When looking at a person for the first time clothing is often a large part of a first impression, giving information about that person that may or may not be true. Clothing also plays a large role in first impressions of characters in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who uses clothing to give information about each character and who they are or wish they were.
Fitzgerald carefully describes the clothing of each character, using color, material, and quality to expose each character's insecurities.The clothing that he has the character’s wear gives information about their status, emotions, and personality. He chose clothing because it is an extension of a person and is self-expression, unlike race or eye color, it is not permanent and can easily be
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In the beginning of the novel Fitzgerald introduces Daisy Buchanan wearing a white dress, he continues to dress Daisy in white because it’s connotation with purity,innocence, and old money, until she is reacquainted with Jay Gatsby at Nick Carraway’s house. Daisy herself is a metaphor of the “American Dream”, she being dressed in white symbolizes the sterility of the “American Dream”, “High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl...”(120), Fitzgerald uses this line to describe Daisy as America’s Golden Girl. When Daisy is reintroduced to Gatsby, she arrives wearing a lavender hat, “Daisy’s face, tipped side-ways beneath a three-cornered lavender hat, looked out at me with a bright ecstatic smile”(85), this is the first scene in the novel when she is wearing another color other than white. Fitzgerald chooses to have Daisy in another color to show the unattainability of the “American Dream”. The color lavender taints the immaculate image that it the dream had before, and the white that Daisy had worn. Gatsby spends his entire life chasing Daisy or the “American Dream”, but is only