1996 UHF Article JG Thirlwell

Dressed For Success (excerpt)

J. G. Thirlwell

It may seem contradictory coming from the man who calls himself Foetus and has titled an album Stinkfist, but Jim Thirlwell likes to wear white. “I’m a pure guy,” he says. “Purely perverted.”

Until recently Thirlwell was on a six-year stretch of wearing nothing but black jeans and shirts for the simple reason that it cut down on laundry. “The big drag about white is that it entails a lot of dry cleaning. When you sit on the fucking subway, you get all grubby,” says Thirlwell, who spends a lot of money on clean-seated limos.

“Then something clicked. All of a sudden I was wearing nothing but frilly shirts and suits… which has put me in a lot of trouble.” On one occasion, coming home at 4 a.m. wearing a ruffled pink blouse and powder blue overcoat, Thirlwell caught his cab driver jerking off in the front seat.

Although it sometimes attracts the wrong types, his tendency to overdress is, he admits, for the ladies. “The appeal is the very fact that I take time out to become a perverse fashion victim.”

A confessed tuxedo junkie, Thirlwell has 15 in his collection – including one in crimson brocade – the majority of which he’s found at Kasbah, a thrift shop on NYC’s Lower East Side. “In an ideal world I would be wearing sequins all the time,” says Thirlwell, who aspires, later in life, to look like a year 2100 Gary Glitter – without the paunch and with a bigger bulge in his pants.

Source: UHF of January / February 1996, Paige Jarrett.