The Canon

This list of canonical texts has not been updated since the belle epoque of Dandyism.net circa 2006, but perhaps it will be someday. 

Principal Texts

AUCHINCLOSS, LOUIS (1917- ) “The Rector of Justin” (1964), the author’s best-known novel, includes no less than three characters referred to as “dandy,” however temporarily.

BALZAC, HONORE DE (1799-1850) Balzac’s oeuvre “La Comedie Humaine” is full of dandies, most of whom are naive young men from the provinces who go to Paris in search of love and fortune. They buy their clothes on credit (as Balzac himself was fond of doing), and use their native wit and intelligence to raise themselves socially. There’s Raphael in “The Wild Ass’s Skin” (1834), Lucien Chardon in “Lost Illusions” (1837-1843) and “A Harlot High and Low,” Henri de Marsay in “The History of the Thirteen” (1833-1835), and Eugene de Rastingnac in “Pere Goriot” (1835). Balzac’s “Treatise on the Elegant Life” is vastly overshadowed by the work of Baudelaire and Barbey.

BARBEY D’AUREVILLY, JULES (1808-1889) Ostensibly a biography of Brummell, “Dandyism” (1844) is the first major text to infuse dandyism with philosophy, marking the transition from the English conception in the early part of the century to the French version that will dominate until the appearance of Oscar Wilde. The heroes in Barbey’s fiction are often referred to as dandies: “Les Diaboliques” (1874), “Bewitched” (1854). Oscar Wilde’s translation of “What Never Dies” (1884) was recently reprinted in English.

BAUDELAIRE, CHARLES (1821-1867) Second to Barbey’s “Dandyism,” Baudelaire’s essay The Dandy from “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863) is the most important French text on dandyism. It is brief but inestimable in importance for adding philosophical weight to the concept of dandyism. References to dandyism abound in Baudelaire’s other critical works, such as his essays on Poe and Delacroix, and “The Flowers of Evil” also contains dandy imagery, as in the poem “Don Juan in Hell.” The hero of his novella “La Fanfarlo” (1847) also has some dandyish qualities.

BEAUVOIR, ROGER DE (1806-1866) A member of the fashionable Jockey Club in Paris, Beauvoir was one of the first visible French dandies and a role model for Baudelaire and Barbey. He was a minor journalist, novelist and poet.

BEERBOHM, MAX (1872-1956) Like all literary dandies, Beerbohm’s fame rested as much on his persona as on his work. He led a quiet life happily married and simply and fastidiously dressed. His chief dandy writings include his contribution to the canon, “Dandies and Dandies,” an essay from 1898, and “Zuleika Dobson,” the quintessential Oxford novel with a dandy protagonist, in 1911. In addition to David Cecil’s acclaimed biography, there is “Max Beerbohm: A Kind of Life” (2002) by John N. Hall.

BULWER-LYTTON, LORD EDWARD (1803-1873) The author infamous for the immortal line “It was a dark and stormy night…” is also the creator of the first major dandy novel direct from the age of Brummell, “Pelham: Or the Adventures of a Gentleman” (1828). This verbose bildungsroman charts the development of its protagonist from zero to dandy-hero, and includes a host of aphorisms, including the sage “He who esteems trifles for themselves is a trifler; he who esteems them for the conclusions to be drawn from them, for the advantage to which they can be put, is a philosopher.”

CARLYLE, THOMAS (1795-1881) “Sartor Resartus” (1833) includes a chapter called “The Dandiacal Body” with a facile (mis)interpretation of dandyism that helped foster the Victorian antipathy toward dandyism that would last until the appearance of Wilde.

COLETTE (1873-1954) The protagonist of “Cheri” (1920) and “The Last of Cheri” (1926) is a delicate young dandy.

D’ANNUNZIO, GABRIELE (1863-1938) Though his work is imbued more with aestheticism and decadence, D’Annunzio and his writings are closely related. Most dandyish of his novels are “The Child of Pleasure” (1889) and “The Flame” (1900).

DICKENS, CHARLES (1812-1870) Dickens cut something of a dandy image, albeit of the more flamboyant variety. The “grey men” anti-heroes who populate his many novels often have a touch of dandyism in them: James Harthouse in “Hard Times,” Henry Gowan in “Little Dorrit,” Sydney Carton in “A Tale of Two Cities,” Pip in “Great Expectations,” and Eugene Wrayburn in “Our Mutual Friend” are a few examples.

DISRAELI, BENJAMIN Before entering into the decidedly undandyish field of politics, Dizzy dressed with cultivated artifice and wrote fashionable novels, of which “Vivian Grey” (1826) is the most a la mode.

FITZGERALD, F. SCOTT (1896-1940) Jay Gatsby in “The Great Gatsby” (1925) is an arriviste American dandy, and it’s no surprise he comes to a tragic end. There are also dandyish traits in Anthony Patch, hero of “The Beautiful and Damned” (1921).

FLEMING, IAN (1908-1964) Bond is as close to a dandy as a popular action hero can be, and in “Children of the Sun” (1981), a study of England between the wars, Martin Green notes how Fleming, who went to Eton, gave Bond a specific kind of Etonian snobbery that is as old as the institution itself. Bond is cool, cultured and elegant, and the hero of 15 novels by Fleming.

FORSTER, E.M. (1879-1970) Forster gave the dandy canon one great character, Cecil Vise in “A Room with a View” (1908), a parody of a Yellow Nineties dandy-aesthete. In the 1985 film version, Daniel Day-Lewis gives a brilliant performance as this self-absorbed art lover completely inept with his leading lady.

GAUTIER, THEOPHILE (1811-1872) “Mademoiselle de Maupin” (1834) concerns a dandy shocked to find himself attracted to another man. No wonder, he is really a she. Swinburne called this gender-bender “the holy writ of beauty,” and it was enormously influential on the aesthetes and decadents of the subsequent generation. The novel owes much of its impact to the author’s famous preface, in which he coins the term “art for art’s sake” (l’art pour l’art) and expounds a theory of life, much like Walter Pater’s “The Renaissance,” based on aesthetic immersion. Gautier also wrote an essay on Baudelaire that explores the poet’s dandyism.

GILBERT & SULLIVAN (1836-1911, 1842-1900) The masters of English operetta satirize aesthetic pretensions in “Patience” (1881).

GORE, CATHERINE (1799-1861) The last of the Regency popular novelists, Gore’s “Cecil; or the Adventures of a Coxcomb” (1841) centers around a dandy modeled on Brummell.

HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL (1809-1894) Holmes’ essay “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” (1858) has some amusing observations on dandyism.

HUYSMANS, J.-K. (1848-1907) Though hardly a dandy himself (he spent a quiet life working as a minor civil servant in France’s Ministry of the Interior), Huysmans was a morbid aesthete and the most important figure of the French Decadence (1880-1900). His 1884 novel “Against Nature” was considered the bible of the movement, and hugely influenced Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” It concerns a flamboyant eccentric inspired by Robert de Montesquiou who would “preach a sermon on dandyism” to his tailors, and is the pivotal text for examining the relationship between 19th century dandyism and fin-de-siecle decadence.

IBANEZ, VICENTE BLASCO (1867-1928) “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (1916) centers around the Desnoyers family, who return to France after making their fortune in Argentina. Eldest son Julio is handsome and elegant, and lives the idle existence of a rich man about town. When the tango craze takes over Paris, Julio becomes the darling of the tango salons, establishing the link between the dandy and the Latin Lover, as well as the dance-hall gigolo, whose sad exploits are recounted in the seldom-heard opening verse of “Just a Gigolo” made famous by Louis Prima. The 1921 film version launched the career of Rudolph Valentino (1895-1926), and shows him at his most seductive. Though it pales in importance to Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” the book, which ends in the bloodbath of World War 1, is noteworthy as an early antiwar novel.

JESSE, CAPTAIN WILLIAM Still considered by historians to be the most valuable book on Brummell, Jesse’s “Life of Beau Brummell” (1844) is culled from the subject’s notebooks, letters, acquaintances and one brief meeting.

LERMONTOV, MIKHAIL (1814-1841) There’s scant history of dandyism in Russia, but the age of Pushkin produced a number of Byronic heroes. Lermontov’s contribution is his one novel “A Hero of Our Time” (1840) notable for its nonlinear construction. The term “dandy” is applied to several characters throughout the novel. Nabokov, who translated the book, describes the anti-hero Pechorin as full of “romantic dash and cynicism, tigerlike suppleness and eagle eye, hot blood and cool head, tenderness and taciturnity, elegance and brutality, delicacy of perception and harsh passion to dominate, ruthlessness and awareness of it,” making for a formidable dandy indeed.

LISTER, THOMAS HENRY (1800-1842) “Granby, a Tale of Modern Society” (1826) is a high-life novel centered on a Brummell-like character.

LORRAIN, JEAN (1855-1906) A flamboyant and acerbic writer who published scores of lavishly paid articles in which he lambasted prominent social figures and incited duels, Jean Lorrain was the ersatz Oscar Wilde of France. His novels and poems, full of sex and violence, are of interest only as examples of the decadent milieu in fin-de-siecle Paris. Decadent dandies populate all his works; “Monsieur de Phocas” (1901) was recently translated into English by Dedalus Books.

MANN, THOMAS (1875-1955) “Death in Venice” (1912) has been called the swan song of the decadent movement. Aschenbach, its middle-aged hero, becomes obsessed with a sonnenkinder youth, who is either a projection of his own lost youth or else his repressed homoerotic longings. Lavishly filmed by Visconti in 1971, Dirk Bogarde stars as the doomed protagonist who has a pivotal dandy transformation scene.

MARLOWE, DEREK (1938-1996) “A Dandy in Aspic” is a modest British spy novel about a double agent with vaguely dandyish mannerisms and a reverence for Brummell. It was made into a film in 1968 starring Laurence Harvey.

ORCZY, BARONESS (1865-1947) In “The Scarlet Pimpernel” (1905), Sir Percy poses as a useless fop but is in fact the daring title hero, proving that behind the dandy mask may lurk a brave man of action. Leslie Howard starred in the 1937 film version, and Anthony Andrews (of “Brideshead Revisited”) and Richard E. Grant have also taken turns as the hero in separate TV productions.

PROUST, MARCEL (1871-1922) A dandy himself, Proust’s mammoth “Remembrance of Things Past” (1913-1927) features two main dandy characters: Charles Swann is of the man-about-town variety, while the Baron de Charlus, modeled on Robert de Montesquiou, is of the decadent ilk. These two characters are superbly visualized by Jeremy Irons and Alain Delon in the 1984 film adaptation “Swann in Love.”

SAKI (1870-1916) High comedy and scathing satire of the Edwardian upper crust characterize the work of H.H. Munro, pen name Saki. Idle dandies were his primary protagonists: “Reginald” (1904), “The Chronicles of Clovis” (1911) and “The Unbearable Bassington” (1912).

STENDHAL (1783-1842) One of the greatest 19th century novels dealing with a young man in search of love and money, “The Red and the Black” (1830) is often called the first psychological novel. Its hero Julien Sorel adopts dandy airs to get what he wants, but it is the dashing Prince Korasoff who is the real dandy. Stendhal wrote two other great novels with young male protagonists: “The Charterhouse of Parma” (1838) and “Lucien Leuwen” (1894).

SUE, EUGENE (1804-1857) An avid anglophile, Sue was a close friend of D’Orsay and was especially known for his outlandishly decorated apartments. He was hugely popular in his day thanks to novels such as “Arthur” (1838) and “The Mysteries of Paris” (1842-1843), in which dandyism figures prominently.

THACKERAY, WILLIAM MAKEPEACE (1811-1863) Thackeray satirized dandies in “Yellowplush Papers” (1837), an 1841 article called “Men and Coats,” “The History of Pendennis” (1848-1850), and other works. He also chronicled Brummell’s last days in “Roundabout Papers (1860-1863).

WARD, ROBERT PLUMER (1765-1846) “Tremaine; or, the Man of Refinement” (1825) is another tale of Regency high life with a Brummellian protagonist.

WAUGH, EVELYN (1903-1966) Waugh’s masterpiece “Brideshead Revisited” (1944) features the sonnenkinder Sebastian, a dandy naif who is unable to grow up and suffers for it. Anthony Blanche is the flamboyant, cosmopolitan dandy in the novel, and both are brought stunningly to life in the breathtaking BBC miniseries of 1981.

VERNE, JULES ((1828-1905) Phileas Fogg in “Around the World in Eighty Days” (1872) is described as well dressed and “Byronic,” and his extraordinary sangfroid is described in multiple passages.

WILDE, OSCAR (1854-1900) Virtually all of Wilde’s oeuvre is imbued with dandyism. The drawing-room comedies, such as “The Importance of Being Earnest”(1895) and “An Ideal Husband”(1895) concern clubman-type dandies, while the novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1890) is in the decadent manner and features the uber-dandy Lord Henry. There have been many great film adaptations of Wilde’s work.

WODEHOUSE, P.G. (1881-1975) The great comic writer created a superb dandy in “Leave it to Psmith” (1924), and the chappie Bertie Wooster of the many Jeeves and Wooster stories, which were adapted in an excellent BBC TV series in the ’90s.

 

Anthologies

“Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s” (1982), Academy Chicago Publishers. Poetry and prose from Oscar Wilde and his circle, including dandyish figures such as Ernest Dowson, John Gray and Arthur Symons.

“The Decadent Reader” (1998), Zone Books. Includes selections from many minor writers of the Decadent Movement, including Jean Moreas, Catulle Mendes and Jean Lorrain.

“The Dedalus Book of Decadence: Moral Ruins” (1990), Dedalus/Hippocrene. Many dandy-infested short stories by Mendes, Lorrain and a number of British writers.

“The Second Dedalus Book of Decadence: The Black Feast” (1992), Dedalus/Hippocrene. Another dosage of stories and poems by French and British writers of the fin de siecle.

“The Dedalus Book of German Decadence: Voices of the Abyss” (1994), Dedalus/Hippocrene. Though dandyism was never big in Germany, this anthology includes several examples, including Herman Bahr’s “The School of Love” and Thomas Mann’s “Blood of the Walsungs.”

“The Book of Masks: French Symbolist and Decadent Writings of the 1890s” (1994), Atlas Press. Originally compiled by Remy de Gourmont at the turn of the century, this book features the most obscure of the obscure among decadent writers.

 

Critical Texts

ADAMS, JAMES ELI “Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood” (1995). Examines dandyism in the context of 19th- century notions of masculinity.

BARTHES, ROLAND (1915-1980) The French critic wrote extensively on fashion in the ’60s, and his remarks on dandyism were recently collected in “The Language of Fashion” (2006).

BINDER, PEARL “The Peacock’s Tail” (1958). An entertaining look at male panache across cultures and through the centuries, with numerous dandy references.

BOADEN, JAMES “Days of the Dandies,” possibly also known as “Beaux and Belles of England,” published around the turn of the century in 15 volumes consisting of Mrs. Jordan, written by James Boaden (two volumes); Horace Walpole, written by himself; Colley Cibber, written by himself (two volumes); Fanny Burney, written by herself; Charles James Fox, written by B.C. Walpole; Laurence Sterne, written by Percy Fitzgerald (two volumes); Beau Nash, written by Oliver Goldsmith; Captain Gronow, written by himself (two volumes); Peg Woffington, written by J. Fitzgerald Molloy (two volumes); Mary Wortley Montagu, written by herself.

BRUMMELL, GEORGE (1778-1840) The original dandy continues to be the subject of numerous books, including: “Beau Brummell and his Times” by Roger Boutet de Monvel (1909). This second biography re-cycles Jesse’s stories and adds tales from some of the published Regency memoirs, as well as lengthy digressions on the Prince Regent and Regency society. “Beau Brummell; His Life and Letters” by Lewis Melville (1924). In addition to Jesse, this third biography of the Beau draws on a wide range of unpublished as well as published Regency era journals, memoirs and correspondence; the manuscript of the Beau’s “Male Costume,” which was not published until 1932; and Regency-era fiction, such as “Pelham.” The narrative, particularly in the second half, gets bogged down by extensive reproduction of the Beau’s stilted letters. Appended is the Beau’s “album,” a collection of letters and writings to the Beau that he assembled during his exile in France. “The Reign of Beau Brummell” by Willard Connelly (1940). This is the first professionally written, modern biography of the Beau. “Beau Brummell” by Kathleen Campbell (1948). Vividly written, it is the most sympathetic biography of the Beau. “Beau Brummell” by Carl Maria Franzero (1956). Franzero rehashes the same stories to such an extent that he appears to have lifted whole paragraphs from D’Aurevilly’s “Du Dandysme.” “The Incredible Beau Brummell” by Samuel Tennenbaum (1967). Tennenbaum adds nothing new and reverts to the Victorian moralizing and censoriousness that Campbell had helped to dispel. “The Two Beaux” by Keith B. Poole (1976). The second half of this book is a rather uninspired monograph on the Beau. “Beau Brummell” by Hubert Cole (1977). Cole checks original sources and uncovers many facts — for example, the will of William Brummell, the Beau’s father, and a hitherto undiscovered drawing of the Beau in his prime – and distinguishes the apocryphal from the probably true. The biography is the most factually accurate, but somewhat dry. “Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Man of Style” by Ian Kelly (2006). By far the best and most insightful of the biographies, it is reliable and entertainingly written. It imaginatively exploits extensive scholarship from the fields of fashion, history, sociology, art and medicine. Kelly goes back to even more original documents than Cole, such as the betting books at the Beau’s clubs and his school records. In addition to gleaning new stories, he is more precise in the mundane matters, such as dates. The book contains two new, startlingly different contemporary drawings of the Beau and unearths the cause of the Beau’s decline: syphilis.

BURNETT, T.A.J. “The Rise and Fall of a Regency Dandy” (1981). A look at the raucous life of Scrope Berdmore Davies, notorious gambler, womanizer and Regency buck.

CONNOLLY, CYRIL (1903-1974) Not only was Connolly part of the fashionable Oxford set in the ’20s, he also wrote several short essays on dandyism collected in “The Evening Colonnade” (1973).

FOULKES, NICK “The Last of the Dandies” (2004). Thorough bio of Count D’Orsay by a dandyish writer.

GARELICK, RHONDA “Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender and Performance in the Fin de Siecle” (1998). Examines dandyism in the context of creating a persona and the encounter between high and mass culture, with many contemporary examples.

GREEN, MARTIN “Children of the Sun” (1981). A study of England between the wars, particularly the aesthetes centered around Oxford.

JACKSON, HOLBROOK “The Eighteen Nineties” (1950). Personally dedicated to Beerbohm, this in-depth tome examines the cultural milieu of the dandy-rich 1890s in England.

JERROLD, CLARE “The Beaux and the Dandies” (1910). A verbose tome of amateurish scholarship, which starts with 17th century beaux and ends with D’Orsay. Primarily of interest to those seeking anecdotal material on pre-Brummell proto-dandies.

JULLIAN, PHILIPPE “Prince of Aesthetes: Count Robert de Montesquiou” (1968). A leading Belle Epoque scholar devotes an entire tome to the sublime and ridiculous inspiration for Proust and Huysmans.

LAVER, JAMES “Dandies” (1968). A cursory history on the subject that mainly follows the timeline of Moers’ “The Dandy,” although it brings dandyism up to the 1960s and the neo-Edwardian look popular in Britain at that time. A good short primer with some interesting insights. Laver is also the author of the much deeper history “Fashion for Men” and many other books on costume.

LORD LAMINGTON “In the Days of the Dandies” (1890). Clearly penned by an amateur, but full of references to intriguing minor figures.

MARTIN, RICHARD “The Boutonnière: Style in One’s Lapel” (2000). A slim volume with a short history of the boutonnière and many photographs of famous and not-so-famous devotees.

MOERS, ELLEN “The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm” (1960). The definitive literary and social study of dandyism from its origins in Regency England through 1910 is an absolute must read for dandyphiles. Moers explains how the original, robust, snuff-snorting Regency dandy eschewed the extravagances of the aristocratic fop and the coarseness affected by republican sympathizers in favor of superb fit, perfect cut, harmony of color, personal cleanliness and the well-tied starched linen cravat, and came to dominate society through his insolence; then crossed the Channel to France and returned accessorized and sissified in his attire to become, while still a social lion, the more flamboyant “butterfly dandy” who eventually drank too much absinthe, smoked too much hash, raged against the bourgeois, dressed in black, and thus became the decadent dandy, who spiced his personality with wit and aestheticism, was often gay, consciously adopted aesthetic garb, entertained the mass public and became the fin-de-siecle dandy, who floundered in the shallows of his own shallowness and became the extinct dandy when Beerbohm, Brummell’s most insightful interpreter, retired to Rapallo. The book is so good that its faults are usually overlooked. Initially an English lit scholar, Moers glosses over or ignores French dandyism after the initial burst of Anglomanie, shortchanging intellectuals like Barbey and Baudelaire; boulevardiers like the Prince de Sagan and Boni de Caselltane; and Proust’s dandy characters like Charlus and Swann and their inspirations, Montesquiou, and Charles Haas. Also, after a brilliant beginning about the Beau and the Regency dandies, she expatiates about the literature of dandyism at the expense of the living and breathing variety. The real-life dandies who are discussed tend to be authors like Oscar and the Incomparable Max. Most grievously, concluding that dandyism died in 1910, Moers neglects all the wonderful, subsequent dandies and dandyism’s continuing influence.

NORDAU, MAX “Degeneration” (1892) is an invective-filled polemic aimed against the aesthetes and decadents of the fin de siecle. Nordau was a kind of mountebank journalist who attempted to write in the style of a serious academic sociologist. For 500 pages he incessantly attacks figures such as Baudelaire, Barbey and Wilde, citing them as evidence of humanity’s hastening demise and making for amusing reading.

PAGLIA, CAMILLE “Sexual Personae” (1990) Extensive references to dandies while examining the battle between Apollo and Dionysus in Western art.

PRAZ, MARIO (1896-1982) “The Romantic Agony” is a seminal study of the erotic and morbid in Western literature, with a large focus on the Decadents.

PURDY, DANIEL LEONHARD “The Rise of Fashion: A Reader” (2004). Includes a section on dandyism.

RIDGE, GEORGE ROSS “The Hero in French Decadent Literature” (1961). Simplistic in its analysis, this book is nevertheless a useful guide to the many dandies that populate the lowest examples of Decadent literature. The author wrote a similarly titled book on Romantic literature.

ROBINS, STEPHEN “How to be a Complete Dandy” (2001). Pocket-sized overview of dandyism’s main figures and themes.

SKINNER, CORNELIA OTIS “Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals” (1962). An amusing look at Paris of the Belle Epoque, with chapters on Montesquiou and Count Boni de Castellane.

STANTON, DOMNA “The Aristocrat as Art: A Study of the Honnete Homme and the Dandy in 17th and 19th Century French Literature” (1980). Interesting discussion of 17th-century dandy prototypes as well as 19th-century dandies proper.

VINCENT, LEON H. “Dandies and Men of Letters” (1913). Written in a light, anecdotal style, this tome covers a half dozen figures from the early 19th century, including William Beckford and Thomas Moore.

VON GLEICHEN-RUSSWURM, ALEXANDER “Dandies and Don Juans” (1928) is written from a German perspective and puts an emphasis on sportsmen and adventurers, with a number of chapters devoted to intriguing pre-Brummell figures.

WALDEN, GEORGE “Who’s a Dandy?” (2002). An essay on contemporary dandyism that sees the “democratic” dandy as a popular entertainer having neither the aristocratic, sartorial elegance of Brummell nor the intellectual superiority of Barbey; coupled with a fresh modern English translation of Barbey’s “Dandyism.”

WOOLF, VIRGINIA (1882-1941) Wrote an appreciation entitled “Beau Brummell” in 1930.

 

Picture Books

BOSTON, LLOYD “Men of Color: Fashion, History, Fundamentals” (1998). A history of African-American style.

BOYER, G. BRUCE “Fred Astaire Style” (2004). Compendium of the master of elegant nonchalence by the seasoned style writer.

CHAILLE, FRANCOIS “The Book of Ties” (1994). Coffee-table book devoted to the history of neckwear, with many images of dandies past and present.

CHENOUNE, FARID “A History of Men’s Fashion” (1993). Lavishly illustrated, erudite and very rare history of male costume from 1760 to the present.

CICOLINI, ALICE “The New English Dandy” (2005). Questionable text and even more questionable imagery.

CONSTANTINO, MARIA “Men’s Fashion in the Twentieth Century” (1997). Thinner in image and text than some of its peers, notably Chenoune.

FLUSSER, ALAN “Dressing The Man” (2002). The best written and illustrated of Flusser’s several books on men’s style.

LESLEY, COLE/PAYN, GRAHAM/MORLEY SHERIDAN “Noel Coward and His Friends” (1979). Extensive images of the dandy and entertainer throughout his life.

MANEKER, MARION “Dressing in the Dark: Lessons in Men’s Style from the Movies” (2002). Based on sartorial themes but with cinematic exemplars.

MARTIN, RICHARD/KODA, HAROLD “Jocks and Nerds: Men’s Style in the Twentieth Century” (1989). Lavishly illustrated coffee-table book with chapters devoted to a dozen male archetypes, including the dandy.

MAUROIS, ANDRE “The World of Marcel Proust” (1974). Includes photos and text on the dandies who inspired Proust’s work.

MCDOWELL, COLIN “Ralph Lauren: The man, the Vision, the Style” (2003). Extensive advertising images showing Lauren’s various historical inspirations. “The Man of Fashion: Peacock Males and Perfect Gentleman” (1997) Judicious balance of text and images while examining male panache through the ages.

MUNHALL, EDGAR “Whistler and Montesquiou: The Butterfly and the Bat” (1995). Gorgeous coffee-table book that examines both men, their friendship, and the celebrated painting that resulted.

ROETZEL, BERNHARD “Gentleman: A Timeless Fashion” (1999). An emphasis on the sensual side of dressing and living, as opposed to the historical and scholarly.