The other man, South African opposition leader Julius Malema, was clad in a black safari suit, with his customary red beret perched on his head.

In a photograph from 22 July 2008, Atiq Ahmed, MP, confidently strides into the Indian parliament in Delhi, adorned in a safari suit.

“I never cared about it or understood this fascination with me,” said Ms. Catroux, the woman whose indelible image in Saint Laurent’s lace-front safari suit, in tautly knotted trench coats, in boyish black jeans and snug biker jackets or in the sexually ambiguous evening wear called Le Smoking inspired successive generations of designers to imitate her and photographers like Jeanloup Sieff, Helmut Newton and Irving Penn to attempt to capture her intriguing beauty on film.

This weekend his white beard is cropped close to his face, and he is wearing a linen safari suit.

His chest felt weighty; he did not know why he had ironed the socks, why he had not simply done the safari suit.