Balzac’s “Treatise on Elegant Living” was recently given its first English translation by the newly founded Wakefield Press. I wrote this essay on it for the latest issue of The Rake.

Lessons in Elegance: The words of wisdom contained within Honoré de Balzac’s “Treatise on Elegant Living” remain pertinent almost two centuries after their initial publication
By Christian Chensvold
The Rake, issue 10

Every era has its particular expression of elegance. But while that expression is forever in flux, the principles that govern it are fixed and eternal. So argues Honoré de Balzac in his “Treatise on Elegant Living,” a breezy philosophic tome written in 1830 recently given its first English translation by Wakefield Press, a small new publisher in Cambridge, Massachusetts devoted to rare and forgotten works of European literature.

The “Treatise on Elegant Living” brims with timeless aphorisms that transcend the ever-changing guise of fashion. Take, for example, the following evergreen gem: “Good has but one style; evil a thousand.” For Balzac, a few of the thousandfold manifestations of sartorial evil include any outfit that bears excessive ornamentation or a profusion of colors. Then there’s what in the fashion industry is called “working a look,” an act of folly whose sin is meritriciousness. “Anything that aims at an effect,” pronounces Balzac, “is in bad taste.”

Full of wit and wisdom, the “Treatise” is the kind of book every boulevardier should keep in his armoire and read a passage from each morning before getting dressed. It is a breviary for the dandy-aesthete who sees life as an art project, and for those who see style is an existential imperative, who feel a burning need to leave their mark everywhere they go and on everything they do. Such acolytes of style will find a perfect mantra in Balzac’s line “Elegance dramatizes life.”

Elegant living consists of nothing less than the perfection of material life, the development of grace and taste in everything that belongs to and surrounds us. It’s a quixotic endeavor that few men are capable of reaching completely, and some not at all.  “Retailers, businessmen, and teachers of the humanities,” Balzac decrees, “fall outside the scope of elegant living.” The “Treatise” is thus not just an exploration of elegance, but an argument for a life of leisure. This may be difficult to swallow if you’re a wannabe fais neant who’s forced, by cruelty of fate, to work for a living.

But time and money aren’t Balzac’s only prerequisites for elegant living. So are certain innate qualities that destine a man, from the moment he enters the world, to one day cut a dashing figure. “To distinguish our life through elegance,” Balzac writes, “one must still have been endowed with that indefinable faculty that always prompts us to choose truly beautiful or good things.”

That draconian necessity — to have been endowed — exemplifies Balzac’s rhetoric at its most rigidly elitist. For while elegance is something that is practiced daily —  “A man must practice this science with the same ease with which he speaks his mother tongue,”  he writes, for “It is dangerous to stammer in the elegant world” — it is also something, like any other talent, that only a select few are born with. “A man becomes rich,” is the book’s best-known quote, “he is born elegant.”

Of course, man is also born naked: Clothing is what makes him civilized. And one should never underestimate the importance of wearing clothes, something everyone does and yet so few do elegantly. “Clothes are the most tremendous modification social man has experienced,” writes Balzac; “they influence all of existence.”

SELECTED APHORISMS

Elegant living is, in the broad acceptance of the term, the art of animating repose.

The man accustomed to work cannot understand elegant living.

It is not enough to become or to be born rich to lead an elegant life: one must feel it.

Though elegance is less an art than a feeling, it is also the result of instinct and habit.

Retailers, businessmen, and teachers of the humanities fall outside the scope of elegant living.

Anyone who does not frequently visit Paris will never be completely elegant.

Studied elegance is to true elegance what a wig is to hair.

Anything that reveals thrift is inelegant.

Clothing does not consist so much in clothes as in a certain manner of wearing them. Consequently it is not the rags in themselves as it is the spirit of the rags that one must grasp.

The boor covers himself, the rich man or the fool adorns himself, and the elegant man gets dressed.

Michael Mattis, who has previously written about Sebastian Horsley for Dandyism.net, offers this remembrance.

Dealing with death is always a hard thing. Dealing with the death of someone you have written about is harder still — especially when what you have written about the deceased is not all that nice.

Frequent readers of Dandyism.net will be well within their rights to expect us to slam Sebastian Horsley even in death. But they will be disappointed. For one thing, it does not fall within the purview of a gentleman to speak ill of the dead. What follows is, rather, a grudging appreciation.

First, the facts: According to news reports, the body of Sebastian Horsley, 47 —artist, writer entrepreneur and showman — was found at about 11:00 A.M. GMT on Thursday, June 17, in his small apartment in Soho, London, by one of his lady friends. He had apparently died of an overdose of heroin.

A few evenings before, Horsley had seen the play about his recalcitrant life, based on his memoir, “Dandy in the Underworld.” The play was written by Tim Fountain. It was to be made into a film, produced by his friend, the actor, writer and director Stephen Fry of “Wilde” and “Jeeves” fame.

Upon seeing the play for the first time, Horsley is reported by the The Independent to have said, “They say seeing your doppelganger is an omen of death, so I got quite excited about that and thought, best get my coat on.”

Horsley had a long affair with, well, “horse,” as herion has been known in the drug-taking community. It is hard to believe that, given that lengthy association, he did not know exactly what he was doing when stuck the needle into his veins for the last time. If you read “Dandy in the Underworld,” you will find that Horsley often talked about his own death, and his right to take himself out of this world in the method and at the time of his own choosing.

And, he once said on video: “It’s only death; it’s not the end of the world, is it?”

Why he would do such a thing on the cusp of so much notoriety — the notoriety he so often very publicly craved — is a mystery. Perhaps it was the final act in a life punctuated by showmanship and self-created drama. He as sometimes tiresome and repetitious in his quips, but he was rarely boring.

After the publication of “Dandy in the Underworld,” he was famously banned from entering the United States on a promotional tour, on the grounds that he might somehow pass on his moral turpitude to others. (As if we Americans don’t have enough moral turpitude of our own). It’s too bad. I had planned to meet him, and had looked forward to it. I can only imagine what our conversation would have been like.

Horsley was born with the benefit of cash. His father was a millionaire several times over, and this carried him well through his thirties. When the money began to run dry — spent on his trademark lavish and outrageous bespoke suits, Mad Hatter-style toppers, wildly collared Turnbull & Asser shirts, drugs and Class A hookers — he put his remaining capital into the stock market as a day trader. And he made bank.

He made no bones about his own upper-middle-class vulgarity. When asked by The Chap “What is your idea of complete sophistication?” he said, “Complete vulgarity. The vulgar man is always the most sophisticated, for the very desire to be sophisticated is vulgar. And without an element of vulgarity no man can become a work of art.”

Horsley hated Beau Brummell, saying the dandy icon had made men’s clothing “boring,” and called Oscar Wilde a fake, and not even a real fake. There is some truth to both statements.

Was Horsley a dandy? Maybe not, at least not in the strict sense of the term. His clothes were too showy and tasteless, his attitude needlessly outré. On the other hand, if he had not been so outré we should never had known of him, or taken pleasure — and often disgust — in his antics.

But, like Quentin Crisp, I believe Horsley had a kind of native dandyism that is hard to deny. It’s the kind of dandyism — perhaps aestheticism would be more accurate — that makes one’s life into work of Wildean art. In Horsley’s case, that work of art was entirely contemporary in the sense that contemporary art is often not pretty. His death was the final stroke on his own corrupt canvas.

Goodbye, Sebastian, you magnificent bastard.

In the spring of 1934, a gentleman with a neatly trimmed mustache casts an eye in the direction of the door to an office waiting room, temporarily distracting him from the copy of Esquire he’s just picked up. Is he waiting for a stockbroker? A dentist? A divorce lawyer?

We can tell he’s a man of means and sophistication from his outfit. He’s sporting a lightweight double-breasted suit in a strong check pattern. His blue shirt has a starched white collar and cuffs, and his Guards tie is finished with a four-in-hand knot. His blue pocket square is a few shades paler than his shirt, and matches his socks. His shoes are brown cap-toe balmorals. A gray homburg and rattan cane have been casually placed on an adjoining chair.

Wearing a checked suit in town is something nearly unheard of, but this man pulls it off smashingly. We know he’s confident in his clothes and his world—because the world he inhabits is the creation of an artist who signs himself L. Fellows. And you can be sure that in the months after this illustration appeared, far more checked double-breasted suits were seen on city sidewalks.

If you’ve ever cracked open an old Apparel Arts magazine or vintage Esquire from the ’30s to the ’50s, you’ve seen the distinctive fashion art of Laurence Fellows. But who was this Fellows fellow, anyway?

Fellows was born in Ardmore, Pennsylvania in 1885. He was trained in illustration at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, and honed his trademark “continental” style studying in England and France. But the real story begins when he returned to the States in the early 1910s and burst on the scene as an eager and talented young artist.

Fellows found work contributing to satirical magazines like Life and Leslie’s, and his European-influenced style was fresh and new, reflecting the sleekness and stylization that led to Art Deco. His work was so fresh, in fact, that he found many of his better-known contemporaries, including John Held, Jr. and Ralph Barton, were adapting his stylistic elements for their own use.

Fellows’ style during this period was very mannered and graphic, with thin black outlines enclosing flat expanses of tone and compositions that emphasized graphic weight and balance over fussy illustrative detail. His bread and butter throughout the 1920s was his work for the Kelly-Springfield Tire company. He brought an idea to the Kelly advertising manager for a series of magazine ads featuring “smart cars and smart types of people.” It was the beginning of an assignment that lasted for nearly a decade. The ads are still smart and fashionable today (and becoming collectible, by the way). Continue »

Yesterday was the 25th annual Gatsby Summer Afternoon in the San Francisco Bay Area. The many duded-up gents give us the chance to revisit our “Who’s the Dandy?” series with our first-ever costume edition. Leave a comment to cast your vote on your favorite outfit. Above are John Akridge and Benny Reese. Below, Slimm Buick: Continue »

“The Passionate Spectator” columnist Robert Sacheli previously delivered a lengthy appreciation on Fred Astaire. Here, inspired by a new biography on the style icon, he takes a curtain call.

Despite the best intentions of our Founding Fathers, Americans have long been crazy for aristocrats — particularly when it comes to emulating their style. In the 1930s, fashionable men looked to a pair of princes for their cues. One, the Prince of Wales, aka the Duke of Windsor, was a bona fide blueblood, and the influence of his Fair Isle sweaters, midnight-blue dinner jackets, and country-house suits was reflected in the gentlemanly swank of Esquire’s fashion illustrations and in the haberdasheries that catered to the well heeled.

When he foxtrotted off with that divorcée from Baltimore, the dapper Prince abdicated more than an imperial throne. He passed the title of ranking monarch of male fashion to a royal from another powerful, if slightly more mythical, land: Hollywood. Fred Astaire’s reign would prove to be a long one, and his enduring imprint on American style is a legacy as remarkable as his films.

While most of us have happily been content to sit back and watch the man dance, Astaire has long been a magnet for cultural historians, and Joseph Epstein, former editor of The American Scholar, stepped up for his turn on the floor last year with his brief biography, “Fred Astaire” (Yale University Press). The book wasn’t exactly rapturously received (the New York Observer pronounced it “intellectual slumming” and “priggish”), and an extended excerpt in the Hudson Review shows that the carping is justified.

In it, Epstein comes off as alternately snarky, sour, and worst, clueless about musicals — as expected for a highbrow whose works include a volume called “Snobbery.” He’s also not been done any favors by his copy editor. Among other gaffes, he manages to misspell the name of one of Fred’s frequent co-stars, Helen Broderick, and refer to Van Nest Polglase, RKO’s master of the 1930s Big White Set, as an exemplar of Art Nouveau and mangle his name as well. Epstein’s biggest head-scratcher, though, is his assertion that for all the pure joy that Astaire radiated to generations of audiences, he falls short of being a genius. Instead he’s an undeniably talented, perfection-obsessed, but basically dull fellow who can somehow dance up a storm. As Miss Broderick might dryly retort with an appropriate eye roll, “Oh, yeah?” Continue »

Last month my editor at L’Uomo Vogue emailed me with the subject heading “Urgente!” She asked me to write the introductory essay for the upcoming issue, whose theme was “eccentricity.” She needed 800 words, and I could take any approach I wanted. The deadline was 24 hours.

I figured every Italian writer on their roster must have been on a six-week summer vacation if they were forced to resort to me at the last minute. Still, I felt honored.

Well the issue is out and my piece isn’t exactly the intro to the issue: Instead, they made in the back-page essay and slapped the word “Opinion” over it. Well, it certainly is.

But hey, there are 350 pages, and I’ve got the last word.

Below is the English original. It’s less musical than the Italian translation, but at least there are paragraph breaks.

Everyone/No One Is Eccentric
By Christian Chensvold

I once met a fashion writer who was dressed in red pants, pointed shoes and a kind of military jacket that looked straight from the cover of the Beatles’s “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” But most noticeable about him was his waxed handlebar mustache.

He was about 25.

During our conversation, the young man repeatedly used the word “eccentric,” but not to describe someone who sleeps hanging upside down like a vampire bat because they find it more effective than Ambien, but to refer to certain acquaintances and their fashion sense, which was carefully calculated to look outlandish.

“Eccentric” is one of those words that in common usage has lost nearly all its denotative meaning. It has also shed its more quaint and rarified connotations. “He’s a bit of an eccentric,” used to suggest the person referred to was erudite and rich in addition to slightly odd. An innocent victim of our era of subjectivity and relativism, “eccentric” now means whatever the speaker wants it to mean, ceaselessly shifting based on context. And increasingly “eccentric” has come to mean just another lifestyle choice.

Decades of global democracy, mass media saturation and egalitarian ideologies have all contributed to the dilution of the concept of eccentricity, a moniker so charming when used to refer to an English aristocrat, yet so pathetic when applied to a suburban Californian trying to live out the fantasy that he’s a pirate.

The true definition of an eccentric, of course, is not just one who behaves oddly, but one for whom it would never occur to behave otherwise. In its purest form, eccentricity is wholly unconscious. But as soon as “eccentric” behavior becomes a kind of deliberate performance used for self-promotion and publicity, or for gaining attention, whether positive or negative, we are not dealing with genuine eccentricity, but something ersatz. Instead of being delightfully oblivious to his own oddities, the “eccentric” is a calculating showman seeking a reaction from his audience. If the true eccentric is a private individual who hides his idiosyncrasies, the ersatz eccentric is a public poser who flaunts them. Continue »

Today marks the five-year anniversary of Dandyism.net.

Usually our fiscal-year recap is penned by managing editor Nick Willard. He will not be addressing you this year because, like all great dandies, he has gone into exile. No one has heard from him for nearly nine months, and his phone just goes to voice mail.

We suspect he’s in debtor’s prison.

The timing could not be worse. At the same time Nick disappeared, I started up another web project, and have decided to focus my attentions there exclusively. A writer doesn’t spend his entire life on one book, nor a painter on one canvas. I need a new challenge, and what’s more, find that I’ve said all I have to say on the subject of dandyism at the present time. I may return to the topic when I have a fresh perspective.

I feel like I’m letting down the many faithful readers who’ve been with us from the start. But fear not: The forum is still open. And you will likely see an occasional new story now and then. But unless Willard resurfaces, it will never be like it used to be.

But they’ve been saying that about dandyism for 175 years.  — CHRISTIAN CHENSVOLD

“Chinese art possess no elements of beauty.”

Oscar Wilde offered up that curious opinion on a San Francisco-bound ferry boat to a crowd of reporters anxious to record his first impression of the city, which at the time supported one of largest communities of Chinese outside the so-called Celestial Empire. Wilde had been in the United States since January, lecturing the colonials on interior decoration, art, design, and an obscure subject he called “The English Renaissance,” ahead of the Gilbert and Sullivan light opera, “Patience.” By this sunny morning in March, 1882, the Irish poet and aesthete had wended his way across the continent to “the Occidental uttermost of American civilization,” making a sensation in big cities and mining camps alike along the way.

Wilde had been averse to things Chinese since boyhood, when he heard a Chinese “fiddle” at an exhibition in Paris. “I… could discern no music in it,” he told the reporters.

While Wilde had seen “much that was admirable” in the arts of Japan, whose blue vases and delicately painted fans were all the rage of the Aesthetic Movement back in London, he found in Chinese art that only “the horrible and grotesque” appeared “to be standards of perfection.”

Wilde had ventured his comments after asking a reporter to point out where the city’s Chinese settlement lay on the hilly grid of streets then visible from San Francisco Bay. He had tasted, indeed drunk deeply, the exotic flavor of frontier life in the American West. Now he was considering going further. Behind the slip of land upon which rested the roaring boomtown-cum-metropolis of San Francisco lay the Pacific. And beyond that, Asia. Perhaps he would visit Japan, home to those charming vases and airy prints that he so admired. Continue »

After a long interruption, Dandyism.net presents the final installment of Robert Sacheli’s article on Gerald Murphy. For convenience’s sake (and to refresh your memory), we have combined all three parts into this one post. 

Fresh from his assiduous assessment of Lucius Beebe, Sacheli seeks to rescue the reputation of another forgotten 20th-century American dandy for whom life itself was the greatest work of art.

 * * *

Murphy’s Law
By Robert Sacheli

“The true dandy was not the most foppishly dressed, the most stylish, the most flash-mannered; he was primarily an artist of talent.” — From a biography of Count D’Orsay, part of Gerald Murphy’s collection of quotes.

If any American dandy in Jazz-Age Paris could look at an automobile part and think “I could wear that,” it was Gerald Murphy.

Photographer Man Ray captured Murphy and his wife, Sara, arrayed for the Comte Étienne de Beaumont’s 1924 Automotive Ball, one of string of fetes that made the nobleman’s name synonymous with up-to-the minute, headline-grabbing party giving.

Here is Sara, bizarre but chic in what looks like a foil dress and oversized driving goggles, accented by the strings of pearls that were her trademark. Gerald, also in goggles, wears tights, gauntlets, and a breastplate into which he has been welded. A fanciful, ziggurat-shaped helmet towers on his head, half metallic wedding cake and half Constructivist chimney.

One element lifts the ensemble from witty party get-up to something approaching art: the side-view mirror attached to his left shoulder. With it, Murphy simultaneously embodies the glamour and power of both master and machine, linking a chivalric nobility to speeding promise of modern life.

That mirror also reflects what made Murphy’s dandyism so potent: his life-long ability to transform the everyday into the extraordinary though an alchemy of imagination, energy, and an innate sense of style. But unlike other dandies over whom history exerted its nostalgic sway, Gerald Murphy’s personal and aesthetic visions were always firmly fixed on the future.

For Gerald and Sara, that future first unfolded in a procession of charmed years whose keynote was a unique kind of grace. Rooted in their love and manifested in their gifts for friendship and for living, it was a grace that nourished some of the most innovative talents of the early 20th century. In the years when their own future darkened, it was a grace that sustained them through the cruelest of losses. Continue »

By Stewart Gibson

“Nothing dates so quickly as the apt comment.” So wrote Osbert Lancaster, ruefully reflecting on the inevitable eclipse of his reputation as one of the leading cartoonists, wits and dandies of his day.

Over a period of almost 40 years, Osbert Lancaster became a household name in Britain thanks to his introduction (with some inspiration from the French) of the newspaper “pocket cartoon.” For four decades readers would avidly seek out Lancaster’s contribution to the front page of the Daily Express prior to giving any consideration to the headlines.

The year 2008 marked the centenary of Lancaster’s birth, and in celebration a new book and exhibition are shining a fresh light on that once glittering reputation, providing illuminating insights into the world view of a man who brought the beady eye of an Edwardian dandy to bear on the follies and foibles of the mid-20th century.

In a superb earlier article for Dandyism.net, Michael Mattis covered much of the life and personal style of this “modern major minor dandy.” So here we must focus upon the work and its relation to the nature of its creator, as surveyed in the recently published book by James Knox, “Cartoons and Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster.”

Born to a wealthy family, Lancaster enjoyed a comfortable upbringing. He showed a natural talent for drawing from an early age and his sojourn at Charterhouse School fortuitously placed him at a institution which had an unusually strong tradition of producing outstanding caricaturists and illustrators, among them William Makepeace Thackeray, John Leech and Lancaster’s direct precursor and hero, the “incomparable” Max Beerbohm.

As a cartoonist, boulevardier and “connoisseur of social distinctions,” Lancaster’s use of longer captions revised the tradition of 19th-century Punch cartoons, in addition to following the example of Beerbohm. Lancaster’s obvious nostalgia for an earlier epoch was reflected in his wry observations on the shifting social mores of the 1950s-70s, most usually as seen through the eyes of his greatest comic creation: Maudie, Countess of Littlehampton. Maudie, and her fatalistic and fogeyish husband Willie, were as well known in their day as any society couple could possibly be. Continue »