Gatsby's colour coding

Tom Buchanan already has a hunch about the mysterious Gatsby, and has been investigating his past, when we are given a colourful example of his suspicion about the newcomer '"An Oxford man!" He was incredulous."Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit."'

Reading the novella before I get around to watching Luhrmann's new film version, I couldn't help wondering why Scott Fitzgerald put him in a pink suit, and how the pink suit is faring nowadays. Of course colour adds to Gatsby's downfall in another way, as his distinctive yellow car with the beautiful green leather interior is noticed at key points in the story. And it's important to remember that everything Gatsby does is to try to win Daisy; and clothing is an important element of this: when he finally manages to show her around his house, he takes out a pile of shirts and throws them in a luxurious pile, 'shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue.' Daisy buries her head in them, crying that she's never seen 'such beautiful shirts before'.


Baz Lurhmann's wife, Catherine Martin, was the costume designer for the latest film, and put Dicaprio in Brooks Brothers'  very traditional designs (they have a new collection riding on the back of the film) but the only near disagreement she had with the star was over the pink suit. In the end the film stayed with the book at least in this detail. In the 1974 version Robert Redford also sported one, and an oh so slightly deeper pink at that; the earliest film with Alan Ladd (1949) was in black and white so the issue presumably didn't arise!
 
  Googling 'pink suits' brings up a bright array of rather startling creations, some  too Psy (Gangham style) to be taken  too seriously,  plus press photos of boy bands; but as you scroll down the page, the first real celebrities to be featured are Brad Pitt looking rather tasteful (possibly with an eye to being chosen by Baz before Dicaprio got the role) closely followed by a brash Mick Jagger, who is never afraid to do his own thing. So it's still not what you could call a mainstream choice. http://www.mickjaggerbiography.com/think-pink-miracle-worker-the-video/     Even Bowie, Jagger's best rival for flamboyant dress, has only the jacket to compete with him.