Last week Nathaniel Adams hosted a soireé in New York in which various members of Dandyland, including folks from the Rhode Island School of Design’s new dandy exhibit, read from classic dandy literature and mingled over free cocktails.

We sent Chenners, asking him to take photos and report on the event.

After numerous inquiries, the D.net founder finally responded via email this afternoon with the photo above and his “report,” which consists of the caption, “My left foot.”

Other sources have confirmed that a fun time was indeed had by all.

American readers of a certain age will remember the old TV commercial for Grey Poupon, a Dijon mustard now made by food-biz megalith, Kraft. (“So fine, it’s even made with white wine.” Fancy that!) In it, one chauffeured Rolls Royce pulls alongside another. The well dressed man in one leans out and asks the impeccable man in the other, “Pardon me, but would you happen to have any Grey Poupon?” The original ad aired in the 1980s.

Fast forward to 2013, when all things vintage — and faux vintage — are in style, from the new-to-retro Fiat 500 to Banana Republic’s “Mad Men” apparel collection. And Kraft and its agency CP+B have seized the day, back-filling the original with clever CG and new footage that tells the story of what happened after the first encounter, Bond-style.

Enjoy.

When it comes to turning to Beau Brummell for inspiration, even people in the men’s fashion world get it wrong from time to time—and more often.

Popular misconceptions include:

• Beau Brummell invented the tuxedo (or at least black-and-white for men’s evening wear)
• That he employed several glove makers to make each pair of gloves
• That the Prince Regent broke with Brummell over the impertinent demand, “Wales, ring the bell!” during one of their late-night piss-ups. (Brummell denied this episode repeatedly while en Caen.)

Over time these legends and others have taken on a life of their own, in part because Brummell’s wit tended toward the exaggeration of trifles. He liked to mess with people’s heads.

Still, we were not quite aghast to read this piece on the website of GQ, that venerable organ of manly style formerly known as Gentleman’s Quarterly. We were, however, nonplussed.

It starts out all right:

“Every time baggy, pleated, and yet somehow tightly tapered pants come back in style, there’s a chance that cuff might creep up the calf inching our fashion standards back to the time when men wore tights and breeches and everyone had the plague… To know how we have have arrived at our current sartorial epoch — and why we must defend it — we need first understand how we broke from the ‘ballet look’ in the first place. And for that, we have one man to thank: Beau Brummel.”

True enough for those who care to “defend” such things, except for the repeated spelling of Brummell’s name as “Brummel.” We can’t fault the author, Micah Fitzerman-Blue, overmuch for this, however. The original French editions, as well as some English translations, of Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly’s “Du Dandysme et de Georges Brummel” spell the man’s surname with only one “L.” It’s an easy mistake.

But then Fitzerman-Blue goes on to describe Brummell’s father as an “upper middle-class politician.” He wasn’t. William Brummell was in fact a bureaucrat, the private secretary to Lord North, Prime Minister of England from 1770 to 1782. Bill Brummell never held elective office.

Then there’s this:

“Between preening, plucking, polishing his boots with champagne (fact), and spending upwards of £800 a year (over $120,000 today) on tailoring, Brummel solidified his relationship with the Prince, and established his status as London’s style icon.” [Emphasis ours.]

No, not fact. As Nigel Rodgers points out in his soon-to-be-released book, “The Dandy: Peacock or Enigma” (of which more anon), “… the story that he used champagne as boot blacking is clearly a Brummell joke—champagne is sticky.” [Emphasis Rodgers'.] Anyone who has ever bungled an inebriated toast at a wedding should know this, and the apocryphal nature of this story has been pointed out in several previous works.

Finally, there’s the kicker:

“All that fuss actually resulted in something decidedly unfussy: full-leg trousers with matching jacket, a white linen shirt, and an ascot. In other words, a suit.”

We have a few other words. Brummell didn’t invent the suit any more than he invented the tuxedo. In fact, men had been wearing suits—coat, vest and some form of leg wear (usually breeches) of one matching fabric or another—for more than a century prior. Brummell never wore one. His day costume consisted of a blue coat, white or buff colored vest, fitted buff trousers and Hessian boots. For evening, he wore a blue coat and black trousers that closed tightly around the ankle. Brummell never used the word “ascot” unless to identify the town of that name in Berkshire or the horse races that have been taking place there for some three centuries now. Brummell wore—and wore exquisitely—a cravat. The ascot tie did not appear until several decades later.

In his biography, Ian Kelly quotes Brummell as saying, “I, Brummell, put the modern man into pants, dark coat, white shirt and clean linen.” In that sense, Brummell is the progenitor of modern men’s dress, but that’s hardly the same as saying that he came up with the suit as we know it today.

We should note that Fitzerman-Blue is not a staff writer for GQ but works for a commercial outfit called Bureau of Trade. Its mission is “finding, curating, and selling quality goods, while educating guys on what it is they’re actually buying…” (In this case, a Tom Ford Black Fleece suit.) Here’s to “finding, curating and selling.” Now if Bureau of Trade would only get the education part right—or maybe GQ should hire Esky to do a little fact checking.

It’s been a while since we lasted posted. Your correspondents have been busy, mostly answering the dolorous call of that cruelest of pagan idols, Mammon. Such is the frenzy of the modern world. But we do have news of a dandiacal nature to impart to our faithful myrmidons around the globe.

First up, D.net founder and Ivy-Style.com impresario, Christian Chensvold, has re-invigorated the pages of The Huffington Post with a new style column. Last week, Chensvold posted a piece headlined “Old Hat: Broker’s Gin and the Fate of the Bowler.” It’s a charming column for a number of reasons. Written in the inimitable Chenners Deadpan Style™ one is hard pressed to know whether he’s serious or having us on for a lark. (We suspect a little of both.) The hook, which is that Broker’s Gin—capped with miniature bowler hat—is currently the fastest selling gin in U.S., dovetails nicely with a chat about the fate of said headgear in the contemporary world.  Your correspondent was honored to be gently pilloried for recently having bought and even occasionally wearing a Christy’s bowler (or derby or coke if you prefer) on the town and for special occasions.

Next, our friend, that redoubtable dandizette, Rose Callahan of The Dandy Portraits fame will be offering her unique photographic perspective at Dandy Talk, a seminar to be held October 5, 2012 at the elegant National Arts Club in New York City. She’ll be joined by Matt Fox of the Fine and Dandy Shop, manners expert Thomas P. Farley and Nathaniel Adams, a writer and the manager of Against Nature Atelier. Admission is free but be sure to RSVP. Nonplussed by idle dandy chatter? Never mind, the event is sponsored by Hendrick’s Gin, which will be providing cocktails.

And finally, if you haven’t seen it already seen it, the Ivy Style exhibit at the Fashion Institute of Technology opened in New York City on September 14. It explores the golden decades of upper-crust, Ivy League college style—that conspicuously casual and uniquely American form of dandyism. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because ol’ Chenners, noted above, is heavily involved in it. Also on the hook for the history notes is Richard Press (of J. Press fame), curator Patricia Mears, Christopher Breward, Masafumi Monden and others. Click over to Ivy-Style.com for more details and updates. The exhibit runs through January 5.

Can’t make it to the Big Apple? Watch the video embedded below…

…or buy the book.

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

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

We suspect he’s in debtor’s prison.

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

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

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

Eton, 1947.

 Sunday School in Lancaster, PA, 1941.

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.

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

Or at least, “What a jerk.”

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

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

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

“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.

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…)

The big-screen adaptation of “Brideshead Revisited” opens July 25 in the US. “The Passionate Spectator” columnist Robert Sacheli recently attended a press screening. The following are his thoughts on the film, as well as the charges of sacrilege leveled by fans of the 1981 Granada Television version.

Outrage against cultural debasement becomes a dandy as much as a good pair of white summer flannels, but the new film adaptation of “Brideshead Revisited” has stirred up a level of feverish emotion ill suiting the man of bemused detachment.

Why has the film hit so many exquisitely sensitive nerves? Perhaps because revisiting “Brideshead” in 2008 is less a threat to the cultural legacies of Evelyn Waugh or Granada Television than it is to our own memories of the 1981 series and the role it holds in our lives.

My own sacred and sometimes profanely silly “Brideshead” connections reach back to high school. Despite the questionable erotic themes — and possibly more problematic, the Jesuit bias — the Brothers of Holy Cross judged “Brideshead Revisited” to merit a place on our summer reading list as we headed into junior year. I’m now deeply ashamed that a hasty late-August skim through the novel left no lasting impression except for its cover illustration, a floridly rendered version of the Brideshead fountain with a pair of male and female figures ominously dwarfed by its sculptural glories.

The now-legendary television series, though, was quite another story. I was as guilty of being a “Brideshead”-head as the next impressionable fellow in the early ’80s. I had an English friend record my answering machine greeting with the series theme swelling in the background. Spellings such as “emphasised” spilled from my fountain pen. I admit to have spoken the phrases “unused to wine” and “would your friend care to rumba?” in actual conversations.

In short, I joined a brotherhood of millions who happily fell for a seductive vision of inter-war England as filtered through the lens of Thatcherism. With that memorable baroque trumpet theme echoing in our imaginations, we daydreamed about cricket sweaters, plover’s eggs, and perpetually indulgent nannies.

Yes, we thought, this is when and how we deserved to have lived.

Burnished in our affection by repeated DVD marathons, “Brideshead” was a comforting return to our youth — or at least the imaginary version we’d assembled from Waugh’s seductive characters and the glow of high-level art direction.

So it’s understandable that there might be reluctance towards Brideshead II. Better to boycott the local cineplex with a wearily dismissive attitude.

Sorry to spoil your fun, but this version of “Brideshead” is neither a desecration nor a disaster. Rather it’s a refocused approach to the novel’s story and characters — a necessary step when adapting any work of literature for the screen.

(more…)

If filmmaker Catherine Breillat could be anyone in the world, she’d be the man pictured at left. Yes, the guy who looks like Lemmy from Motorhead dressed for the Dickens Fair.

“I have always said that if I had been born in a different century, I would have been Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly,” says the director of “The Last Mistress,” which opened in the US last week.

The film, which is loosely based on a novel by d’Aurevilly, centers around Ryno de Marigny, a proud libertine and gambler who strolls through life with his “hands in his pockets and nose in the air.”

The film stars prettyboy newcomer and Angelina Jolie lookalike (emphasis on jolie) Fu’ad Ait Aattou, who had never acted before and who therefore gives off the requisite air of dandy detachment.

Asia Argento, daughter of Italian horror film legend Dario Argento, is the film’s leading lady and a classic belle-laide.

Fans of Barbey’s fiction will enjoy a long sequence in the heart of the film that makes use of his favorite literary device, the recit parlé, or spoken narrative. Breillat’s adaptation also preserves the themes of mystery, revenge, passion and death that permeate all the work of Barbey, who was born in the sign of Scorpio and shares the sign’s preoccupations to the highest degree.

The press kit for the film includes the following remarks from Breillat:

On discovering the book Une Vieille Maitresse: I enjoyed the dandyism, a last shout from the aristocracy. Just like the Marquise de Flers, I am “absolutely 18th century.” The 18th century was more elegant and open-minded than the 19th, when the middle classes came into power, bringing narrow-mindedness and rigorously strict moral principles.

I also loved all these highly androgynous characters. Ryno is a terrible womanizer, a sort of Valmont (DANGEROUS LIAISONS), but he is also, like many dandies, deeply feminine. I’ve often dreamt about Michelangelo and the “Portrait of a Young Man” by Lorenzo Lotto (which is also in the film), about these men of dazzling beauty, a certain feminine beauty, yet without being effeminate.

The story could only take place in an aristocratic environment. When struggling to survive, feeding a family and finding a room for shelter, there is no time for the leisure of romance. Not enough time to experience the pureness. Sentiment can only be expressed in a certain level of comfort where it is not tainted by the harsh realities of life. The way many great authors of that era expressed strong feeling in such idealistic settings has always fascinated me. Aristocracy simply lends itself to the refinery of sentiments.

“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.”