In the essay "Funky Chic," journalist and novelist Tom Wolfe observed that "every person's 'real self,' his psyche, his soul, is largely the product of fashion and other outside influences on his status." And in a 1989 interview with Time magazine, he said, "Clothing is a wonderful doorway that most easily leads you to the heart of an individual; it's the way they reveal themselves to you."

Observe how Wolfe applies this principle in two paragraphs from his novel A Man in Full. The first paragraph and the last part of the second illustrate the rhetorical strategy known as effectio--a detailed personal description.

from A Man in Full (1998)

by Tom Wolfe

Roger was thankful for the clothes he had chosen to wear today, because if there was ever a time he needed sartorial armor, it was right now. He had on a navy hard-finished worsted single-breasted suit, a shirt with white collar and cuffs and a body of pale blue stripes, a medium blue crepe de chine necktie with tiny navy pin dots at half-inch intervals, and cap-toed black shoes. From his breast pocket debouched a plain white silk handkerchief. In Atlanta, white or black, north of Ponce de Leon or south of it, sartorial armor didn't get much more bulletproof than this.

The receptionist, a young white woman, checked him out from face to necktie to cap-toes. When he announced his name, the young woman smiled and told him to please take a seat; someone would be out very soon. He had just sat down in a leather armchair and was weighing the woman's promise to decide whether it was sincerity or a faux-polite runaround he had detected in her voice, when an older white woman did, indeed, emerge from somewhere beyond the receptionist's desk and invite him in.

She led him through a small, windowless gallery that suddenly opened into an enormous room. Light poured in, seemingly from all sides. Behind a desk so big it seemed like a satire on the executive life, in a great leather-covered swivel chair, sat the unmistakable Cracker bulk of Charlie Croker. With a heave of his chest, Croker rose and came walking--or, rather, limping--toward him. He seemed so much older than his pictures, and wearier. He gave Roger a smile, but it was a tired smile, and he had circles under his eyes. Yet he radiated physical power. He had on a white shirt and a dark red necktie, but no jacket. His neck, trapezius muscles, shoulders, and chest seemed to be a single unit-welded mass. They were so big, it was as if he were wearing a chest protector beneath his shirt. His hands were so big, Roger braced as they shook hands, for fear he might be another hearty bonecrusher, like Buck McNutter. Roger's hand disappeared inside this huge white man's, just as had been the case when he met McNutter, but in fact there was nothing unusual about the pressure Croker exerted.

From A Man in Full, by Tom Wolfe (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998)