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.

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

Since Dandyism.net’s beginnings, we’ve shamelessly raided the oeuvre of American artist J.C. Leyendecker to illustrate our posts. In the early days, before our scowling mascot was created, we used a Leyendecker image next to the site’s logo. Currently, we use Leyendeckers to illustrate the notorious “How Dandy Are You?” quiz, as well as the “Test of Dandy Knowledge.”

We’ve always seen in Leyendecker’s images a singular sartorial elegance, patrician demeanor, a certain frostiness, and a rock-solid masculinity. Naturally it took a gay man to create such images.

Now we can finally post Leyendecker images without shame, thanks to a nihil obstat from the publisher of the new book “J.C. Leyendecker,” by Laurence and Judy Cutler.

It all came about as a result of D.net webmaster Christian Chensvold’s profile of the artist for the online magazine at RalphLauren.com. Writes Chenners:

In 1905, Leyendecker created his most memorable legacy, leaping from the purely visual to the powerfully symbolic. In an age when detachable shirt collars were de rigeur, Leyendecker’s Arrow Collar Man—a mascot for the menswear company Cluett, Peabody & Co.—became what Cutler calls the first real advertising campaign and produced the first sex symbol of either gender.

In a campaign lasting twenty-five years, Leyendecker portrayed an archetypal American masculinity that was equal parts football hero and urbane man-about-town. Whether clutching a briar pipe or guiding a winsome debutante across the dance floor, the Arrow Collar Man embodied a vision of American manhood that was both rugged and refined—every woman’s dream. “At one point,” says Cutler, “Leyendecker’s Arrow Collar Man got more fan mail than Rudolph Valentino.”

Below are a few more images from the artist, all courtesy of Abrams Books, via American Illustration Gallery, NYC. (more…)

Astute readers likely noted the clothing Chenners wears in the photo spread in the recent L’Uomo Vogue story on Dandyland and thought, “What a ‘charmless, entitled jerk.’”

Or at least, “What a jerk.”

In the photo, the then-bearded D.net founder is shown wearing a navy blazer (albeit double-vented with ticket pocket), navy and gold striped tie, and yellow poplin Go-To-Hell trousers (it was summer, after all).

Indeed, Chensvold has recently returned to his sartorial roots in classic Anglo-American style. So much so, that he has added another feather in his Stickpin Media cap with the founding of Ivy-Style.com, a site devoted to the classic American menswear sometimes referred to as “trad.”

In other buttondowned news, Chensvold recounts the day Miles Davis walked into the Andover Shop and loaded up on natural-shouldered jackets and penny loafers for the online magazine at RalphLauren.com. The article, called “Ivy League Jazz,” looks at that brief moment in time when the hip and square collided, and innovative jazz musicans dressed like IBM executives.

(Achtung: The music files in this post are NOT set to play automatically. If they do, please alter your browser preferences so that media files play only on command).

Recently a forum member posed the question “What sort of music does a dandy listen to?” While the unanimous answer was “Whatever the hell he likes,” in this post I’ll alter the question to “What sort of music is dandyish?” and offer a suggestion.

At Dandyism.net headquarters, when performing particularly arduous editorial duties, there is one genre of music I turn to for inspiration: British Light Music. While some might call it elevator music, I prefer to think of it as grand staircase music.

British Light Music consists of light orchestral music for things like ballets, films and plays. The emphasis is on melody. It is largely a 20th-century invention and therefore has developed alongside — though completely aloof from — the total dismantling of tonality by composers of serious music.

Besides the virtues of effortless elegance and a certain mischievous quality, British Light Music is wholly scorned by serious musicologists since it’s based on pretty melodies. It therefore has the added appeal of being a musical pariah proudly flying the banner of beauty over the shelled trenches of atonality.

I find the music especially appealing in the morning, as I could never listen to something like a Shostakovich quartet before lunch. It is also especially pleasant to listen to in the evening while choosing a boutonniere for a night at the opera.

My own collection is small but cherished. The following are a few of my favorite tunes.

First up is “The Boulevardier” by Frederic Curzon. No lollygagging flaneur this fellow: Just listen to that brisk pace as he marches down the avenue to give his tailor an earful of the ol’ rancid:

(more…)

Following hard upon Robert Sacheli’s three-part biography on Lucius Beebe, D.net founder Christian M. Chensvold has written an article on chartering vintage railcars — including Beebe’s Virginia City — for the online magazine at RalphLauren.com.

“Beebe hired Hollywood decorator Robert Hanley to select a crystal chandelier, 17th-century clock, red silk curtains, and working fireplace in a decorating scheme commonly referred to as Venetian Renaissance baroque, though some find ‘Barbary Coast bordello’ more accurate,” writes Chensvold.

“Pellizzer [the car's current owner] has preserved the car’s original decor as much as possible. ‘I think it’s the best car out there because of its history,’ he says. ‘And it’s certainly the most gaudy, ostentatious, and over-the-top.’”

Under a tight deadline, Chensvold was unable to ride aboard the railcar, though the current owner has promised him its future use.

In fact, at this very moment the Junta is planning a cross-country goodwill tour aboard the Virginia City.

During my apprenticeship of the dandy art, I’ve learned that dandyism is not defined by a specific look from a certain era, but instead is an approach to wearing clothes, independent of time and place, that produces an effect we call dandyism. There is no one way to dress like a dandy, only ways that succeed or fail to varying degrees. And nowhere is the attempt to adopt a standardized dandy uniform more futile than in the attempt to replicate the way dandies dressed a hundred years ago.

No, instead a man simply dresses in his own particular way, and his movements and demeanor animate his clothing. And crystallized within the elusive effect of this combination of man and clothing is that certain something we call dandyism.

Now ours is an age of overstatement. I have it on good authority from a journalist, and journalists can always be trusted, that when a certain dandypunk removed his pustule-spangled mantool from the nearest harlot long enough to answer some questions (about himself) for an article, he was wearing a suit pockmarked with shiny red sequins.

Yet according to Max Beerbohm, part of the magic of dandyism lies in producing the supreme effect through the least extravagant means.

So while I still find pleasure in donning full dandy regalia for a night at the opera, lately I find I take greater sartorial pleasure in outfits whose dandy factor is far less obvious.

(more…)

“La chair est triste, helas, et j’ai lu tous les livres.”

When I was younger, those lines of Mallarmé used to haunt me. This was back when I could tolerate Mallarmé’s deliberate obfuscations. These days I take my whisky straight, and prefer the direct approach of AE Housman.

But recently that line resurfaced in my mind, and while I’m quite sure my flesh is sad, I began to wonder if I really had read all the books.

Sure, I tear through non-fiction, and there’s the constant speed-reading of magazines and websites, but I can’t remember the last novel to capture me the way they did in my twenties, when the world was new and each tome seemed to offer greater insight into myself and my path in life.

Finding a suitable work of literature became an exercise in dandyish discrimination in which nothing suited my taste.

Last summer I made it through a few short stories by Fitzgerald, which inspired me to sample 20th-century WASP literature. But I abandoned several stories of John O’Hara after the first page, and while I got further with Louis Auchincloss, I eventually figured that if I wanted to be sedated by gentility, I might as well read Henry James.

Was I really destined, as I alluded to recently in the forum, to simply reread Stendhal’s “Red and the Black,” Balzac’s “Lost Illusions,” and Flaubert’s “Sentimental Education” over and over for the rest of my life?

Then The Los Angeles Opera began its production of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” and in preparation I picked up my collegiate copy of Thomas Mann stories, intending to reread a story called “Tristan.” Sure enough, after two pages I came down with an instant case of dandy ennui.

I was going to put the book away, but noticed there was a story in the collection called “The Joker” that I’d never read. As I delved in, it became clear why I’ve been so blasé about reading for the last 10 years:

I’d strayed away from dandy lit.

Yes, “The Joker,” written in 1897, was a hit. So allow me, faithful myrmidons, to tell you a dandy bedtime story.

(more…)

Ten years ago D.net was a mere glint in his diabolical monocle, yet even then webmaster Christian M. Chensvold had a vision of restoring the misunderstood, much-maligned dandy to his rightful place in society.

So he chose the two-hundredth anniversary of Brummell’s resignation from the dragoons to publish his pseudo-scholarly, teacup-shattering interpretation of dandyism.

Like a dapper gent charming his way into parties he wasn’t invited to, Chenners had been insinuating articles on dandyism into obscure publications since the age of 24. There was Cochran’s, a regional antiques newspaper for the Sonoma Wine Country, and Victorian Decorating & Lifestyle, a magazine for Anglophile housewives that went under in 2002, fueled by the rise of Ikea.

At age 27 Chensvold began dating a Deco Belle and was able to talk his way into the pages of The Sophisticate, the journal of the Art Deco Society of California, with an article on Deco-era dandies.

A year later an expanded version of the story ran on Retroactive.com. Unfortunately the site soon disintegrated into the Internet ether, sucking the seminal article along with it.

However, for a time the site was one of the top-five “dandyism” results on Internet search engines, so it’s no surprise that several passages soon thereafter appeared verbatim in a certain Brit’s breezy instruction book on the topic, without so much as a tip of the homburg.

And so Chensvold’s mini-masterpiece joined the statue of Zeus at Olympia and the dodo bird among mankind’s lost treasures — that is until now.

Through advanced technology, we were able to retrieve this Dead C Scroll of Dandyism.net, which we now present for your edification and amusement. We have corrected typos and made it conform to the D.net Manual of Style, but otherwise the text appears as it did 10 years ago.

We also found a photo of what Chensvold looked like during the article’s composition. He is pictured above stepping away from his desk for a cup of coffee.

Originally planned as a trilogy, the article was hastily expanded to four parts to mollify a cranky homosexual who complained that the first three parts neglected gay dandies. Though Noel Coward and Harold Acton were featured prominently, the reader was no doubt miffed that Chensvold thought their sexual orientation completely irrelevant to their dandyism.

The article gives priceless insight into D.net’s conception, not to mention the stories we’ve been recycling for the past three-and-a-half years. It’s also worth pointing out the earnest and fervent tone of the prose (note debt to Barbey in several turns of phrase), compared to the cynical, cold and ironic tone Chensvold espouses today.

 He has certainly evolved into a true dandy.

(more…)