For most of his life, Buzz Bissinger was a Brooks Brothers-clad, rage-filled asshole given to inappropriate utterances, so he decided to change his wardrobe. From “My Gucci Addiction,” the journalist’s extreme self-portrait in GQ, which focuses on shopping and fucking:

“It is safe to assume that when someone buys more than half a million dollars of clothing in three years, it isn’t simply beautiful clothing that he seeks. My wife and I realized several years ago that we had run our sexual course. It was on the surface a strange decision, since both of us were highly sexualized. And great lovers to each other. And she was absolutely beautiful. But the twin killers of menopause and boredom had set in, as they do in every marriage. And I had never been able to equate sex with intimacy.

I had always been attracted to S&M, even at an early age, when I didn’t know what it was. My mother wore leather gloves in springtime. My first teacher in kindergarten, who probably thought I was mentally challenged because I never spoke, also wore leather gloves, and every day as she left I would watch as she slowly put them on with the stretch and pull of the fingers. My eighth-grade math teacher wore stiletto black leather boots and black hair like Elvira and spoke in dismissive clips, and I adored her, even when she dropped test results into my lap with B- circled in red at the top.

I did engage in a relationship with a dominatrix after the failure of my second marriage. I left the scene after two years. But I clearly missed it, the trappings of leather increasingly irresistible. I liked extreme feelings of restraint and taking pain. But I was also interested in everything.

My sexual appetites began to spin in all sorts of different directions. My wife and I talked about it at length. She was far more experienced than I was, and she did in high school what I longed to but could not because of the need to please others—get laid, smoke dope, go to Woodstock. Before she left for Abu Dhabi, she urged me to explore, not on the basis that we wanted some open marriage but because of her feeling that I owed it to myself, to both of us, because my unfulfilled desires, or at least what I thought might be my desires, were leading to the nastiness and the contempt toward a spouse that comes from frustration.”