Ian Fleming: Live and Let Die (1954)
“The afternoon before he had had to
submit to a certain degree of Americanization at the hands of the FBI.
A tailor had come and measured him for two single-breasted suits in
dark blue light-weight worsted (Bond had firmly refused anything more
dashing) and a haberdasher had brought chilly white nylon shirts with
long points to the collars. He had had to accept half a dozen unusually
patterned foulard ties, dark socks with fancy clocks, two or three
‘display kerchiefs’ for his breast pocket, nylon vests and pants (called
T-shirts and shorts), a comfortable light-weight camel-hair overcoat
with over-buttressed shoulders, a plain grey snap-brim Fedora with a
thin black ribbon and two pairs of hand-stitched and very comfortable
black Moccasin ‘casuals’.
“He
also acquired a ‘Swank’ tie-clip in the shape of a whip, an
alligator-skin billfold from Mark Cross, a plain Zippo lighter, a
plastic ‘Travel-Pak’ containing razor, hairbrush and toothbrush, a pair
of horn-rimmed glasses with plain lenses, various other oddments and,
finally, a light-weight Hartmann ‘Skymate’ suitcase to contain all these
things….
“Bond looked
grimly at the pile of parcels which contained his new identity, stripped
off his pyjamas for the last time (‘We mostly sleep in the raw in
America, Mr. Bond’) and gave himself a sizzling cold shower….
“Later,
in white shirt and dark blue trousers, he went into the sitting-room,
pulled a chair up to the writing-desk near the window and opened The
Travellers Tree, by Patrick Leigh Fermor.”
Click here to read the full article by Matt Spaiser - The Suits of James Bond
James Bonds Underwear of Choice - Nylon Vests and Boxer Shorts
Diamonds are Forever (1956) “In transit it was six o’clock
on Thursday evening and Bond was packing his suitcase in his bedroom at
the Ritz. It was a battered but once expensive pigskin Revelation and
its contents were appropriate to his cover. Evening clothes; his
lightweight black and white dog-tooth suit for the country and for golf;
Saxone golf shoes; a companion to the dark blue, tropical worsted suit
he was wearing, and some white silk and dark blue Sea Island cotton
shirts with collars attached and short sleeves. Socks and ties, some
nylon underclothes, and two pairs of the long silk pyjama coats he wore
in place of two-piece pyjamas. None of these things bore, or had ever
borne, any name-tags or initials.” (Chapter 6)
