Beat

Beat is an existential and literary movement that was interested in the creation of a style that would be the literary equivalent of the be-bop rhythm of Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk, rather than in the details of tailoring. In his books The Subterraneans and On the Road, Jack Kerouac, who was the prototype of the beat artist, used the character of Sal Paradise to meet every kind of hipster, zoot-suiter, pachuco and biker, and ever mentioned his dress code. Like a contemporary anthropologist, the beat writer doesn’t participate, except as a witness, in the rituals he describes. His personal style remains supremely relaxed and nonchalant in the normality (often super-conscious) of his own clothing and hairstyle. The same applied to all the early members of the group, with the exception of William Burroughs, who was the movement’s Buster Keaton, according to Tom Leary, and wore a three-piece grey suit (jacket, trousers and vest) and a felt hat, whether he was in Tangiers in 1958 or London in 1967, in the full bloom of the psychedelic era.