Do clothes make the man?

Lee Siegel, writing in the Times, has some interesting observations about how fiction writers can reveal character through the clothes that they give to their creations. But after citing many examples from classic literature (from The Illiad to Ulysses), he argues that fashion doesn't seem as vital to contemporary novelists. As he points out:

A world of difference exists, however, between Fitzgerald’s very deliberate portrait of Gatsby wearing “a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-colored tie” when he meets Daisy again after many years, and, say, Jennifer Egan’s casual description of a character dressed in “black cords and a white button-up shirt” in her brilliant novel, “A Visit From the Goon Squad.”

Gatsby is wearing the novel’s themes: white as the fantasy of self-remaking without the blemishes of the past; silver and gold the currency-tinged colors of an impossible happiness. Egan’s character is simply wearing clothes.

He concludes that today’s fiction is a reflection of today’s society: Just as we often pay little attention to the clothes that we wear in real life as we buy them off the rack from chain stores, our novelists pay little attention to the clothes that their characters wear.

Siegel's essay reminds me of what Mark Twain had to say on this topic:

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.