When serendipity knocks you have to be there to answer the door.

It was a while ago when serendipity gently scratched like a hopeful paramour. Bored one afternoon I had gone to see a movie matinee up at the independent Clay Theater up in the nice part of Fillmore Street in San Francisco. The film was what my father would call “a cute little movie;” not a blockbuster shoot-‘em-up by any means, but rather a nicely put together character study. “The Great Buck Howard” stars John Malkovich and includes a brace of cameos by Tom Hanks, who also produced it. The movie deals with an eccentric TV psychic, loosely based on the real life story of The Amazing Kreskin, who appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson dozens of times. It’s a good renter.

Anyway, after the film I decided to stroll across the street to The Junior League of San Francisco Next-to-New Store. As even the most lackadaisical boulevardier should be able to surmise, the Junior League is one of those tony, old-money institutions that benefit a plethora of causes which, luckily for the organization, never seem to improve enough so that the League’s charity can ever be turned down.

As a deadbeat dandy, I’ve had a certain amount of luck at the Junior League shop in the past, finding articles such as cast-off Dunhill ties and never-worn Church’s English shoes. That day I started at the suit and sport coat rack, flicking through it with my usual, speedy, “Nope-flick, nope-flick, nope-flick.”

I looked around and spied a second, free-standing rack next to the one I’d been flicking through and went to take a look. My hand alighted on a soft wool navy blazer. I pulled it out. It was double-breasted, four-on-six, with three buttons on the cuffs and no vents. It had conservative shoulders. I looked more closely. The gold-colored buttons bore the stamp, “G&H.”

I could feel my palms beginning to sweat.

“It can’t be,” I thought. “It must be a knock-off.” I undid the button and pulled back the front of the jacket to reveal the lining. There it was: “Gieves & Hawkes,” it said. “No. 1 Savile Row London.”

My second thought was, “Well, it will never fit.” Trembling, I put it on and looked in the mirror. But for a slight pull on one of the buttons — a thing easily repaired by a competent tailor — it fit like a glove.

“Well,” I thought, “they’re going to want a couple hundred at least.” I looked for a tag. I couldn’t find one. I looked on the rack. It bore a sign that read, simply, “Men’s $5.00.” Now I went weak in the knees. This Gieves & Hawkes navy blazer — the ultimate, perfect, Roger Moore-esque blazer — was $5? It was too good to be true. It didn’t have a tag; they’d never sell it to me. With trepidation and a feeling of foreboding I walked up and placed the jacket on the counter and said to the clerk, “This was on the five dollar rack.”

“Alright,” the lady clerk responded in a cheery Oxford accent and proceeded to ring up the sale. I couldn’t believe it. There was an elderly gentlemen looking at ties standing nearby. He eyed the jacket with some curiosity.

I couldn’t stand it. “But that’s Gieves & Hawkes!” I nearly shouted it.

“So it is,” the clerk replied, flatly. “Looks like you got the deal of a lifetime, eh?”

The old man gave me a wink. “What?” I asked the clerk. “Is it haunted or something?”

“No,” said the woman, who seemed to have no sense of humor or irony. “It’s just that double breasted isn’t in style among the fashionistas right now… So it’s five dollars…”

“Well, what the hell do the fashionistas know?!” I laughed, putting my new Gieves & Hawkes blazer on and bagging up the old midnight blue velvet jacket I’d worn into the shop. Newly arrayed, though still weak in the knees, I barged down the street like a soldier on parade and headed straight for the Elite Café, there to get a stiff drink — A drink that cost me double what the blazer did — and relay my good luck to Chenners over the phone. I expected at any second to get a tap on the shoulder from an angry Junior League store manager demanding extra payment. Luckily, this never came.

Later that evening, I went through the pockets of my new G&H blazer. In the left breast pocket I found a folded card. On the front was printed a horse head and crown crest inscribed with the legend “1893” and the word “Mort” in hand-written calligraphy. Inside was scrawled, in ball-point, “Lady Mountbatten.” I surmised that the last time the original owner had worn this blazer was at one of those murder mystery dinner parties. Maybe, though, the article really is haunted. At least I hope it is.

Next time The Amazing Kreskin comes to town, perhaps I’ll be able to find out for sure.

Faithful myrmidons will have noticed that two new articles have recently been posted to the D.net homepage, our “Dandy of the Year”—which is more like “Dandy of the Every Other Year” at this point—and a piece on our former leader and ongoing inspiration, Christian Chensvold (blessings and peace be upon him) and his success in the ephemera of Japan. These are but a mere amuse-bouche for what is to come. On the slate are original monographs, profiles, interviews, book and museum reviews and much more. Stay tuned.

In addition, we’ve made some changes to the masthead:

Michael Mattis takes over as Grand Poo Bah, charged with the thankless but not entirely unrewarding tasks of Managing Editor and Forum Moderator. We encourage new viewers to become Forum myrmidons, and lapsed myrmidons to re-engage in the conversation. There is no entry fee and you have nothing to declare but your genius. We think you’ll like the changes. If you would like to try your hand at the quill and contribute an original article to the D.Net home page, please join the Forum and send Mattis a private message.

Florida gentleman and neo-royalist homme d’affaires, Sean Charles Hall, is our new Social Media Manager and Cruise Director. Hall created and now curates our elegant page on Facebook. There you’ll find a veritable boîte à bijoux of dandical imagery, bons mots, and exquisite conviviality.

Stewart Gibson has been named, sotto voce, as D.net’s Editor, Ephemera. For some time, the London boulevardier has been charged with the exclusive responsibility of making sure that there are three or four new Ephemera links each week.

And while you’ve been cramming so that you can pass the definite Test of Dandy Knowledge— finals are next week, gentlemen—more texts have been added to the Library.

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Dandyism.net founder and erstwhile editor-in-chief, Christian “Chenners” Chensvold has cracked the code that lies at the four-point crossroads of contemporary dandyism, trad, preppy and Ivy League style—in Japan. He was recently profiled in the Japanese magazine, Free & Easy.

In 2008, Chensvold founded Ivy-Style.com, a website devoted to the Ivy League look, its history and its place in American—and, indeed, international—culture. Two years ago, Chensvold pulled up his California stakes and moved his operation to New York, to be nearer the epicenters of publishing, culture and style. There he met classic men’s style greats like G. Bruce Boyer and Richard Press. And Ivy-Style.com thrived. Recently, he was appointed an editorship at the venerable New York high society magazine, Quest.

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My eyes first fell upon Luca Rubinacci while exploring Scott Schuman’s website The Satorialist.  I can still remember being quite impressed by Luca’s use of color. “Now that is how you dress boldly,” I said to myself. I must admit that I thought nothing more about him for some time afterwards. Then one day as I flipped through the pages of my favorite men’s magazine, The Rake, there staring back at me was that same stylish individual from several months earlier. I recognized instantly the same style, and once more I was taken by his bold use of color, his beautifully fitted bespoke clothing, and the distinct originality that he projected. I was so impressed with what I saw on those pages that I actually took the time to read the entire article, something which I’ll admit that I rarely have time to do. Come to find out, Luca Rubinacci is a very interesting man whose style exemplifies his originality—in his clothing, his work, and his lifestyle, all of which help him cut the dandyish figure.

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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 meretriciousness. “Anything that aims at an effect,” pronounces Balzac, “is in bad taste.”

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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.

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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). (more…)

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: (more…)

“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?” (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

Eton, 1947.