R S Gwynn: Wilkinson (Sword) blades weren't marketed in the US until the late 60s or 70s. The Gillette Blue Blade was ubiquitous in its tv advertising (along with ads for the new canned shaving creams--Shade's "Our Cream") ...There may have been other double-edge blades at the time (Pal?), but Gillette was "king." "Gillette blade" may have indeed been some kind of arcane code for "bisexual," but virtually every male in the US used Blue Blades.

 

Jansy Mello: I surmise Shade's was the double-edge sort, not the double-blade one. However, what I meant was that the word "gillette" was descriptively applied to bisexuals and not necessarily to those who shaved with a Blue Blade.

 

btw: I wonder if Nabokov ultimately applied the "Occam's razor" principle in literature ("when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better."), as Albert Camus (in his July 1943 essay, "Intelligence and the Scaffold", Confluences n.21-24) seems to have defended in his description of the great French classics's obstinacy, as opposed to the thematic multiplicity found in James Joyce's or in the "Russian novels"