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.

“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…)

If politics make strange bedfellows, the strangest must be the dandy and the politician.

Yes, there is a long tradition of political dandyism from Alcibiades to William Pitt, Benjamin Disraeli, Sir Samuel Hoare and Anthony Eden in Britain, and the young Theodore Roosevelt, Jimmy Walker, and former Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in the United States.

But we wonder if this tradition can withstand scrutiny. Disraeli became a successful politician only after he put his green velvet trousers, canary-colored waistcoat and lace shirts in mothballs. Walker, on the other hand, remained a dandy, but his casual approach to governing eventually forced him out of office.

On a more profound level, how can one square the politician’s naked ambition for power and the need, in modern democracies, to cater to the masses with the dandy’s nonchalant superiority?

One man, though, who has been a successful politician for decades and whose style we’ve always admired is San Francisco’s Willie Brown.

Thirteen years after he resigned as Speaker of the California State Assembly — an office he held for an unprecedented 15 years — and more than four years after his tenure as San Francisco’s mayor ended, Willie Brown remains one of the most powerful men in California politics. He is also one of the world’s best dressed men.

A Texas native, Brown came west, arrived in San Francisco in 1951, age 17. He was met at the station by a dapper uncle, he relates in his new memoir, “Basic Brown: My Life and Our Times,” who took one look at the country-dressed youngster and immediately took him shopping. Brown’s been a clothes-wearing man ever since.

Brown’s politics, like those of his predecessors is built on “juice” — that most dandyish form of soft power that works entirely through personality, influence and connections and operates at the highest levels of society. And Brown is nothing if not a social butterfly. Though now in his 70s, rare is the evening when he doesn’t have two or three high-toned engagements lined up, and he still spends his Friday afternoons at the window table at Le Central, talking, drinking and playing dice with socialites like Harry de Wildt and his long-time haberdasher, Wilkes Bashford.

Partly through his old friend, the late Herb Caen — who dubbed him “Da Mayor” and called him “Hizzoner” — and partly through his own charisma, Brown developed a relationship with the press that was the envy of his political colleagues and the scourge of his rivals.

“The only thing worse than being misquoted,” he once said, channeling Oscar Wilde, “is not being quoted at all.” (more…)

The split between the dandyism of clothes and the dandyism of words is the subject of our most recent Library addition: “Social and Literary Dandyism,” published in Littell’s Living Age in 1880.

In its rambling way, Littell’s unsigned article compares the purely social dandy — the Beau Brummells and Poodle Bings — with his literary counterpart.

“Dandies, like saints, are never much beloved of their fellow-creatures,” states the anonymous author. “Like saints, they have an ideal perfection in manner and dress, and ideals are felt to be impertinent. To be a dandy is to outrage the vanity of every one who has not the energy to be wakefully attentive to details of deportment and costume. The great dandies of old says, like Brummell, Lauzun, and the rest, were everywhere welcomed because they made themselves disagreeable to so many people.”

The author goes on to say, “A young man is never more certain of social success than at the moment when most other young men never mention him without saying that they ‘would like to kick him’.”

But as goes social life, so goes its literary counterpart. “Literary dandyism is also excessively annoying to the rugged hodmen of letters,” notes the author. “These industrious persons detest the literary dandy, the man who minds his periods and regards the cadence of his sentences, and shuns stock illustrations and old quotations, as the social dandy avoids dirty gloves and clumsy boots.”

The anonymous author names several men whom he considers literary dandies, including Balzac, Arnold, Pater, Walpole, Sydney, and even Machiavelli and Plato himself. Yet he was more prescient that he could ever have imagined. Just a few years after the publication of “Social and Literary Dandyism,” Oscar Wilde would burst onto the scene, first as an international lecturer on aestheticism and eventually as the author of some of the English language’s most elegant comedies of manners.

Many years later, a young journalist named Tom Wolfe — a man who donned his white suits, he said, for the express purpose that they pissed off “industrious persons” — would help reinvent literary non-fiction. Both were roundly kicked by the inelegant hearties of the prose world in their respective day. Yet both show that dandyism, whether personal, social or literary, involves clever balance of artifice and being true to oneself.

Perhaps the most famous of all dandy admonishments is Brummell’s simple warning, “If John Bull turns to look after you, you are not well dressed, but either too stiff, too tight, or too fashionable.”

Later worthies echo the Beau’s sentiment. “Never in your dress altogether desert that taste which is general,” is one of Pelham’s maxims in Bulwer-Lytton’s novel. “The world considers eccentricity in great things, genius; in small things, folly.”

And in his essay “Dandies and Dandies,” Max Beerbohm writes, “Is it not to Brummell’s fine scorn of accessories that we may trace that first aim of modern dandyism, the production of the supreme effect through means the least extravagant?”

So it was with great amusement not long ago that I came upon an old acquaintance who recounted an anecdote that perfectly illustrates these long-held dandy ideals.

Carlos is a fine young man of conservative style, prone to academic-looking corduroy jackets, who had recently interned at my company before moving on to a nonprofit organization. I asked how his new gig was going. “It’s the most ‘San Francisco’ place I’ve ever worked,” he said enthusiastically.

“In what way?” I asked.

“The place us full of eccentrics,” he explained. “Real San Francisco-style originals. There’s even a guy who dresses like he’s on his way to the Dickens Fair.”

“Really?” I said, arching an eyebrow. “What’s his name?”

“Gregory Seeley.”

And so I offer a new twist on an old maxim: “If Carlos turns to ask if you are on your way to the Dickens Fair, you are either too retro, too eccentric, or both.”

(Mr. Seeley is pictured at left at a company picnic.)

Every era gets the dandies it deserves.

The Regency got Brummell, a true sartorial innovator whose wit was as crisp as his country-washed linen. Count D’Orsay alleviated Victorian stuffiness with his manly charm, and the Edwardian Era was graced by Saki and Max Beerbohm, who all but reinvented the rapier wit. The Deco era had thoroughly modern Noel Coward, Lucius Beebe appeased Atomic Age anxiety with quaint anachronism as well as a poisoned pen, and the big-money ’80s saw the rise of another dandy satirist, Tom Wolfe.

Though they had different personalities and temperaments, these great dandies all shared certain qualities, including style, wit, aplomb and often a mild eccentricity. Many also enjoyed some measure of celebrity — how should we have known them otherwise? And while some dandies of the past certainly enjoyed their fame, the artists among them put their work first and did not pursue celebrity for its own sake. “L’homme est rien,” said Flaubert. “L’oeuvre est tout.”

But who in our present era is celebrated for his dandyism? When the words “dandy” and “dandyism” appear in print, what names are written in conjunction with them? Who, in the eyes of the media and public, are the successors of Brummell, D’Orsay and Beerbohm?

In a 2006 article, The Guardian attempted to answer these very questions. Published in light of Ian Kelly’s Brummell biography and the BBC miniseries “This Charming Man,” the article cites as Brummell’s successors, among others, two pop stars: Brian Ferry, a self-proclaimed “pimpernel” who, the author gushes, “now wears Prada, Hedi Slimane and Kilgour,” and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, whose “ghetto fabulous” look consists of “jeans and $10,000 worth of jewelry around his neck.”

Others recently celebrated as dandies in the press include Combs’ former umbrella-carrier-in-chief, Fonzworth Bentley (real name Derek Watkins), OutKast frontman André 3000 (real name Benjamin) — whose tailored Duke of Windsor/Harlem Renaissance-inspired duds have lately given way to outfits more conducive to farming than strolling boulevards — British rock star Pete Doherty, who dresses like an Amish notary, and Patrick McDonald, whose penchant for cosmetics at times makes him look like Liza Minelli.

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Bon vivantism, if that is indeed a legitimate phrase, is a characteristic — or, if you prefer, a malady — particularly evident in great historians and men of letters. From Ben Franklin and Emile Zola to Winston Churchill and Bernard DeVoto — whose book “The Hour” is perhaps the most elegant paean to cocktail time ever written — men of letters have proved inveterate noontime party boys who like to live well and live big, indulging appetites in comestibles and potables, concepts and conversation with equal gusto. These are men who know how to linger over a glass but also over a thought, pulling the last drops of pleasure and enlightenment from both.

Arthur Schlesinger, the historian and author of some 20 books who died February 28 at the age of 89, was one such titan of the pen and the palate.

Invariably the obits describe Schlesinger as a liberal Democratic partisan, an apparatchik even, whose writings “The Age of Roosevelt” and “A Thousand Days” gave the foibles and follies of his patrons in Roosevelt and Kennedy administrations a free pass. Yet Schlesinger was also a steadfast anti-communist who condemned the callow radicals of the ’60s and the race-baiting zealots of identity politics in the ’70s with as much fervor as he did the McCarthyites of the 1950s. His book “The Vital Center” is an appeal for reason and balance in government. (more…)

You may have never heard of Osbert Lancaster. He is one of those minor dandies who achieved a quiet perfection in his everyday life, though never rose to legendary status.

No, Lancaster simply dressed carefully, offered wry commentary on the world through his writing and illustrations, and lived a leisurely and mildly sybaritic life. Few men may rise to the rank of a D’Orsay or Duke of Windsor — fewer still may wish to — but Lancaster is someone that every man forced to labor for a living can admire.

“Osbert Lancaster stands among the most prominent of the minor dandies,” writes Michael Mattis in a survey of Lancaster’s life. “These are men who, through dint of superb personal style, effervescent social skills and, in some cases, a little artistic or literary talent, get noticed, but who cannot be said to stand among the highest in the dandy hierarchy.”

Though Lancaster — rather like us — never had need to refer to himself as a dandy, other people did. And now, thanks to Mattis’ discovery, many will continue to.

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Habits — good, bad and in between — start early.

The other day, as I sat in my easy chair reading Christopher Hibbert’s new biography “Disraeli, the Victorian Dandy who Became Prime Minister,” I pondered the nascence of my own flirtation with, and ultimate surrender to, the doctrine dandyism. As a boy I was always dressing up. One minute I might be a cowboy, cap-guns a-blazing, another I might be a knight, a magician, a prince, a soldier, or the captain of a spaceship.

But at what point in my young life, I wondered, did a flair for costume become a passion for living and dressing well at any cost?

More to the point, what nefarious influences worked upon my already flamboyant character (long since brought in check) to cause me to explore and eventually embrace a philosophy so self-centered, self-reflexive and possibly so self-immolating as dandyism? Whence did this curiously addictive tangent spring? (more…)

In general, I have found that dandies trend toward the right while aesthetes trend left. It’s a not a hard and fast rule of course: Oscar Wilde wrote a famously ignorant essay entitled “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (and when he was old and dandified enough to know better). On the other hand, the painter Edgar Degas, though a dedicated bohemian, was so far to the right that were he alive today he would make National Front members wince.

It’s rare to find a dedicated socialist, Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist or anarcho-syndicalist who has any idea what he’s talking about when it comes to dandyism. Most famous among these is Walter Benjamin, the French philosophe who spent half his life in his mother’s basement writing 2,000 pages of drivel on the topic so tinctured with Marxist claptrap it’s positively stained red, and utterly useless save for a few poignant observations on flaneurie.

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