Kurt at Cultural Offering points us to this 1991 Paris Review interview with Tom Wolfe. fascinating. Worth a read.

 I realized instinctively that if I were going to write vignettes of contemporary life, which is what I was doing constantly for New York, I wanted all the sounds, the looks, the feel of whatever place I was writing about to be in this vignette. Brand names, tastes in clothes and furniture, manners, the way people treat children, servants, or their superiors, are important clues to an individual’s expectations.

Image: National Endowment for the Humanities