When Oscar Wilde arrived in the United States, he said, “I have nothing to declare but my genius.” When Sebastian Horsley arrived, he said, “I have nothing to declare but Oscar Wilde’s genius,” and was promptly sent back to England.

In March of this year, on tour promoting his book “Dandy in the Underworld,” Horsley — who’s known, in addition to having himself crucified in the Philippines, for his facility with putting a clever twist on established witticisms — was denied entry in the US on grounds of moral turpitude. It was the crowning achievement of the Bush Administration.

For the past 200 years, notoriety has always clouded the dandy: gambling debts, sex scandals and garden-variety egomania have always formed the shadow cast by the man of taste and wit. But with Sebastian Horsley’s various addictions — heroin, prostitutes, himself — this happy breed reached a new low.

In addition to his ghastly taste in clothing and penchant for spouting theoretical nonsense, Horsley broke a cardinal rule in the history of dandy literature: From Barbey and Baudelaire to Beerbohm and Wilde, dandy authors write about dandyism; they do not write about themselves as dandies.

But perhaps Horsley’s greatest distinction is that not one member of the D.net staff felt obligated to read his book.

And for that, Dandyism.net awards Mr. Horsley the title 2008 Dandy of the Year.

Photo by Moritz Steiger. 

Recently a reader known as Dr. Bathybius left a comment on Michael Mattis’ post “Life’s Not Fair.” The comment was a piquant one, and as the post was no longer the lead, we feared the comment would go unseen, and that all hell would not break loose. So we contacted the poster, expressed our interest in running his comment as its own post, and requested a photograph of himself in his finery. In exchange, we gave our dandy word of honor (admittedly not worth much) that we would not editorialize at his expense, such as by wondering aloud, for example, whether he is one of the founders of International Talk Like a Pirate Day. The doc agreed, in exchange that we fix his embarrassing typos.

And so we present a mini-essay from a genuine retro-eccentric (and LiveJournal blogger), pictured at left in an exclusive photo for D.net.

It seems there is a war between the GQ-Dandies and the Bohemians/Décadents of which I was previously unaware! Well then, “…into the breach! …every man-jack of you!” I had thought that refinement of experience (sartorial or otherwise) was the order of the day (callow youth that I was). But, alas, after taking the ‘How Dandy are you’ quiz, I realize that I am already pre-reviled by your elite fashion cadre as an eccentric, an oddity and perhaps even (dare I say it?) a clown! This is most especially distressing in that Mr.Mattis belongs to the same confraternity in SF that we (Mr. Seeley and myself) do. Has he forgotten his scandalous San Franciscan roots? The name of this organization he well knows, but I’ll not mention it here (to protect all relevant parties).

Like all divergent species, we each have a common set of ancestors, whether Brummell, Baudelaire or Barbey d’Aurevilly. Let us find some solace or unity in that. If not, let the martial horns blare, and I shall gird my loins for doing battle with misguided and effete miscreants arguing over the number of tassels that the ideal ox-blood tinted loafer should be festooned with (2 tassels too staid? 3 tassels completely outré?). Let the tyranny that the sack suit has exerted over the 20th century be laid waste, and a more enlightened time dawn where the male homo sapiens has yet more radiant plumage than his crypto-gynocratic mate. After all, I would rather be a comical lion fighting on my feet, than a pallid, navel-gazing fashion-lemur like Tom Wolfe, in his Antebellum, white-washed, pseudo-”Slave-Owner” togs, carefully cogitating the rarefied alchemy that is the “two-olive martini,” all the while genuflecting at the altar of tepidness.

“Braccae illae virides cum subucula rosea et tunica Caledonia-quam elenganter concinnatur!”

Gentlemen, I remain your assiduous nemesis ever,

REA3      8¬}D-

P.S. Young Mr.Seeley is an actual friend of mine. Please consider him my second at the duel.

When Bathybius submitted his photo, he offered the following:

The suit (if you’re curious, or a fact-collector) is bespoke as tailored by Favourbrook of Jermyn Street, (Saville Row/Picadilly), London:

http://www.favourbrook.com

Again, my reason for commenting in the first place is to bemoan the fact that Dandyism seems to become a more and more restricted definition with time. Where is the splendor of current male sartorial fashion? Whenever I see yet another stereotypical navy blue blazer with brass buttons, I muse, “Where are the explorers? Where are the new frontiers? Can one re-purpose the fashions of the past (with modifications/updates) to create new taste-pleasing forms? More highly refined aesthetics?” Admittedly, I freely embrace the Décadent/Symbolist, Belle Époch/Mal du Siècle aesthetic, which would not be everyone’s choice, but I am speaking more of method than of matter.

As a guide to this line of inquiry, I would point to the following publication, which is at least a sign-post of what I am aspiring to (whether I am successful at it or not, one has one’s ideal and one must do what one is capable of doing in realizing said ideal):

“The Man of Fashion: Peacock Males and Perfect Gentlemen” by Colin McDowell.

Well enough of my prattling…

My warmest felicitations to you and Dandyism.net.

How well do you know the history of dandyism? Moreover, how closely do you read Dandyism.net?

OK, so you know Oscar Wilde was tried for indecency by the Marquess of Queensbury for his love affair with Lord Douglas. But what was his prison number? And what name did he travel under after he was released from jail?

Dandyism.net presents the opportunity to test your knowledge of two centuries worth of dandy history and lore. From Beau Brummell to Sebastian Horsley, find out if you’re a philomath or ignoramus when it comes to dandyism past and present.

The 100 questions were compiled by the D.net staff, who not only wrote them off the tops of their heads, they did so while drunk.

The test consists of six categories: The Regency, The 19th Century, The 20th Century, Pop Culture, Dandyland and Dandyism.net.

(Answers appear at the bottom of the post below the image.)

THE REGENCY

1) Which Oxford college did Brummell attend?

2) What regiment did he join after he left school?

3) What was the name of Brummell’s manservant?

4) On what London street is the statue of Brummell located?

5) To whom did Brummell address the remark, referring to the Prince Regent, “Who’s your fat friend?”

6) What grotesque term did George Cruikshank use to describe the insect-like dandies in his caricatures?

7) What night of the week were the balls at Almack’s?

8 ) What early biographer of Brummell wrote, “Posterity will hardly accord to George Bryan Brummell one line in the annals of history.”

9) Of what Regency buck and memoirist was it said, “He committed the greatest follies, without in the slightest disturbing the points of his shirt collar”?

10) In a famous anecdote, Brummell sent a message to a friend saying he needed a loan because all his money was in the three percents. Who denied the loan, coldly saying that all his money was also tied up in the three percents?

11) Where was Romeo Coates born? (more…)

Rather than becoming more perceptive and informed over time, mainstream articles on dandyism get stranger and stranger — even the ones we’re quoted in.

The latest entry is from Quest magazine, a luxury city mag from New York.

The article in question quotes Chenners at least as accurately as previous articles have, while charting “the evolution of dandyism from Oscar Wilde to Justin Timberlake.”

Yes, you read that correctly.What’s more, personae used to illustrate the article include model Giselle Bundchen, designer Kris van Assche, and other creative choices.

Fashion cycles come and go, sometimes over centuries. Brioni has apparently raided the 1880s wardrobe of Oscar Wilde for inspiration. Its latest advertisement in Men’s Vogue features this Bunthornian velvet topcoat with shawl collar and embroidered button fastenings.

Of course, “Oscar Wilde Topcoat” is kind of a misnomer: “Bottomcoat” is more like it.

“What do Beau Brummell, Malcolm McLaren and Ralph Lauren have in common? They have all been obsessed, in one way or another, with the tug of war between self-conscious historicism and cutting-edge avant-gardism that has always defined British fashion. Using clothes as shorthand for social posturing, subcultures ranging from Regency fops to ’60s Mods and Thatcher punks have both asserted and subverted the traditions of polite English society.

“Of course, nowadays ‘‘punk’’ outfits are sold ready-made in every mall, and spat-wearing, umbrella-toting dandies are more likely to turn up in a Ralph Lauren window than in real life.” — Armand Limnader, T Magazine

In preparation for round two of Trivial Pursuit, The Test of Dandy Knowledge (see previous post), we suggest poring over the latest addition to the Dandyism.net library in an effort to better acquaint yourself with your dandy forefathers.

“The Amateur of Fashion,” is an article on the eccentric Romeo Coates that dates from 1862. Coates was no sober Brummellian, but a butterfly dandy of almost Liberace proportions. When a meeting with the Prince Regent was scheduled, Coates began his fastidious preparations:

His tailor was sent for post-haste, and at least an hour of precious time passed in deciding upon the materials of a new dress suit. The handsomest ruffles, the most perfect cravat, were purchased without delay, and entirely regardless of expense, He was measured for a pair of pumps, that were to be fastened with gold buckles set with diamonds. The diamond-hilt sword was polished all over with wash-leather and a silk handkerchief; and diamond buttons, a diamond brooch, and a diamond ring bought for the occasion.

Max Beerbohm’s take on Coates, written many years later, can be found here.

Social and Literary Dandyism
Littell’s Living Age, 1880
Article unsigned

Dandies, like saints, are never much beloved by their fellow-creatures. Like saints, they have an ideal perfection of 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 days, Brummell, Lauzun, and the rest, were everywhere welcomed because they made themselves disagreeable to so many people. There is a kind of popularity which is acquired by an attitude provoking unpopular. Men and women are attracted by the courage which despises and disregards their feelings. People whose minute perfections and sense of their own merit make them detested, become notorious, and consequently are sought after. A sage might say to aspiring boyhood, “Young man, be a puppy.” In this respect, as in others more important, the prizes of the world are to the impudent. Society truckles to people who can consistently display their conscious superiority. The very magnitude of their insolence and calmness of their fatuity excite curiosity and welcome analysis. People are anxious to judge for themselves as to whether a conspicuously conceited fellow is in earnest and a supreme fool, or whether he is quietly playing a part. Thus the eccentricity of imperturbable vanity, a vanity which declares itself in peculiarity of dress and manners, is rather a good introduction to society. A famous living statesman was remarkable for his canes and waistcoats even before he was admired or feared for his wit or eloquence. Dandyism was to him only a steppingstone, as it usually is to young people high ambition and real strength of character. They learn very early in life that to be remarked is the first thing necessary for success, and social is of of course more readily attained than literary or political notoriety, and may lead on to these higher prizes. It would probably be a mistake to suppose that “the higher dandyism” is entirely a matter of calculation. The most distinguished dandies in the history of society have been men of great power and ambition disguised as fops. They have thus disguised themselves, not only because the distinction gained by impertinent perfection of dress was necessary to their projects, but because they could not do anything by halves, and because they were supremely vain. Vanity, a quality much decried, is really necessary for some sorts of success. Without vanity there could scarcely be any ambition. In the evolution of character vanity first declares itself in the love of finery which is remarkable in the child and the savage, and which clings to many generals, statesmen, and divines. The gigantic tailor’s and jeweler’s bills of a son do not usually make a parent’s heart sing for joy; but these bills may, in rare cases, be more full of promise and encouragement than any number of medals and first-classes. It is difficult, however, to get parents and guardians to take this hopeful view, and the young genius for dandyism, like genius for the other arts, is too often persecuted by indignant and terrified relations.

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.” As Thackeray observed in the case of Pendennis, that desire is the result of envy and of conscious humiliation awakened in manly bosoms. To provoke people so much is a token of superiority, and a prize of nonchalance. Nor is it social dandyism alone which thus irritates the rabble of decent fellows who have neither the vanity, nor the impudence, nor the strength of resolution to win distinction. Literary dandyism is also excessively annoying to the rugged hodmen of letters, the rapid picturesque writers, the half or quarter educated persons who crowd the press, and carry their farrago of ill-assorted observations to an uncritical public. 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. They howl at him as the little humorous street boys bully some small Etonian with a tall hat and a broad white collar, who has lost himself in Seven Dials. This antagonism naturally breeds more excess in literary dandyism, till the prose of some critics is full of musk or millefleurs as the handkerchief of a popular preacher. Both parties are hardened in their ways; the rough and ready press-man becomes careless even of grammar, and trots out his quotations from Macaulay’s essays more vigorously than of old. The prose of the exquisite begins to die away in aromatic nonsense, and his great genius tries itself to death in the hunting for rare exotic adjectives.

There have been schools of literary dandyism, there have been literary dandies, more robust than those of our time. Where we can show nothing much better (if Mr. Arnold belongs to an earlier generation) than Mr. Dowden and Mr. Pater, the great literary ages can boast of Plato, Catullus, Ronsard, Pascal, Horace Walpole, Sir Philip Sidney—nay, one might add, Buffon and Machiavelli. The two last named may be recognized as literary dandies because they respected the mere details of their literary labor. They were not of the sect that swears by tattered old slippers that toast at the fire, and ragged old jackets perfumed with cigars. They arrayed themselves in fine linen, if not in purple, before they sat down to describe the animal kingdom or give rules for the conduct of the prince. The other writers, whose names we have taken very much at random from a crowd of the greatest authors, were dandies in style, exquisites in literary manners, precisians, who turned away from what was commonplace in though. They lived among slipshod writers, or in ages when all the world scribbled, or in times when style was disregarded, or not invented, and they set themselves to seek after grace and distinction. One can imagine how the Athenians, who were accustomed to the harsh and niggardly style of the old chroniclers, or the half-developed prose of Herodotus, laughed at Plato. That philosopher, if the portrait-bust of him does him no injustice, was very carefully about the dressing and curling of his ambrosial locks. It is more certain that he must have given immense labor to the perfection of his style, to that instrument of extraordinary suppleness and grace which was derived from no model. The tradition says that the first clause of the “Republic” was found written in nine different ways in a notebook of Plato’s. Whether the legend be true or not, the polish of his manners and the “educated insolence” of his wit sufficiently mark Plato as the great father and patron of all literary dandies. Catullus was not less a literary exquisite, with his airs of a spoiled wit, and his style, like his novum libellum, arida modo pumice expolitum. He naturally takes his place among homines venustiores, among gentlemen who care for the attire of their thoughts, who let the toga trail with a delicate grace, and despise all muses inlepidœ atque inelegantes. The famous Pleiad of France, the seven poets and critics of the sixteenth century, was a coterie of literary dandies. They made it their business to care for the way in which thoughts were presented; they devised lace and jewelry of style and of versification; and boasted of ceste celeste manière d’escrire, a celestial transcendental manner of writing. Du Bellay ventured to discover that the old French of Froissart and Villon was scabreux et mal poly, and he and his friends were only the precursors of three or four successive schools of literary dandies in France. Who can consider the polish, the precision, the accuracy of that speech, its point and elegance, which make even dull writers seem witty, and fail to acknowledge that the work of the literary dandies has not been wholly wasted? Some advantage came of the conceit and careful periods even of the elder Balzac. And though the great Balzac of a later time is more remarkable for vigor than elegance, it was at perfection that he too aimed. Plato did not rewrite his sentences more frequently; and the ruin of at least one publisher, by Balzac’s expensive corrections of the press, proved how minutely careful he was to have his thought draped in the very best and richest language he could procure by incessant research. Our own revival of letters had its heroic dandy in Sir Philip Sidney, with his contempt for the slovens and grobians of literature, those “paper-blurrers” who, “by their own disgracefulness, disgrace the most graceful of Poesy.” Sidney’s censure of the dramatists of his time is a typical example of the scorn of the literary dandy of the nobler sort. “Now you shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers, and then we must believe the stage to be a garden. By-and-by we hear news of a shipwreck in the same place; then we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock. Upon the back of that comes out a hideous monster with fire and smoke, and then the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a cave; while, in the mean time, two armies fly in, represented with swords and bucklers; and then, what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field?”

It would be easy to carry on the history of literary dandyism. The elegant disdain of Pascal, and his care for polished insolence of irony, might lead us to the reserved conceit and minute toil of Gray, and thence we might pass to the fine gentlemanly literature of Walpole. Modern France had its school of dandyism under the master whom Ouida and the society journals call by the appropriate name of Baudelaire. It might probably be demonstrated that literary dandyism has been salutary as well as irritating, that it has served as a protest against the lax language and outworn commonplace of the press-man and the poetaster, and that, like ordinary dandyism, it has made its disciples more distinguished among than beloved by their literary brethren.

The Amateur of Fashion
S. C. Hall
The St. James’s Magazine, 1862

Towards the conclusion of the first decade of the present century, a young man made his appearance in the height of the London season in Bond Street, attracting as much attention from the loungers about Long’s and the old Naval Club nearly opposite, as the remarkable vehicle in which he was seen.

He drove a pair of horses that, from their figure and action, must have been matched at an enormous expense; the curricle, then new — for such it was — was pronounced the most elegant carriage that had ever been turned out of Long Acre. The body, beautifully painted and richly lined, was shaped like a concave scallop-shell, mounted on light springs. The new harness glittered with silver; and conspicuous among the ornaments was a crest, displaying a gamecock with expanded wings and open beak with the legend beneath, “While I live, I’ll crow.”

The wheels were bright with well-harmonized colours, and a highly polished cross-bar was balanced over the backs of the well-groomed steeds, whose foam tossed about like flakes of snow as they curveted and champed under the guidance of their driver. The stranger was of medium height, yet of well-proportioned figure. His features did not find many admirers, but this may have been owing to the darkness of his complexion, for though somewhat harsh in their outline, their expression was not disagreeable. The blackness and curliness of his hair and whiskers, added to the tropical tint of his skin, made many of the spectators set him down as an Eastern prince; and it was readily believed that he was some powerful and wealthy rajah, direct from India, on a visit to the illustrious “John Company.” He wore the queer-shaped beaver hat then in vogue; a tall shirt collar, encircled by a yellow bandanna, with a scientific tie; a close-fitting blue surtout, the front entirely covered with frogs and braid; tight pantaloons of ribbed cloth, of the same colour; and Hessian boots, carefully wrinkled up the leg, and set off at top with a rich tassel.

By his side sat a younger man, somewhat different in complexion, as well as in other characteristics; but as he happened to be the writer of these pages, I shall of course, be excused any further reference to them or him.

My companion was no Eastern prince; he was the heir of an extensive coffee planter in the island of Demerara, reported to have left immense wealth, as well as large estates, with almost innumerable slaves, producing vast quantities of sugar as well as coffee. He had recently arrived in England, with the determination of making a figure in the gay world of London, in which the reputation of £40,000 a year to squander had already sufficed to bring him a fair share of fame, though only within a circumscribed limit. His portrait, however, was being engraved for a magazine, and his patronage was eagerly sought by such West-end tradesmen as had contrived to learn his residence.

The cause of my being associated with him was to be found in the fact that he was paying his addresses to a kinswoman of mine, who, however, was far from being satisfied that “to that complexion she must come at last,” and gave him no encouragement. I, being frequently in her company, shared largely in the attentions the dusky suitor bestowed upon her family, and, as I must confess, liking the fun of the thing, was often with him when he drove through the public thoroughfares.

He was extremely amiable, and possessed a simplicity of character that made us look more indulgently on his eccentricities. He was liberal to profusion, and permitted no expense to hinder the realization of any idea that promised to bring him under the favourable notice of the higher classes of English society.

No channel seemed to directly and expeditiously to lead to this cherished object as the stage. Rumours had reached London that he had astonished the audience of a provincial theatre by his performance of one of the most arduous characters in the English drama. Suddenly all his numerous acquaintances about town received private and confidential announcements that he was about to make a similar experiment, — indeed, had paid a large sum for permission to appear on the metropolitan boards, in one of Shakespeare’s finest plays. Our astonishment was increased when we beheld in the Haymarket bills the tragedy of “Romeo and Juliet” advertised for representation:

ROMEO, BY AN AMATEUR OF FASHION.
HIS FIRST APPEARANCE IN LONDON.

Of course I made my way to the little establishment in the Haymarket on that memorable evening; in truth, everybody went who had the slightest knowledge of the new actor. As the fame of his singularities and of his enormous fortune had by this time spread far and wide, the house was crowded in every part.

If there is one character in the wide range of the wonderful creations of our great dramatic poet that makes unusual demands on the person, the voice, the features, and the talent of the individual attempting its personation, it is the ardent lover of the impassioned Juliet. Imagine, therefore, a countenance that might readily have been mistaken for that of a creole, and a figure which at every movement betrayed total ignorance of dramatic gesticulation, dressed in a conventional costume that then passed unchallenged as the dress of an Italian nobleman of the sixteenth century, the most remarkable portions of which were, a white satin hat, surmounted by a plume of ostrich feathers of the same colour, on a head with the wiry black hair at the back tied in the shape of a door knocker, with a short pigtail; white satin tunic, breeches, and shoes, profusely ornamented with gold spangles and modern jewelery; and find silk stockings that covered a pair of legs jealously maintained in a position before the spectator the most favourable to the display of their symmetry. Imagine such a person in such a dress, with the addition of a diamond-hilted Court sword of the nineteenth century — one of my West Indian friend’s latest extravagances — indulging in gestures totally new to a theatrical audience, and grimaces equally original, and shouting in a voice curiously harsh, and the reader will comprehend something of the effect he produced.

From the commencement of this singular performance, boxes, pit, and galleries were in an exalted state of good humour. Indeed, the majority of the crowded house having been furnished with tickets at the cost of the new actor, ought not to have been otherwise. They testified their gratitude by their lively appreciation of his merit — every movement, almost every look, exciting their approbation; and this was given not only with a hearty zeal that testified to its genuineness, but occasionally with a heartier mirth that as conspicuously evinced their satisfaction. All the interesting passages won rounds of applause; but in the balcony scene the impression created was tremendous. Charles Kemble, though a very great favourite, had never produced half the effect. Many persons were affected to tears; which, however, streamed down cheeks untouched by the slightest influence of sorrow.

The crowning portion of the performance was unquestionably the catastrophe. Though the actor had exerted himself with wonderful success from his first remarkable entrance before the footlights, he appeared to have reserved his greatest dramatic powers for the final scene. Every portion won the most vehement plaudits, which rose to demonstrations of an extraordinary description when he died upon the body of the really unfortunate Juliet. Round after round of vehement applause followed each other in rapid succession — every one rivaling his neighbour in a determination to do justice to the claims of this theatrical phenomenon.

In the very midst of the storm the dead Romeo solemnly rose to life, and, his ostrich plumes majestically waving, his spangles shining like stars, with his diamond-hilted rapier carefully carried in his hand, advanced, wearing a highly gratified smirk upon his dusky visage, towards the orchestra, and gravely placing his legs in the favourite position, bowed to his enlightened patrons amid a hurricane of encores, bravos, and other encouraging exclamations. He then — still bearing the precious deposit — solemnly walked back to his post beside his poisoned mistress, —i n whom certain movements about her waist showed that she was far from being as dead as she looked, — and deliberately — with identically the same gestures and articulation — died over again!

The performances was so thoroughly unprecedented, and created so unusual an impression on the mind of the play-going public, that the new actor was called upon more than once to repeat it. I may as well here add, that his reputation travelled far and wide. His good nature was appealed to frequently, and never in vain, by traveling Thespians, who were certain of crowded houses — barns, I mean — whenever they were so fortunate as to announce in their bills the name of “The Amateur of Fashion.” The result was, that he became so completely identified in the popular mind with the character he personated, that he ever afterwards received its name as a prefix.

Notwithstanding this (as my friend was pleased to consider it) “brilliant success,” he was not brought any nearer to the fulfillment of his ambitious desires. He received invitations, it is true, to routs and assemblies where a few notabilities were seen, and was for a time looked upon, at least at Lady Corke’s, as a lion of some repute; but the wish of his soul was to gain admission to the circle at Carlton House, where he was sure to meet the deities of fashion, who made that celebrated mansion their Olympus. Unfortunately, the Prince of Wales had never noticed “The Amateur of Fashion,” and months passed away in the hope deferred that makes dreamers of impossible distinction occasionally heart-sick.

He now ventured to express to certain “gentlemen at large,” who borrowed his money, rode in his curricle, and ate his dinners, his secret aspirations: these, in the same extremely confidential manner, found their way, by various channels, to some of the Prince’s attendants or associates, and, as it was supposed, through them to the ear of His Royal Highness; for one day, to the Amateur’s inconceivable, to his inexpressible gratification — a gratification that with incredible activity he presently endeavoured to diffuse in every possible direction — a letter came to his address, by the twopenny post, enclosing an invitation card to the next evening reunion at Carlton House.

It is impossible to describe the excitement this much-coveted distinction created in the mind of my eccentric friend. His tailor was sent for post-haste, and at least an hour of precious time passed in deciding upon the materials of a new dress suit. The handsomest ruffles, the most perfect cravat, were purchased without delay, and entirely regardless of expense, He was measured for a pair of pumps, that were to be fastened with gold buckles set with diamonds. The diamond-hilt sword was polished all over with wash-leather and a silk handkerchief; and diamond buttons, a diamond brooch, and a diamond ring bought for the occasion.

All proper preparations having been completed, he rehearsed the speeches he intended to make to his royal host, and prepared himself to take his share in the brilliant conversation that must necessarily ensue.

The night fixed for the party arrived, and Carlton House was as gay as a profusion of wax lights, and abundance of rococo furniture, and a throng of ultra-fashionable company could make it.

It is vain to attempt to do justice to the magnificence that, at the period to which I refer, or rather in this and one or two equally celebrated palatial residences, was considered taste. I will therefore merely say, that the domestics wore their state liveries, and the officers of the Household their Court suits, both displaying themselves conspicuously in the sculptured vestibule, along the well-lighted, crimson carpeted staircase, and in the luxurious anterooms that led into the grand saloon, where the princely host and his patrician company had assembled.

As the most prominent figure in a most remarkable tableau, I am bound to delineate him with more than ordinary care; but the Prince of Wales, under the peculiar circumstances I am endeavouring to narrate, demands talents from his portrait painter to which I am afraid I can put forward no pretensions.

In his dress, as in his manners, His Royal Highness aimed at perfection. His toilet, therefore, was singularly refined and elaborate. On this particular occasion he wore the uniform of his regiment, which unquestionably set off his handsome person to the greatest advantage. It was splendidly embroidered; in short, it was in every respect worthy to adorn a royal colonel who possessed unrivaled connoisseurship in dress, and was known to be as thoroughly acquainted with the anatomy of a coat as he was perfect in the physiology of a cravat — the most exalted attainment then possible in the dandy curriculum.

With his fine head of hair carefully powdered and confined behind by a ribbon, he stood sipping out of a Sevres coffee-cup, in the centre of a group of both sexes, to all of whom he was conversing in high spirits, whilst other distinguished-looking persons stood or sat at a distance, as though belonging to a less privileged coterie. Some talked in a low tone, as they supplied themselves with the refreshing beverage that was being handed round, but many contented themselves with playing the more quiet part of observers.

Most of the gentlemen were in uniform, showing that they belonged either to the Court, the military, or the naval service; but there were some half-dozen individuals in private dress — that is, wearing the fashionable evening costume of civilians. Its striking features were a long-tailed cloth coat, with lace ruffles; high shirt collar, bound by a fold of stiffened muslin, tied with an elaborate bow; satin waistcoat, and breeches; silk stockings and pumps. Such persons were well-known caricatures; and many, indeed, figured in the print-shop windows in St. James’s Street. They were the leading “dandies” of their day. It must be confessed that the Prince was growing stout, but still was graceful in person, and handsome in face.

There were a few ladies in the apartment, all more or less partaking of the best type of English aristocratic beauty, richly apparelled in full Court costume — small waists and demi-trains — with ostrich feathers in their hair, and rare jewels on their arms, necks, fingers, and ears; but the most remarkable was an aristocratic brunette, with lustrous dark eyes, wearing a rich robe of Genoa velvet, trimmed with Mechlin lace, and a turban apparently made of a Delhi scarf, in which the plumage of a bird of paradise increased the effect produced by the large diamonds fastened on the folds. She stood near a piano, then just invented as an improvement on the harpsichord, at which sat a foreign professor, a dark-visaged man, with a head of black curly hair, dressed in the latest Parisian fashion, who enjoyed high patronage as a musicmaster.

The Prince, having delivered himself of a repartee with princely success, joined the patrician beauty at the piano, and presently they sung together the tender duet from “Il Don Giovanni,” “La ci darem,” to the professor’s accompaniment. Very tenderly indeed was it vocalized, interrupted only by a murmured bravo! or bravissimo! — brava! or bravissima! from the swarthy possessor of the music-stool, or a whisper of admiration from the courtly cognoscenti in the background.

At the conclusion, the pianist broke out into transports, expressed partly in enthusiastic French, partly in energetic Italian, and the attentive chorus in the rear ventured to breath audibly their transports in the vulgar vernacular.

“Well, Latour, have I fallen off much in my singing?” inquired the royal vocalist, taking a pinch of the choicest of Fribourg’s productions, from a gold snuff-box set round with brilliants.

“Fallen off!” exclaimed the Court musician, apparently in extreme amazement, “on the contrary, your Royal Highness has improved marvelously! And as for my Lady Countess, her voice is ravishing! The divine maestro would have been in ecstasy to have heard his duo to such perfection. I have reason to be proud of two such unrivaled pupils!”

The professor glanced round the circle with confidence, and beheld, as he expected, the fullest confirmation of the justice of his opinion. The Prince was evidently pleased — singing was one of the qualifications His Royal Highness prided himself in possessing in an eminent degree; and the Countess might have appeared to be blushing, had no one been aware that her colour was only transient, when affected by the agency of soap and water.

“Yes — ah! the thing is pretty! Exceedingly good style, Mozart! Nice music to go to sleep to,” here exclaimed, in a drawling manner, an elaborately dressed gentleman, belonging evidently to the class of civilians I just now referred to, coming languidly forward from an ottoman where he had been reclining, and, it must be confessed, yawning during the performance. “But I’m monstrous glad I wasn’t asked to sing it! Horribly fatiguing, I should think!”

“Ah, Brummell!” replied the Prince, good-humouredly, “we don’t expect such prodigious exertions from you. A man who surrenders all his time to the study of her person cannot, we know, find leisure for cultivating his voice.” The sentence was regarded as a bon mot, and a general laugh followed its delivery — a laugh, though, by no means boisterous, as the exertion it would have required, the tight-laced exquisites, who assisted in producing it, could not have attempted. The Court musician was the only person who appeared to thoroughly enjoy the joke. His hilarity, however, was a little in excess.

“Mr. Brummell is content to gain distinction in a quiet way!” observed one of the circle, with a particularly hilarious and rather intellectual countenance. “He was evidently no ambition making a noise in the world!”

“Not bad, Sherry, by Jove!” cried the Prince and immediately the silk bags on the coat collars of the gentlemen, and the ostrich feathers in the head-dresses of the ladies, were agitated by the same mirthful inclination — the possessor of the music-stool laughing at least a semitone higher than before.

“I’m obliged to you, Mr. Sheridan, for your opinion of my vocal powers,” answered the Beau, with a bow that was scarcely perceptible; then added, with much emphasis, “Nevertheless, I beg permission to remind some people that the animal usually considered to make the loudest noise in domestic life rarely gets appreciated as one out of the common!”

The professor did not join the laugh this time.

One of the royal pages now appeared at the door, and immediately a gentleman of the Prince’s suite moved towards him. He presently returned, and remained for a few minutes in earnest conversation with another member of the Household, apparently in a higher position, who was conversing with a lady near the piano. The latter functionary speaking somewhat imperatively, attracted the attention of his royal master, who was turning over the leaves of the dark-eyed Countess’s music-book, while M. Latour played a piece of his own composition, that he had lately dedicated to his patron.

“What is it, Bloomfield?” inquired the Prince, looking up. The person thus addressed displayed an invitation card, which he said just been presented at the door.

“A manifest forgery!” exclaimed His Royal Highness, examining it through a gold eye-glass; then added, with a look of displeasure, “Some one has taken an unpardonable liberty in concocting this.”

There were signs of more than ordinary curiosity in all the gusts, male and female, and those in the background came forward to show the interest the took in the very strange affair.

“Do you know this person, Brummell?” inquired the Prince, placing the card in his hand. The dandy, with a critical face, read the name written upon it. His features in a moment expressed the most intense astonishment, with a large amount of indignation.

“I know him!” he exclaimed, apparently horror-struck, “why, he makes sugar and sells coffee, — in short, is a sort of grocer. How could I know such a man?”

He passed the card contemptuously to a largely whiskered exquisite, who had been glancing at the inscription over his shoulder.

“Do you know him, Alvanley?” inquired their host.

“Is it the black fellow who played Romeo?” replied the individual thus addressed, affectedly, and elevating his eyebrows and his short collar simultaneously. “Of course, I don’t know him in the least.”

“Are you acquainted with him, Petersham?”

“I cannot boast of that honour, I assure your Royal Highness.”

“Is he a friend of yours, Sherry?”

“Not that I know of. But were it possible for the poor man to patronize me handsomely, I couldn’t be so hard-hearted as to object to his countenance.”

When the laugh had subsided, the great dandy said authoritatively, “The person is not presentable; that style of thing cannot be permitted here, positively.”

The Prince seemed to have been good-naturedly waiting for an excuse for not disappointing the dupe of an unworthy trick. He looked round the circle, and beheld in the general expression a decided disinclination to associate with the alleged “sort of grocer.”

Time brought about its revenges, when the neglected, almost forgotten dandy, after a long expatriation, in vain strained his feeble sight to observe a recognition in the countenance of “the fat friend” of his brighter days, as the latter, a crowned king, passed through the French town in which he lingered out a melancholy existence. The change that awaited the Court wit was still nearer, and was at least equally humiliating.

“I do not like this affair at all,” observed the Prince, at last, with a vexed look; then added, in a kindly tone, to Colonel Bloomfield, “Go to this gentlemen, and undeceive him in a way not to hurt his feelings — taking care to express the extreme regret of the Prince of Wales that such an accident should have occurred.

“Now, Lady Jersey,” he said, turning to the dark-eyed countess, “let us try, with Latour, something by the new Italian composer, whose productions are now so much in vogue on the Continent.”

“My dear sir!” exclaimed a fashionably dressed man, as he stopped a sedan that had just left the portico of Carlton Palace, and in a very cordial manner addressed a gentleman in cocked hat and Court suit, richly ornamented with diamonds, with a diamond-hilted sword at his side, who, as the few murky lamps at the house doors and the links of the bearers showed, possessed a singularly sombre complexion, “let me congratulate you on your well-deserved distinction! Of course you found His Royal Highness a most charming host?”

“Oh, there was some irregularity, Major; I do not exactly understand what,” cried the unsuspicious dupe, putting his well-curled head close to the window. “But the Prince sent me a most kind message. I have no doubt that His Royal Highness will speedily set it right.”

The chairmen presently proceeded with their burthen into Pall Mall, where they were again stopped.

“Ah, my dear fellow! is it you?” exclaimed another cordial voice. “‘Pon my life, I’m delighted to see you looking so well. Just come from the royal party, eh? Didn’t the Prince greatly admire your diamonds?”

“Well, Doctor, you see there was a slight mistake; but I have no doubt that I shall be sent for by His Royal Highness, from whom I had the honour of receiving a most obliging message.”

The sedan was suffered to proceed; but it seemed as if all its occupant’s most particular friends were in the streets that lay in his way home on this particular night, and at this particular hour; for along Pall Mall, and up St. James’s Street, in Piccadilly, and even to the door of his lodgings in Dover Street, the chair was continually being stopped by well-dressed gentlemen, who rivaled each other in the warmth of their congratulations. All received slight variations of the same reply, in which the civility of the Prince of Wales was always prominently referred to. My friend felt wonderfully pleased at the prodigious interest his visit to Carlton House had excited and never entertained the slightest suspicion of the hoax that had so successfully been played upon him.

The simplicity of the Amateur of Fashion was displayed in as striking manner in the Pump-room at Bath. He was surrounded by persons of both sexes, possessed of certain pretensions to rank and fashion; and one gentleman of influence expressed unqualified admiration of his legs — then, as usual, in close-fitted pantaloons and well-wrinkled Hessians. In a moment they were in the favourite position, regarded by the owner with a smile of complacency. A captain in the Guards ventured, in a delicate way, to insinuate that a limb so perfectly shaped must owe something to art, especially at the graceful swell in the rear.

Far from being offended, or even surprised, at the suggestion, the Amateur appeared to take it quite as a matter-of-course compliment, and, dexterously pulling off his boot before the astonished company, offered to submit to any extent of inspection. This seemed too much for some of those who were nearest him, particularly the ladies, who, in evident apprehensions of what might come next, made a hasty retreat.

Not noticing this, my dusky friend, with a settled gravity which indicated his idea of the importance of the transaction, fluently descanted on the genuineness of the member, turning it about in every possible direction, that the amused spectators might see it to the best advantage. Toes, heel, calf, shin, and instep, were equally well ventilated, amid a chorus of wondering exclamations; till the performer, as though prompted by a sudden recollection, placed himself in his favourite position, gazing with ineffable content on silk stocking and pantaloon.

His lendings and spendings proceeded in a reckless course; but after a few seasons, the estate at Demerara, large though it was, began to give signs of exhaustion. Sugars fell, either in value or in quantity, and coffees were so depreciated in the market, that the heir of the wealthy planter found himself straitened in his resources. In time he was obliged to dispose of his handsome curricle — crowing cocks and all, to send his valuable horses to Tattersall’s, and to deposit numerous diamonds, including his magnificent sword, with the relation usually appealed to for assistance in a reverse of circumstances.

These expedients not sufficing to set the Amateur of Fashion at his ease, and West India property, in consequence of political changes, descending rapidly in deterioration, he found himself quite unable to meet his liabilities. He expatriated himself, and lived for several years in quiet retirement in a well-known town on the French coast, much frequented by Englishmen who stood in any apprehension from their compatriots John Doe and Richard Roe.

My friend was thus lost sight of altogether in his old haunts, and by his old associates; indeed, his name and fame had sunk into entire oblivion, when he contrived to effect an arrangement with his creditors, and once more made his appearance in London. No longer, however, dashing in his brilliant equipage through Rotten Row, or astonishing the habitués of Fop’s Alley with the lustre of his jewels. Even the frogged coat was discarded in favour of a garment suited to an elderly gentleman with a limited income. Nevertheless he clung with more than a lover’s devotion to pantaloons and Hessians; and by these, notwithstanding his long absence, he was sure to be recognized where he went.

“Bless my heart, Raikes,” cried an old member of Arthur’s, “here’s Romeo Coates!”

Newspapers and magazines were simultaneously thrown down, and there was a general rush to the open window, with as evident a curiosity as if caused by the advent of a resuscitated Pharaoh. Their astonishment was largely increased when they beheld the individual on whom they were gazing — who had overheard the exclamation — stop suddenly in his promenade, walk gravely back, and plant himself before the window in an attitude and with a manner familiar to all who had known him in his palmy days.

“My name, gentlemen,” he said, “is Robert Coates.”

He then took off his hate with a theatrical bow, and resumed his walk with the dignity of a well-graced actor retiring from the footlights after an ovation of popular applause. The effect of his demonstration on the members of Arthur’s may, perhaps be imagined; it certainly cannot be described.

Alas, poor Romeo! The end of my eccentric but amiable friend was truly lamentable. He had been married many years, and lived on the wreck of his fine fortune in quiet respectability. On quitting Covent Garden Theatre after an operatic performance, he remembered that he had left his lorgnettes in the box he had just vacated. He sprung out of his carriage, and rushed across the road, then crowded with vehicles; a cab, being driven rapidly away, knocked him down, and he was by the wheel going over his head. The few survivors of his old friends lamented him sincerely; for, notwithstanding his vanity and folly, he possessed an excellent heart, and was in many respects an accomplished gentleman — a marked contrast to more recent amateurs of fashion, whose careers have been remarkable only for coarse profligacy and vulgar excess.

The Dandy Laid Bare: Embodying Practice and Fashion for Men
Christopher Breward, 2000

Contrary to claims that the original version of the dandy inhabited only an elite milieu, such was the ubiquity of his figure in the imaginative urban landscape of the early nineteenth century that its revolutionary characteristics were obsessively recorded across a range of popular media. […] His faintly ridiculous persona was considered a fitting subject for the entertainment of the masses, a guarantee for health sales. Thus a rather fantastical and overblown version of dandyism became the stock in trade for pantomime balladeers, print sellers and penny novelists; entrepreneurs whose output has provided a rich but compromised seam of commentary for future historians of fashionable masculinities. Indeed, if the archives were to be stripped of these distorted caricatures of sartorial behavior and corporeal modification, a whole set of subsequent discourses relating to the rise of commodity culture, the experience of modernity in the city and the relationship between desire, clothing and the gendered body would remain unexplored and without example; for any evidence of the material practice of dandyism (and there is not much) counts for little when placed alongside its potent and more familiar role as a symbolic representation of less tangible cultural fears and concerns.

It is this ongoing mobilization of the “idea” of the dandy, as a cipher for a particular yet very fugitive version of masculine fashionability, bodily display and metropolitan neurosis that interests me in this chapter. I am concerned here with the ways in which the description, critique and analysis of a dandified subject-position are both embodied in the choices and actions of real consumers, yet also exist at a level of abstraction. They are thus held in a seeming tension with immediate historical realities but illustrative of longer historical developments which trace the role played by fashionable men in defining the tenor of metropolitan life in the modern period. This double-bind might best be illustrated by isolating the image and form of the dandy at three pivotal points in its evolution. Separated by over half a century, each incarnation shares a locus in the West End of London and finds its co-ordinates linked to a more general crisis in the articulation of acceptable forms of masculine sexuality as represented through male bodies and their relationship to fashionable living. Such a trajectory has been traced before, largely through the lens of literary and sociological enquiry, but in the light of recent investigations into the specific economic, political, and aesthetic structures necessary for masculine fashion consumption and its representation the dandy terrain is ripe for revisiting. In the self-consciously manufactured figures of the Regency Buck, the fin de siècle Aesthete and the neo-Edwardian Gent, fashion history has inscribed a remarkably suggestive model for understanding the complex nexus of taste, longing and corporeality that constitutes a key definition of modern fashion culture itself. Their deliberately artificial performances, sometimes contradictory and sometimes interlinked, form an echoing commentary on the obscured nature of masculine narcissism across the years.

In the lines of the ballad “I’m a fashionable Beau” (published by a Newcastle printer some time around 1820 in a collection titled The Dandy’s Songster: Being a Collection of the Most Charming, Exquisite, Popular and Most Approved Dandy Songs for the Fashionable Dandies and quoted at the opening of this chapter) all the identifying characteristics of the breed are itemized for the ridicule of a broad audience. This beau is first and foremost a victim of his commercial and material context, foolishly prioritizing the latest trends in an expanding market of fashionable goods to construct a vain and effeminate parody of genteel tastes. A susceptibility to new-fangled fashions and urbane faddishness had been a staple target of the satirist for several centuries, though it was more usually female consumers and their unpatriotic partiality for foreign goods that attracted criticism. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, British sartorial products aimed at men achieved wide approval on a global scale, offering new possibilities for a satirical focus on male consumers. The temporary eclipse of Paris as a centre for the production of luxuries including fine clothing during the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars left an opening for London to assert itself as the new source for a gentleman’s wardrobe that was more closely attuned to the philosophical and practical concerns of the moment. The London dandy in his “newest [...] tip-top style of dress” was inevitably kitted out in plain, home-manufactured, fine wools and linens, designed in deliberate contrast to the showy silks of the ancien régime, but in their overt modernity still vulnerable to persistent critics of the fashion system. Dress historian Anne Hollander makes a strong case for understanding this shift in the choice of textiles and the rising importance of cut as an embodied process, reflecting concurrent academic and connoisseurial concerns with a re-evaluation of the antique, and especially of the heroic nude male figure. The technology of new measuring and construction techniques mastered by London-based tailors and a choice of materials that subtly smoothed and emphasized muscularity, their neutral colors mimicking the tones of naked flesh, eased an aesthetic transition from an aristocratic concentration on elaborate but immobile surfaces to an idealistic celebration of “individual moral strength founded on moral virtue”. This was made manifest through a clothing style which deliberately suggested the inherent nobility of the ideal male body.

The fashionable beau of the ballad clearly fell some way short of the desired model, though his fixation on presenting a body that was molded to fit fashionable expectations is clearly expressed. Corsets, collars and cravats constrain his upper form to skeletal proportions, whilst the adoption of flared Cossack pantaloons, a wild and unruly hairstyle and athletic spurs pays some regard to the current romantic obsession with physical action and heroic deeds. In his enthusiasm the dandy has overshot any imitation of the natural athletic form promoted by re-appraisals of Greek statuary; instead his manipulation of proportion bears a closer relationship to the bodies and toilettes of his female counterparts. He has assumed the fussy and mincing mien of a fashionable courtesan. It is this mannered effeminacy and misplaced effort that caused most amusement, largely because the appearance of a casual effortlessness, though arrived at through laborious dressing rituals, was a central desideratum of the new dandy creed. This beau has completely missed the point. Most subsequent commentators credit the infamous socialite and trendsetter George “Beau” Brummell as the originator of the “correct” sartorial philosophy. Hollander sees his minimalist stance as a radical commentary on the breakdown of social hierarchies: “In the new urban dandy mode, a man’s heroism consisted only in being thoroughly himself; Brummell proved that the essential superior being was no longer a hereditary nobleman”. Elizabeth Wilson notes that in his reversal of the usual dynamic of the dressing-room lie the seeds both of an anti-fashion stance, in which the undemonstrative gentleman’s suit pioneered by Brummell gave rise to a notion of an unchanging “classic” style, and an oppositional take on the politics of appearance:

Hours were still spent on the dandy’s toilette, now not in order to produce a painted and bedizened creature, but on the contrary in scraping, scrubbing and shaving the skin, in polishing boots to perfection and in tying the ultimate cravat to give an impression of indifference. The dandies invented Cool; but the blasé pose was of course arresting. There was both revolt and classic chic in the dandy style.

Wilson also worries about the cold horror that lies at the heart of the dandy sensibility. Like Susan Sontag in her discussion of Nazi chic, she finds in the calculating distance and glorification of self that a Brummellian take on life dictated, a chilling premonition of the aesthetics of fascism:

When politics becomes aestheticized, when, that is, political activity is evaluated in terms of its “beauty” rather than of its effects, then this produces a fascist elevation of style above humanity and of effect over suffering, and a justification of cruelty and death in the name of style.

Certainly in the context of the 1810s and 1820s, Brummell’s celebration of hygiene, clean linen, perfect tailoring and supreme self-control accrued one level of meaning from the contrast between his pampered body and the ragged, emaciated bodies of the poor who littered London’s streets. He may well have challenged the long-held assumption that aristocratic prerogative dictated the direction of fashionable taste, but his alternative promotion of style was no less feudal in its tight bracketing of sartorial display with worldly power. His apartments in Chesterfield Street and Chapel Street sat in the midst of an elite enclave marked by the extravagantly stocked shops of Bond Street and St James’s Street, the well-appointed carriage driveways of Hyde Park, the exotic reception rooms of Carlton House, and the luxurious clubs of Pall Mall. Furthermore, all of these sites, their fittings and products, were serviced by a burgeoning empire and a thriving manufacturing economy whose trade also set the body of the dandy in stark relief against other even more compromised bodies, those of the enslaved and the indentured, whose exertions supported his pleasures and his indolence. Regardless of their pain and discomfort, the sparkling opulence of such a milieu provided a fitting setting for the proudly relaxed display of Brummell’s well-turned tailoring and his sharp wit. As his contemporary Captain Gronow noted, Renaissance notions of princely magnificence paled besides Brummell’s audacious appropriate of ancien régime splendor:

In the zenith of his popularity he might be seen at the bay window of White’s club, surrounded by the lions of the day, laying down the law, and occasionally indulging in those witty remarks for which he was famous. His house in Chapel Street corresponded with his personal ‘get up’; the furniture was in excellent taste, and the library contained the best works of the best authors of every period and of every country. His canes, his snuff boxes, his Sèvres china, were exquisite; his horses and carriages were conspicuous for their excellence; and in fact, the superior taste of a Brummell was discoverable in everything that belonged to him.

Something of this realization, that in its apparent leveling of distinction Brummell’s simple wardrobe only succeeded in revealing social inequalities, also pervades Ellen Moer’s assessment of its significance. She quotes Max Beerbohm’s admiration for its beautiful understatement, citing his rather knowing and ironical belief that its ordered austerity formed the ideal costume for democracy. However, she goes on the affirm that “there remains an irreducible firmness to the Brummell figure, something compounded of assurance, self-sufficiency, misanthropy, nastiness, even cruelty, that made him feared in his lifetime and will never be explained away”. The essential arrogance of the echt-dandy’s body can be seen in the ballad’s evocative suggestion of the way in which the “fashionable Beau’s” figure commanded a grudging respect as it moved through the city’s public spaces. He lounged from street to street with a “Bond Street swing”, demanding attention inspiring desire, and spawning a whole new vocabulary to describe dandyism as a physical practice. In all of the subsequent literature on consumption, gender identities and city life, with it’s valorization of the prostitute, the flâneur and the middle-class female shopper as iconic tropes of modernity, the dandy has arguably remained something of a footnote, his reactionary posturing forcing him out of the frame and casting him in a nostalgic light. Yet in these contemporary descriptions, representations of his loud insistence on his own presence and an obsessive and constant remolding of his image placed the dandy’s body at centre-stage, yoked to other manifestations of corporeal spectacle whose apparent “naturalness” helped to refine emerging and subsequent models for the performance of fashionable masculinities in an urban setting. If this early literature of dandyism tended to undermine the seriousness of the pursuit through humor and caricature, this was perhaps only an ameliorating response to the terrifying power of fashion as a medium for social and cultural change. Hollander suggests that

[this] perfect man, as conceived by English tailors, was part [...] country gentleman, part innocent natural Adam, and part naked Apollo the creator and destroyer — a combination with an enduring appeal, in other countries and other centuries.

In support of this claim, by the 1820s the dandified body was able to refute those accusations of effeminacy raised in satirical representations through recourse to its associations with a sporting virility personified in the pursuit of horse-racing, fencing, gambling, womanizing and boxing. If the “fashionable Beau” made himself ridiculous and effeminate through his too-eager pursuit of fashionable novelties, he could at least redeem his masculine pride “at op’ra, rout and play”, for it was in these more rowdy settings that the perfection of the male form was most profitably displayed and celebrated. Pierce Egan, the most assiduous recorder of — and apologist for — the perfected dandy lifestyle in his journalism and his picaresque novels of London life, presented the heroic figure of the boxing champion as the apotheosis of a desirable modern masculinity made material. Truly naked in action, aside from his leather breeches, the pugilist offered his body as a living model for the man who aimed for antique minimalism in his clothing and a modern rationalism in his philosophy (blurring the boundaries between homosocial discourse and homoerotic longing in the process). Writing about Bob Gregson, a famous fighter who retired in 1810 to take over the stewardship of the Castle Tavern in Holborn (a public house much patronized by the dandy classes), Egan noted that his 6 foot, 15 stone frame was the focus for much admiration.

A finer or better proportioned athletic man could not be met with [...]. He was considered by the celebrated professor of anatomy at the Royal Academy a most excellent subject to descant upon [...]. He was likewise selected by the late Sir Thomas Lawrence as a fine subject [...] his general deportment was above all absurd affectation; nothing supercilious was to be found in his manner [...he] was always well, nay fashionably dressed.

The valorization of the pugilist marked a watershed in the honing of an appropriate and democratic representation of masculine sartorial desire in an urban context. As self-controlled as Brummell, but more wary of excess, his figure straddled the worlds of West End finery and a more demotic energy. This fusing of the heroic modern body with the promises of fashionable consumption set a template that Egan captured most forcefully in his portrait of “the modern Corinthian” — the virile dandy. Here was a feisty and classless corporeal identity that rejected the foppery and elitism of previous incarnations and looked forward to an uncertain but longstanding role in the imaginative cityscape and sartorial language that constituted forms of masculine fashionability during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His genealogy forges a useful link to the re-emergence and re-definition of a dandy rhetoric fifty or more years later:

I feel induced now to describe, for the benefit of posterity, the pedigree of a Dandy in 1820. The DANDY was got by vanity out of Affectation — his dam, Petit-Maître or Maccaroni —his grand-dam, Fribble — his great grand-dam, Bronze — his great great grand-dam, Coxcomb — and his earliest ancestor, Fop. His uncle, Impudence — his three brothers, Trick, Humbug and Fudge! and allied to the extensive family of the Shuffletons. Indeed this Bandbox sort of creature took so much the lead in the walks of fashion, that the BUCK was totally missing; the BLOOD vanished; the TIPPY not to be found, the GO out of date; the DASH not to be met with; and the BANG UP without a leader, at fault and in the background. It was only the CORINTHIAN that remained triumphant — his excellence was of such a genuine quality, that all imitation was left at an immeasurable distance.

Moers sees the intervening years, between the disgrace of Brummell and the decline of first-wave dandyism in the London of the 1820s, and the rise of Oscar Wilde and the cult of aestheticism in the same city at the tail-end of the century, as a golden age when the practice of “clothes-wearing” took on the guise of a moral philosophy. Transcending the actual acts of acquisition and dressing, dandyism in the 1830s and 1840s gradually becomes a disembodied stance, divorced both from the site of its birth (in London) and its meaning as a process rather than a position. Taken to its logical extremes by the Count D’Orsay, who combined Brummell’s insistence on the perfection of cut and materials with Egan’s sportiness and the satirist’s taste for the outlandish, the material pursuit of dandyism simply came to connote an outrageous and privileged vanity, a deliberately trivial and voluptuous escape from reality. Further developed into a mannered exposition on artificiality by Honoré de Balzac, whose own unprepossessing body formed a rather bathetic prop for an elaborate and overblown dress code, the hollow shell of the dandified image found its polished surfaces more usefully detailed as a textual discourse in academic treatises and popular gossip columns that paraded in textural form on the streets. Dandyism as an abstract proposition reached its apogee with the publication of Jules Amedee Barbey d’Aurevilly’s volume Du Dandysme et de George Brummell in 1845, a polemical discussion of dandyism as a political gesture in conflict with bourgeois values. This was closely followed by a series of poetic reflections by Charles Baudelaire on the capacity of the dandy’s defiant stance to ferment rebellion and stand as “a moral consciousness” in a corrupt modern world. By the 1850s the “fashionable Beau” of 1820 might as well have hailed from another planet.

As Moers points out, Barby

minimizes the place of clothes in Brummell’s dandyism, not because he considers the art of dress negligible (on the contrary) but because he wishes to emphasize what he calls the intellectual quality of Brummell’s irony, wit, impudence and poise. What he does say about Brummell’s style of dress [...] is that it was so restrained and so natural as to be a triumph of mind rather than body.

Similarly, Elizabeth Wilson underlines the cerebral and critical bias of Baudelaire’s construction of dandyism, which he saw as “a search for perfection, an exacting and stoical discipline, a form of spirituality and also a social response to those transitory epochs when democracy is not yet all powerful, yet aristocracy is only partially dethroned and debased”. It would seem (despite Moers’ protestations) that in the hands of the Parisian literati the rarefied practice of thinking about clothing ultimately succeeded in belittling any serious consideration of the physical traces of its very production and consumption, a phenomenon that would have amused a practical man of the wardrobe like Brummell no end. Yet putting aside tensions between the rival claims of French theory and English empiricism to the ownership and correct interpretation of dandyism (indeed of fashion history generally!), there is a significant point to be made here about the way in which the established historiography of the dandy has obscured his very physicality and material context. Indeed, it has hindered the application of his ideas and practices to a broader understanding of the historical relationship between men, their bodies and their clothing. Moers herself was guilty of just such a dismissive attitude (overlooking the fact that the dandy always was a creature prone to mass dissemination) when she asserts that following her “golden age”,

Baudelaire’s thought was transmitted to the fin de siècle through the feverish imagination of Huysmans and the juvenile imagination of Swinburne. Dandies and corruption, dandies and sin [...] would in the 1890s become partners in cliché. [...] For the dandy was to go down to defeat at the hands not of decadence but of vulgarity. The fin de siècle made him over for mass-audience.

It was for a mass audience that the popular writer of contemporary fiction Richard Whiteing created the dandy figure of the young aristocrat Seton in his 1899 novel No 5 John Street. However, this in no way dilutes the sharpness with which Whiteing represents the dandy’s body, rescued via Paris and transposed back to a much-changed London, the city and its society hovering with some sense of apprehension on the brink of the twentieth century. Some things though remain much the same, as the reader witnesses Seton’s careful preparation, aided by his manservant, for a leisured ramble through the streets of Mayfair to Hyde Park. Here was a path towards self-adoration not so much changed from that previously followed by Brummell himself:

Atkinson now comes in to put the finishing touches to his master for the morning promenade. He brings half a dozen cravats, and a whole trayful of scarf pins [...] Seton is to choose [...] puts a forefinger on a scarf of quiet grey; then again, laying it on a perfect pearl [...] retires to his dressing room, followed by his man. When he reappears, it is as the finished product of civilization. He is booted, hatted, gloved and generally carried out in all the details of a perfect scheme. [...] His valet regards him with the pride of the stableman who has just drawn the cloth from the loins of a flawless horse. ‘Cigarettes, Atkinson, I think. Put the cigars in the bag!’ The cigarettes are in a tiny case of enameled gold, which bears an ‘S’ in inlaid diamond points on the lid. [...] ‘Which cane sir?’ ‘Let me see!’ and he turns to a suspended rack at the door. There are as many canes as scarf pins. He hesitates between a trifle in snakewood, with a handle of tortoiseshell, and a slender growth of some other exotic timber, capped with clouded amber almost as pale as the pearl. [...] Now we are out of doors, and skimming, in the Seton’s private hansom over the well watered roads [...] until we reach the flower shop in Piccadilly for the morning button hole. [...] Our dandy looks at a whole parterre and points to one bloom, like the chess player who knows that he is pledged to the choice by touching the piece.

Literary historian Lynn Hapgood characterizes the style of No 5 John Street in terms of a dandified perspective, as “a world of surfaces in a text full of sensuous detail that exposes the deceitful nature of what the physical eye sees…the upper class in particular is portrayed as all surface since its concerns are with life as art, a deliberate evasion of reality”. Certainly the dressing-room rituals of Seton appear to conform to that commonly held notion of late nineteenth-century dandyism as the mannered denial of sordid realities (whether sexual or economic) through the deliberate manipulation of appearances, the construction of a protective and critical carapace of finely tuned sartorial exhibitionism. The “life as art” performances of infamous aesthetes such as Robert de Montesquieu and James McNeill Whistler together with other fictionalized versions by Wilde and Huysmans are all reflected in Whiteing’s description. Yet beyond the extraordinary poses of self-publicizing celebrities or the exaggerating tendencies of decadent novels, Seton’s self-presentation can be seen also to link with popular debates and widely held concerns over the moral state of masculinity, the advances of consumerism and the temptations of city life that informed a more generalized understanding of male corporeal behavior, fashionable display and sartorial desire at the turn of the century. In the pages of popular fictions, tourist guides, journalistic accounts, music hall programmes, department store catalogues and advertising promotions, both real and imaginary men like Seton were seen to epitomize a tangible mood of assertive masculine acquisitiveness whose challenging potency has since been overlooked or misconstrued by historians of fashion, consumption and gender alike. Indeed the enduring supposition has been that shopping and dressing were the exclusive domain of middle-class and aristocratic women, or of men whose masculinity was in some way “deviant”.

Cultural historian Richard Dellamora has made connections between these disruptive models and the sexual upheavals of the 1890s, in which the figures of the New Woman and the homosexual were first consciously described and linked to dandified behavior. He conjectures the reasons for the dismissal of popular characters like the dandy as anything other than incidental signifiers in broader and supposedly more “serious” histories. He states that

heretofore, political historians, by which I mean male political historians, have been blind to the significance of homosexual scandal in the 1890s [...] a less defensive approach [...] would acknowledge the crisis of masculinity at the time. And a less pure history, which permitted itself to be contaminated by literary scandal and gossip, would recognize how anxiety about gender roles inflects a wide ranger of interactions.

Along with Regenia Gagnier, Elaine Showalter, Maurizia Boscagli, and Rhonda Garelick, Dellamora repositions the fin de siècle dandy at the centre of these interactions, in a manner which, while it illuminates the rhetorical intentions of a cosmopolitan minority, still perhaps ignores the day-to-day commercial and material significance of his type. In an echo of the paraphernalia, visual ephemera and “gossip” which positioned the early nineteenth-century dandy at the centre of cogent debates on masculinity, national identity and conspicuous consumption, descriptions and appropriations of late Victorian dandyism have much more to tell us about the general relationship between men, their bodies and their clothes at this confusing time.

Recalling (though not repeating) the barely disguised homophobia of Moers, who sees only the corruption of a noble ideal in Wildean incarnations of dandyism, the decline of Brummell and Baudelaire’s inheritance has been used portentously by more recent theoreticians to reflect “a loss of balance between the dual imperatives of leisure and work incumbent upon Victorian gentlemen. The dandy is too relaxed, too visible, consumes to excess while producing little or nothing”. In the spectacular and very singular body of Oscar Wilde, whose 1895 disgrace is generally quoted as precipitating the crisis over appropriate models of masculinity that informed twentieth-century attitudes towards the “correct” performance of “manliness”, with all its connotations of denial and disavowal, the two models of dandy and gentleman are seen to have become dangerously confused. Moers traces the sartorial and embodied patterns of Wilde’s flirtations with the politics of dress from his early promotion of a rather rigorous aestheticism with the aid of green velvet and medieval posture, through the florid and bohemian adoption of an extravagantly furred and accessorized wardrobe of opera cloaks and fedoras, influenced by the example of D’Orsay and Balzac in the 1880s, to the strict (and rather Brummell-like) formality of correct evening dress taken up to mark his commercial successes in the theatre of the 1890s when “he was content to express individuality (aside from his enormous and oddly proportioned bulk) with a single detail: a green boutonniere, a bright red waistcoat or a turquoise and diamond stud”. In this final incarnation he mocked the ideals of gentlemanly deportment with ultimately disastrous results for himself and for the future of an unproblematized relationship between middle-class men and the construction of their outer selves. But, beyond that affronts to notions of bourgeois respectability, the dandy has been held to signify very little else, perhaps because it is difficult to extrapolate broad cultural or material meanings from the “unreproducible” posturings of one man, or because the close association of dandified forms of presentation and behavior with the image projected by Wilde has succeeded in limiting their application elsewhere.

There can be little doubt then that figures like Wilde had a decidedly unsettling effect on the literary, legal and medical construction of sexualities; indeed, this period at the end of the nineteenth century needs to be revisited as a crucial moment in the development of their “modern” forms. However, one might argue for a clearer recognition of the less spectacular circumstances which gave rise to an identifiable “dandified” style — such as that attributed to Seton — as being rooted in a more popular, generalized celebration of leisured urban masculinity, relatively untouched by high moral debate but linked materially and philosophically to that earlier circulation of representation of the heroic and self-adoring dandy which had marked Regency London. The adoption of a visibly relaxed and “non-productive” sartorial rhetoric was not in itself transgressive; only the context and manner in which it was mobilized made it so. In equating an embracing of idle display too closely with sexual dissonance, some historians have been in danger of obscuring or distorting similar choices made by men who identified with the status quo. Furthermore, it could be claimed that the metropolitan dandy of the 1890s continued to draw on a thriving, self-consciously virile culture of cosmopolitan masculine consumption which had been in evidence since Pierce Egan’s celebration of gambling dens and boxing tournaments at the opening of the century. This was a mode of living which re-colonized wider forms of popular culture at precisely the moment that Wilde’s version was acquiring its problematic sexual reputation, sending the established version into partial eclipse. The two strands of dandified display — one associated with political, sexual and social resistance, the other with a commercial and corporeal engagement with the urban marketplace — require careful unraveling if the defining features of the latter are not to be subsumed by the polemics of the former.

The fictional figure of Seton, with his carefully judged appearance and assiduous collecting of fashionable possessions, is thus as much a reflection of what London’s shops and catalogues offered the ambitious and stylish young man at the turn of the century as evidence of decline and decadence. His literary scopophilia may look to the obsessions of Dorian Gray in one direction, but in the other it finds a brighter resonance in the pages of a tailor’s seasonal directory. That the mannered presentation of self could simply represent an unproblematic adherence to the rules of “smart” society in an expanding arena of consumer choices is clearly communicated in retail and social guides as London and Londoners, published a year before Whiteing’s novel in 1898, where the author provided tongue-in-cheek guidance to the ways of modern society:

It is fashionable to be radical in theory and advocate women’s privileges. To have an inner knowledge of all classes of society. To know the latest club scandals. To have some particular fad. To wear some particular garment different from anybody else. [...] To be up in the slang of the day. [...] To know the points of a horse. To have an enormous dog in the drawing room. [...] To know the latest music hall song. [...] To go to Paris twice a year and at least once to Monte Carlo. Never to be in town after Goodwood or to return to it before November. [...] To excel in one’s special sport, fox hunting for preference, and be able to drive a tandem. [...] To belong to a club and have some of one’s letters and telegrams sent there. Always to fill one’s rooms with more men than women.

While such a list evidently revelled in the paradoxical nonsense of trivia, its pointed social observations map the co-ordinates of an accumulated cosmopolitan knowledge that defined the exalted status of the fashionable man and traced the limits of his finely tailored body. In its random citation of desirable adherences, it is possible to discern the more serious juxtapositions of high and low culture, reactionary posturing and avant-garde enthusiasms, artistic affectation and hearty philistinism, that influenced a prevalent model of fashionable masculinity at the turn of the century. Here was a dandified position that comfortably accommodated sexual conformity, advanced tastes and commodity fetishism within its remit. It also drew on the homosocial milieu of club life, hunting and gambling that alongside the insistence on the “particular” as far as the wardrobe was concerned, would not have surprised a Regency beau. This corporeal engagement with the modernity of London positioned the dandy in the midst of a culture enthralled rather than repelled by the notion of masculine pleasures. More than this his body had come to symbolize the assumption of a forward-looking and productive position in society. Sleekly clothed according to scientific measuring systems and mechanized construction processes which superseded even the revolutionary techniques of Brummell’s tailor, its slim, sharp contours traced a hygienic and athletic profile that was as potent in commodity terms as the Gibson Girl, the Dollar Princess or the Music Hall Strong Man. His monocle, top-hat and morning coat embellished advertisements for products as diverse as shoe polish, cigarettes, and alcohol and reflected the glare of the spotlight in any West End revue worth its salt, providing a template of urban sophistication for any aspirant office-clerk or shop-counter worker who chose to adopt it.

In this sense the perfected (rather than the corrupted) body of the fin de siècle aesthete marks a transition towards dandyism as a truly commercial trope, moving away from the carefully guarded secrets of the Savile Row tailor and the arcane pronouncements of the society dictator to express a potential within sartorial taste that was dangerously malleable and democratic and no longer so prone to the ridicule of the caricaturist (in direct contradiction to Flügellian theories of renunciation). The fashionable man now took control of his body and his image in a world where image was rapidly becoming a prime currency and in this action the dandy still laid claim to a certain brand of heroism. Seton’s skilled mastery of the cutter’s workshop and its products, related by Whiteing in a description of the dandy’s visit to his tailor, is thus a prophecy of the continuing, but increasingly compromised ability of dandified practices to describe masculine desire and self-fashioning in the following century:

Seton has so much the use and habit of the place that he passes at once to his favorite room. A lay figure, molded exactly to his shape [...] stands in a corner, clad in his latest suit. The lugubrious effigy is a model for clothing only, so its representative functions stop short of the head which is but a block, and of the feet, which are but pedestals of iron. The rest is Seton to a hair, in shoulders, waist and hip [...].Then there ensues a most amazing discussion of experts, in which the dandy holds his own in fair give and take of technicalities with the snip [...]. Such Mesopotamian terms as ‘forepart’, ‘side-body’, ‘middle-shoulder’ and…the triply mysterious ‘skye’ are freely bandied about. [...] From time to time, Seton seizes the chalk and makes drawings on the garment, or makes the figure spin like a prayer wheel. In vain is the cutter summoned [...]. On the question whether a back seam should be convex or straight, or young blood takes the pair of them without yielding an inch, while the staff gather about the door as though to catch glimpses of a well-stricken field.

By way of a conclusion, both to this chapter and to the genealogy of the dandy’s body which it describes, it is worth considering the manner in which the obsessive structuring of the wardrobe and fetishization of the surfaces of the formal suit — which mark the fin de siècle aesthete’s attitude to dress and life — translated to what has widely been described as the last incarnation of Brummellian dandyism in the decades immediately following the Second World War. Linking the two epochs is the diminutive figure and biting wit of Max Beerbohm, the social satirist and critic who in 1896 produced a definitive text (entitled Dandies and Dandies) on the nature and history of the practice. Moers acknowledges the corrective nature of Beerbohm’s narrative and the antidote it provides both to the abstracting tendencies of a Baudelairean perspective and to the heady flamboyance of the decadence:

The point of his essay is that the art of costume itself is the essence of Brummell’s dandyism. Costume is not a mere outward show of some profound spiritual achievement. ‘Dandyism’, Beerbohm writes ‘is ever the outcome of a carefully cultivated temperament, not part of the temperament itself.’

In this sense Beerbohm returned to first principles, both in his interpretation of dandyism and in the conduct of his own affairs, which closely mirrored the dandified idea of expending great effort on outcomes which themselves betrayed the utmost simplicity through their surface polish. Literary theorist Robert Viscusi illustrates how the dandy as idea, body and text conjoin in Beerbohm’s lustrous life as in his self-reflective publications:

Dandies make themselves. Whatever they may be by birth and nurture, dandies are born anew as dandies when they first dress themselves according to the dandy code. The dandy self, naked and fresh, is a figure in black and white. Completely dressed, almost completely monochrome, he is, to put it simply, a written thing.

Put even more simply, in Beerbohm’s writings and epoch the original dandy spirit is finally made modern flesh. Though in setting him down, Beerbohm announces his eventual decline.

Beerbohm died in 1956 and his wardrobe, suitably monochrome, survives at the Museum of London. An evening suit impeccably tailored in black wool and a soft brown smoking jacket trimmed with chocolate braid suggest a life lived permanently according to the stylish rituals of the 1890s — in flight from vulgarity. The rather ironical modernity of such a position in the mid-1950s is not so surprisingly, for it was precisely at this moment in the history of menswear that a particular grouping of fashion designers and consumers made conscious reference to the picturesque heritage of the dandy style in the face of a profound cultural and social change. The “neo-Edwardian” style as it became known is displayed at its most self-assured in Norman Parkinson’s iconic photograph of a group of financiers lounging in silhouette in one of the few remaining alleyways to survive in a blitzed City of London. Tightly kitted out in Savile Row suits, they have rejected the more capacious and baggy “one size fits all” hang of the utility and demob clothing that served in drab post-war circumstances for a conscious celebration of swaggering fin-de-siecle panache. Bowler hats and tightly rolled umbrellas provide the glamour of the parade ground and the race track while velvet collars, covered buttons and turned-back cuffs recall the ostentation of the music hall. The couturier Hardy Amies, who was soon to turn from designing the wardrobe of the new Queen to designing a line of men’s suits for the multiple tailoring firm Hepworth’s, captured the complacent, wistful and undeniably elitist tone of the masculine new look in his autobiography of 1954:

It seems to me that the basic principles of our way of life have not changed much. We still like to be ladies and gentlemen and if fewer succeed in so doing then at least more attempt it than would ever have dared to before. But all are fighting to preserve something they believe in. The young man how has just left his public school or the University dresses, when in London, in a neat dark suit, with well-pressed narrow trousers, cuffs to the sleeves of his jacket and possibly lapels to his waistcoat. Even if he doesn’t indulge in such fashionable details, he would feel uncomfortable in anything other than a hard collar and a bowler hat. His more daring companions may flourish a flowered waistcoat and a velvet-collared coat; but if I mention too eccentric examples I may frighten the reader out of my argument. Let us agree, however, that the average young man of position tries to give an air of substance without being stodgy: of having time for the niceties of life. His appearance may be only demonstrating wishful thinking: that he has several thousand a year in the funds, and that income tax is only a shilling in the pound; that he is prepared to be a good father to a large family. But I think the wish is there all right.

In Amies’s description of the conservative dress code of the aspirant young man, the co-ordinates of the “neo-Edwardian” style are clearly discernible, though kept tightly reined-in by the prerogatives of a petit-bourgeois understanding of respectability and an overriding concern with the tidy notion of “gentlemanliness”. Elizabeth Wilson has equated the look with a reactionary Tory stance against “austerity” and the incursions of the Welfare State, an echo of the aggressive elitism which had first inspired Brummell to use clothing as a social weapon (though in his case the practice was allied to a more progressive brand of aristocratic politicking than Anthony Eden’s, the Conservative Prime Minister whose suave taste in tailoring provided a dominant template for the new gentleman). In a parallel reading of the development of the style, cultural historian Frank Mort looks beyond such “aristocratic” bodies to trace the ways in which the tenets of this late dandyism informed the marketing and design strategies of the post-war multiple tailors “Burton’s”. Here provincial and subaltern consumers were presented with a model of fashionability that was buttoned-up, upright and uncompromisingly English; armor against the incursion of “all those dissidents and unconventional types who were marked out by improper dress”. By this, Mort is referring to the increased visibility of homosexuality in popular discourse after the publication of the Wolfenden Report in 1957 and the survival of older stereotypes of criminality or subversion through the figure of the spiv or the bohemian. There is something of this fear of change and suspicion of difference in Amies’s professed desire not to “frighten” his readers by describing the more extreme characteristics of a renewed interest in the adornment of masculinity, repeated again in his more recent celebration of The Englishman’s Suit, where he states that:

The Edwardian look was helped by the narrow trousers and the shaped coat, although it was too stuffy to last. [However...] it became acceptable that men discussed fashion seriously. The fashion shows I mounted for Hepworth for seven years at the Savoy in London were eagerly viewed by men in the City and not exclusively by those in the fashion press.

As Amies suggests, it was of course in a strictly metropolitan milieu, amongst a close coterie of like-minded men, that the final versions of a purer dandyism were played out. These were the inheritors of Beerbohm’s attenuated minimalism. Their starkly tailored bodies paid allegiance to a philosophy of life in which elegant repose and a certain withdrawal from the humdrum bother of living according to the dictates of the masses could be summed up in the placing of a button hole or the height of a shirt collar. Moving across a social terrain that encompassed the diverse worlds of choice guard’s regiments, merchant banking, financial and property speculation (sometimes of a criminal nature), the theatre, publishing and the newer creative industries, theirs was an arrogantly confident pose, deliberately out of time and more profoundly subversive and deeply embodied than that peddled by weary politicians or high street outfitters. Cecil Beaton and Kenneth Tynan produced a celebration of such personalities in their publication Persona Grata of 1953. As an apt example, the theatrical entrepreneur Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont sprawls in profile on a chaise lounge across one of Beaton’s photographs. Tynan’s acerbic prose does him full justice:

Beaumont, who is forty-three years old [...] is the eminence grise of English Drama. Out of self-defense, he has become an enigma, and it suits him, his was never an emphatic personality, and he has little truck with personal wealth or imperatorial whim. […] His social manner is flawless, twinkling without smugness, shining without slickness; the gestures are soft and self-effacing, inducing a gentle hypnosis [...] as he talks he smokes, insatiably but smoothly, never in nervous sucks [...]. His trick of holding his cigarette between the middle two fingers while wearing a monogrammed signet ring on the little one, represents his only homage to dandyism. Vocally [...] favoring a lazy, glazed, leaning tenor, which irons out its sentences as if they were so many silk shirts. ‘Terrible’ is the universal epithet.

Ultimately it is Beaumont’s body, as much as his clothes, which marks him out as a “true” dandy, the softness of his voice deputizing for the luxury of silk shirts. But perhaps this is the logical destination for a sartorial practice which lost its visible potency as a moment when refinement, modernity, outrage and all those other dandified pursuits were opened up to a teenage market on an unprecedented commercial scale. In such a context distinction can only be marked by, rather than on the body. As pop journalist Nik Cohn states (his homophobia a product of the times):

The Edwardian look [...] lasted till about 1954, by which time it had been taken up and caricatured by the Teddy Boys, who made it so disreputable that even homosexuals were embarrassed to wear it. Nothing could have been more ironic: having started as an upper class defense, Edwardiana now formed the basis for the first great detonation of male working-class fashion.

And so the rarefied version of dandyism inaugurated by Brummell and endorsed by Baudelaire finally dissolved from view, the possibilities for constructing a radical surface identity through the manipulation of a regimented wardrobe given over to the commodified realm of the boutique owner, the features writer and the pop celebrity in a logical conclusion to the processes set in motion during the period of Wilde and Whiteing. By 1965, the “dandy-style” signified little more than the fancy-dress ruffles and military “retro-chic” which cluttered the rails of Carnaby Street and King’s Road. The word itself now persists in fashion journalism as an adjective rather than a noun, and dandyism survives in the world of style magazines as a rather diffuse, but potent description of masculine glamour, effort and attitude, usually retaining some nostalgic connection to the style of the models excavated here. (In the late twentieth-century spreads of Arena and Vogue Hommes the descriptive repertoire of dandyism is endlessly played out but with seemingly little direction.) In a literature where language evoking male sartorial desire is even more limited than that reserved for the meaningful description of fashionable femininities, its residual survival counts as a blessing, though it lacks the virulent energy which marked comparable early nineteenth-century commentaries.

A resistance to closure, together with an acknowledgement of the emptiness which lies behind the surface have always been pivotal characteristics of the dandy’s repertoire, aiding and frustrating definitive categorization. With this in mind I hesitate in drawing any firmer conclusions from the changing nature of dandyism over the course of the modern period, other than affirming that the dandy narrative forms a compelling commentary on the rise of consumer culture and its shifting relationship to the bodies of men. This is perhaps best expressed as a continuous tension between notions of elite and mass taste, between a controlled exercising of restraint and an abandonment to conspicuous consumption. It is pertinent then that we should hold on to the constant dialogue between fashionable clothing, corporeality and concerns with sexual and class identities which his figure represents as a mainstay of contemporary discourse. Above all else, as succeeding incarnations of the type have shown, the central identification of the dandy with his wardrobe is a visceral one, the suit as sensate a membrane as the skin. Through the historical actions of the dandy we remember what it is to wear fashion.

How well do you know the history of dandyism? Moreover, how closely do you read Dandyism.net?

OK, so you know Oscar Wilde was tried for indecency by the Marquess of Queensbury for his love affair with Lord Douglas. But what was his prison number? And what name did he travel under after he was released from jail?

Dandyism.net presents the opportunity to test your knowledge of two centuries worth of dandy history and lore. From Beau Brummell to Sebastian Horsley, find out if you’re a philomath or ignoramus when it comes to dandyism past and present.

The 100 questions were compiled by the D.net staff, who not only wrote them off the tops of their heads, they did so while drunk.

The test consists of six categories: The Regency, The 19th Century, The 20th Century, Pop Culture, Dandyland and Dandyism.net.

(Answers appear at the bottom of the post below the image.)

THE REGENCY

1) Which Oxford college did Brummell attend?

2) What regiment did he join after he left school?

3) What was the name of Brummell’s manservant?

4) On what London street is the statue of Brummell located?

5) To whom did Brummell address the remark, referring to the Prince Regent, “Who’s your fat friend?”

6) What grotesque term did George Cruikshank use to describe the insect-like dandies in his caricatures?

7) What night of the week were the balls at Almack’s?

8 ) What early biographer of Brummell wrote, “Posterity will hardly accord to George Bryan Brummell one line in the annals of history.”

9) Of what Regency buck and memoirist was it said, “He committed the greatest follies, without in the slightest disturbing the points of his shirt collar”?

10) In a famous anecdote, Brummell sent a message to a friend saying he needed a loan because all his money was in the three percents. Who denied the loan, coldly saying that all his money was also tied up in the three percents?

11) Where was Romeo Coates born? (more…)

Shortly after his arrival in Africa, the narrator of Conrad’s “The Heart of Darkness” meets an accountant wearing a spotless white suit in the middle of the jungle. Although he’s but a colonial numbers-cruncher, the image is an arresting one: Might such a triumph of elegance over environment be the ultimate dandyish gesture?

Dandies of the Brummellian ilk delight in the sober shades of fall and winter, but d’Orsay-type butterfly dandies shine best in summer, delighting in suit fabrics such as gabardine, seersucker, linen, dupioni silk and fresco, and shirtings made of gossamer cloths like voile and batiste.

Although the dandy can dress with panache in the most sweltering of climes without relying on a suit and tie, as our own Nick Willard has demonstrated, when it comes to formal dressing, the dandy faces two divergent paths: He can show his disregard for the mercury and remain sharply tailored, or he can embrace the lazy days of summer with a softer silhouette and a rumpled sprezzatura.

And so we submit for your encomium or disapprobation the following gents, which include two new faces and four notorious ones. Which one best expresses summertime elegance?

Candidate number one (below left) is a newcomer from the pages of the New York Times. He is dressed up from head-to-toe, making no visible concession to the heat and even donning a waistcoat as an extra layer (or two layers, since it’s double-breasted.)

On the right is Will, who previously faced off against manton in the WTD gladiatorial arena. He’s stylishly dressed in seersucker, but what about the dark tie and pocket square?

Candidate number three, socialite Geoffrey Bradfield, is still wearing his forced smile, though his trademark double-cuff-shoot is sadly absent. Is the pink suit a daring statement, or is he only channeling John Dodelande? And the bit loafers with no socks — summer staple or gauche gesture?

On the right, Andrea Sperelli, another previous WTD contender, expresses everything about summer except the joy. Does he resemble a Bright Young Thing at Oxford, or a Wimbledon linesman dressed by Ralph Lauren?

Candidate number five is James Jimenez, a decadent impresario who, as you can probably tell, is a close friend of Lord Whimsy. A fan is certainly one way of staying cool. Next to him is Dandy of the Year Lapo Elkann. Does the ventilating open neck and the three mismatched shades of white epitomize sprezzatura or merely slovenliness?

“Like the Duke of Windsor, late 20th-century punks and early 21st-century gentlemen are, in very different ways, inheritors of the tradition of Brummellian dandyism, the former through their political posturings and the latter through their sartorial sublimity. For, in spite of, or rather because of its exquisite propriety, Brummell’s self-presentation was, fundamentally, oppositional, an anti-fashion statement that mocked the sartorial superiority of the aristocracy and the sartorial mediocrity of the bourgeoisie. In essence, Brummell was a punk disguised as a gentleman.” — Andrew Bolton, curator of The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in “Anglomania.”

Dandies who don’t have their fortunes tied up in the three-percents will want to fork over $15 for the July/August issue of Italy’s L’Uomo Vogue. With many articles on dandyism, the issue is sure to sell out and appreciate in value. Indeed, copies are already on e-Bay for the exploitation of dandies in Australia and Japan.

What’s sure to make the issue a collector’s item isn’t the article by the redoubtable Nick Foulkes — author of the recent d’Orsay biography — on who is and isn’t a dandy. Nor is it the piece on “dandy cars,” nor the fluff piece on the renaissance of the pocket watch. And it certainly isn’t the photo spread of Robert Downey Jr. cavorting variously in top hat, bowler, frock coat, cravat and monocle.

No, the issue will be a sound investment because it includes the best article we’ve ever seen in print about dandyism and the Internet, entitled, with typical European flair, “Dandyland’s STARS in the DIGITAL Era.”

The article was written by D.net’s own Chensvold & Willard, who have become the Rodgers & Hart of dandy journalism for their dry and conceited style, as evidenced in the very words you’re reading now.

Intended for a general audience uninitiated into the mysteries of Dandyland, the article opens with a uncharacteristically modest mention of Dandyism.net, then goes on to discuss Winston Chesterfield and Andrea Sperelli (who faced off in a “Who’s the Dandy?” post), Doran Wittelsbach, John Dodelande and Lord Whimsy. Dickon Edwards, who doesn’t typically pontificate on dandyism itself but who is a fine example of a dandy rocker, was also included.

In the interest of diplomacy, Chensvold and Willard suggested that their editor make the photo requests, since if certain parties knew the story was written by the “charmless entitled jerks” of D.net, they would be unlikely to comply, despite assurances of the article’s neutrality, or at least quasi-neutrality.

Curiously, we know from the blogosphere that Sperelli was asked to provide a photo, but his absence in the photo spread (and despite his being a fellow Italian) is either due to his unwillingness to condescend to the request of a vulgar fashion magazine, or because the L’Uomo Vogue staff didn’t think he looked elegant enough. Or because he found out the article was written by Chensvold & Willard.
The vainest of all, however, was our very own Chenners, who did not have a recent photo handy, as he’s never been asked to submit a picture to illustrate one of his own articles, and so blew his 60 percent share of the writer’s fee on a photographer.

Willard, on the other hand, took his share of the fee and hired a limousine and two lady escorts, traveled to Atlantic City, placed what was left on black, lost, then calmly left the casino, got back in the limousine, and went home.

Below is a scan of the article in Chensvold and Willard’s somewhat clumsy Italian. For the benefit of English-speaking readers, a translation follows.

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Catherine Breillat’s “The Last Mistress” opens today in New York.

An official selection at the Cannes Film Festival last year, the movie is based on dandy scribe Barbey d’Aurevilly’s 1851 novel “Une vieille maitresse.”

Director Breillat is known for sexually provocative films such as “Romance,” for which she hired Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi to penetrate her leading lady. In “The Last Mistress,” the principals were only asked to simulate lovemaking.

Released by IFC, the film will hit Los Angeles next week, followed by a gradual nationwide rollout.

Click here for the Village Voice review.

Saith the IFC in a release:

THE LAST MISTRESS is a smoldering adaptation of Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s scandalous 19th-century novel. Set during the reign of “citizen king” Louis Philippe, it chronicles the surprising betrothal of the handsome, aristocratic, former libertine Ryno de Marigny (newcomer Fu-ad Aît Aattou) to Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida of FAT GIRL), a lovely, young and virginal aristocrat.

Lurking in the margins – and in the imaginations of high society’s gossip-hounds – is de Marigny’s older, tempestuous lover of ten years, the feral La Vellini (Argento). Described as “a capricious flamenca who can outstare the sun,” La Vellini still burns for de Marigny, and she will not go quietly.

Here’s the trailer: