Dress like a fictional hero? I can't find my place

Banana Republic has launched an Anna Karenina collection for the autumn season. Is it time to throw out last year's Miss Marple tweeds?

Love Tolstoy? Enamoured, like Vronsky, with Anna Karenina? Then you will be relieved to know that Banana Republic's Anna Karenina collection, based on the film starring Keira Knightley as the (spoiler alert) doomed heroine, has just launched. Now we can all channel 19th-century Russian high society by wearing a bit of fake fur.

Not me, though. I've always found Anna Karenina impossible to like. This is I'm sure part of Tolstoy's point, but I've no desire to dress like her. Ditto Miss Marple – apparently the inspiration behind a popular Japanese clothing line, and good god, scrolling down the Flavorwire piece shows the Brontës, the Marquis de Sade and even Ayn Rand have proved inspirational to fashion designers. And so has Márquez. To stand out among the phoney fashionistas, meanwhile, you can also pick out a pair of Catcher in the Rye sneakers.

Rejecting all of these, it makes me wonder if there is a novel that I'd like to be inspired by, sartorially. I'm in the middle of Ian Rankin's latest, Standing in Another Man's Grave, but I'm not sure John Rebus's look is the one for me. Neither are the corsets and frills of the past, the jewels and fur of 19th-century Russia. So I wonder – and I write this from home, in an old T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms – if there's a certain post-apocalyptic chic I might be able to pull off, inspired, perhaps, by The Road or The Stand? Or, in honour of the upcoming film, if there's a hobbit look I could attempt? Going bare foot doesn't seem like a good idea in this weather, but I could certainly go for a camouflaging elven cloak …

Leo TolstoyAlison Flood
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