, asks Matt Damon’s Tom Ripley what his talent is—to which literature’s most famous fraud replies with: “Forging signatures, telling lies, impersonating practically anybody”. Yet there is another talent of Tom’s that is essential in his ability to deceive those around him into thinking that he is one of them—and that’s his sartorial savoir-faire.

Fashion is of vital importance to Tom, in both the novel by Patricia Highsmith and subsequent adaptations, including that 1999 film, but also 1960’s French New Wave retelling, Purple Noon, and the upcoming black-and-white Netflix version, Ripley, starring Andrew Scott in the titular role. The style of the 1999 movie—Jude Law’s polo shirts, white trousers, and boat shoes, Gwyneth Paltrow’s high-waist bikinis, broderie anglaise tops and peasant skirts—is still referenced by designers today (it won costume designer Ann Roth an Oscar at the time).

And while Matt Damon’s character is certainly au fait with fashion, he’s without the means to access it in the same way that the other characters are: he has one shirt he washes out nightly, a threadbare cord jacket Dickie offers to replace, and one pair of dress shoes that he has to wear to the beach. In many ways, the film is at pains to emphasise that, though Tom is good at what he does, he’s not quite good enough—after all, Dickie, Marge (Paltrow) and Freddie Miles (Philip Seymour Hoffman) all figure him out. Yet it is with fashion that he manages to move in these circles. In fact, it’s how he accesses them in the first place, having borrowed a Princeton jacket for a piano recital when he first encounters Dickie’s father, who mistakes him for a student and pleads with him to fetch home his wayward son.

In the novel, Tom is obsessed with clothing, spending hours touching Dickie’s shirts and jackets or fingering the jewellery on his dressing table, saying that doing so “reminded him he existed”. His spectacles serve as a way to switch between characters—like a villainous Clark Kent and Superman—while his decision to wear Dickie’s monogrammed velvet slippers and signet rings after he has (spoiler alert) murdered him, alerts Marge and Freddie to the fact something isn’t right.

Fashion is often used by literature’s anti-heroes as a significant tool in their arsenal to deceive. It’s Jay Gatsby’s “beautiful shirts”—so beautiful, that they make Daisy cry in The Great Gatsby—but which signify his extreme wealth via social climbing; Gone with the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara dressing in a pair of old curtains to try to (unsuccessfully) trick Rhett Butler into thinking that she’s well off after the Civil War; and Patrick Bateman’s Rolex watch, Oliver People’s glasses and Nike dunks that allow him to go undetected as a psychopath among Manhattan’s elite in American Psycho.

And it’s not just on the page that grifters and tricksters utilise clothing to impersonate others. Anna Delvey, the so-called “fake heiress,” who conned New York into believing she was a German socialite, used designer pieces as a decoy for the fact she had no money and didn’t pay for anything. The girl in the Celine wide-rim glasses couldn’t possibly be a conwoman, could she? Meanwhile, convict Elizabeth Holmes, the university dropout behind Theranos, a company that claimed to detect disease via just one drop of blood, modelled herself on Steve Jobs in a uniform of black polonecks so that she would be taken seriously by tech bros and the world at large.

“The way we dress does, to an extent, affect how people see us, but it’s context dependent,” explains Dr Dion Terrelonge, a fashion psychologist. “It’s about alignment and how we fit in with people’s expectations. We like to think we don’t judge others based on what they are wearing, but we do. It’s not a negative judgement, necessarily; it’s about interpreting and categorising. It helps us navigate the world.”

Whether or not you wield that power for good or for evil is the differentiator. “When you wear an item of clothing that you associate with a certain person, lifestyle or behaviour, then you’re far more likely to take on those things,” explains Dr Terrelonge. “When people copy other people’s style, they’re trying to align themselves with them and their lifestyle. It’s walking 100 miles in their shoes. It’s shorthand for, ‘this is the kind of person I am’—you look the part.”

For conners, it’s “fake it til you make it” or “dress for the job you want” writ large. As Tom famously says in his final speech in the film, “I thought it was better to be a fake somebody, than a real nobody.”

This article originally appeared in harpersbazaar.com/uk March 2024

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