From New York to Colorado, audiences went wild for Oscar, whose applications of rouge and dyed green carnation buttonholes were so unlike anything worn by cowboys. The 6ft 3in Irishman had yet to write the great works that made him famous (The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Ballad of Reading Gaol). Yet by turning himself into a commodity he was able to be famous merely for being famous. Without Wilde’s very modern genius for self-promotion, conceivably, there would have been no David Bowie or, indeed, Kim Kardashian.