How the dandy was born Shaun Cole & Miles Lambert
The dandy style, created by Beau Brummell, was perfected by Oscar Wilde and Edward VIII. By Shaun Cole and Miles Lambert
George Bryan ‘Beau’ Brummell (1778-1840) is credited as the ‘original’ dandy. That was in the sense this sartorial style was first understood – as restrained, almost austere elegance, with keen attention to detail.
Brummell is seen as the first exemplar of, as French essayist Roland Barthes put it, ‘a man who has decided to radicalise the distinction in men’s clothing by subjecting it to an absolute logic’.
This is in contrast to more flamboyant, ostentatious predecessors such as the fop or 18th-century macaroni, who revelled in ornamentation and decoration.
Brummell did not invent this restrained style, but drew on that of many English country gentlemen, who by the 1770s chose to wear plain, woollen tailoring for their outdoor activities, both country and urban.
Practical considerations for more active wear led to the need for improved construction and fit, and stimulated the development of the already-dominant London tailoring profession.
Brummell was described as the ‘dictator of taste’. His ideals, exemplified in his appearance and manners, stressed personal elegance and neatness; panache and languid hauteur; wit and intelligence; and meticulous care and cleanliness. Although clearly some income was required, vast wealth was not.
There’s a deep contradiction here. Brummell may be identified as the source of 19th-century, understated, plain but elegant men’s dress and style. Yet he was actually a paradigm of 18th-century conspicuous consumption, requiring admiration and emulation.
He lived life as if he were a wealthy aristocrat and he used the fashionable arena of London’s social high life as his canvas for self-promotion. His emphasis on detail, fit and cleanliness was also prohibitively expensive.
His sartorial philosophy – his genius – was the clever acquisition and advocacy of an already established trend towards better fit and construction in tailoring, and towards plainer colours, lack of superfluous ornamentation and greater hygiene. This approach has perpetuated his now legendary significance as an innovator and a pioneer.
There are two further phases of dandyism. Like the first, these were tied not only to a particular period but also to key individuals who epitomised this archetype of dandy style and attitude: Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) and Oscar Wilde (1854-1900).
In the second wave, ideas and theories about dandyism emerged from the literature of Baudelaire and JulesAmédée Barbey d’aurevilly (1808-1889).
This phase moved away from concerns around fashionable consumption and class towards a more individual bohemianism. Baudelaire equated the artist’s creative talent with the dandy’s quest for perfection in his 1863 essay The Painter of Modern Life.
He emphasised an intellectual stance that elevated both the artist and the dandy (and sometimes artist-dandy) beyond the ordinary existence and daily routine of a general populace.
Baudelaire wrote, ‘Dandyism appears especially in those periods of transition when democracy has not yet become all-powerful. Disenchanted and leisured “outsiders” may conceive the idea of establishing a new kind of aristocracy.’
This form of dandyism was exemplified in Britain by Count Alfred d’orsay (1801-1852), and by the politicians and writers Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) and Edward Bulwer-lytton (1803-1873).
Novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) was also fascinated by the concept of the dandy, in particular in his two major novels of the later 1840s, Vanity Fair and Pendennis, set in the Regency period.
In Vanity Fair’s Jos Sedley, Thackeray created a fastidious and ridiculous figure who reached a certain maturity only when purged of his obsessive and
‘dandified’ behaviour – behaviour lampooned in contemporary caricatures.
The third wave, described by the writer Ellen Moers as fin-de-siècle literary dandyism, was concerned both with expressions of style and with new definitions of homosexuality.
These coalesced in Oscar Wilde’s infamous trials and the concerns with his self-presentation.
The close association with the aesthetic movement, of which Wilde was so much a part, is noted by Moers in her description of the single details – ‘green boutonnière, a bright red waistcoat or a turquoise diamond stud’ – Wilde added to his formal evening wear in the 1890s.
Wilde was following earlier, more creative expressions of aesthetic style.
A new approach to dressing in the highest echelons of society was seen in the behaviour and dress style of the Duke of Windsor (1894-1972).
In his 1960 memoir, A Family Album (in which he frequently referred to Brummell), he said, ‘All my life, I had been fretting against those constrictions of dress which reflected my family’s world of rigid social convention.’
He contrasted his own adventurous styles with the adherence to sartorial conventions of his father, George V.
The Duke of Windsor’s contribution to changes in men’s fashion lay in the context in which he wore certain items – suede shoes in town; single-breasted suits made in fabrics usually reserved for double-breasted.
He also followed in the tradition of his grandfather (Edward VII) by paying what some considered too much attention to his dress.
The older Edward’s mother, Queen Victoria, wrote to him, ‘We do not wish to control your own tastes and fancies … but we do expect that you will never wear anything extravagant or slang.’
His father, Prince Albert, advised the future Edward VII to avoid ‘the frivolity and foolish vanity of dandyism’.
Edward VII dressed well and is credited with popularising a number of innovative garments and styles: the dinner jacket or tuxedo; the homburg hat; a pressed trouser crease; the white dress waistcoat; and particularly a form of tweed, Glenurquhart plaid, which has come to be known as Prince of Wales check.
The Duke of Windsor acknowledged his grandfather’s style in his memoirs and continued his stylish innovations.
But he pushed harder against conventions, reflecting and influencing a new generation of men who were trying to move away from the formality and strict protocol of their parents.
Writer Colin Campbell compared the older, ‘aristocratic ethic’ of the early19th-century dandy’s consumption, which focused on mannered performance of the self, to the supposed authenticity and naturalness of the Romantic bohemian.
‘Bohemianism’ was seen by Campbell as ‘the attempt to express romantic ideals in a complete way of life’.
Campbell doesn’t say there was a direct identity link between Romantics and modern consumers. But Joanne Entwistle, another dandy expert, links Romantics with hippies of the 1960s and 1970s – and links dandies with 1960s mods in the theory that mods were modern-day, working-class dandies.
The keen attention to detail in the clothing of the first waves of mods in the late 1950s and early 1960s was certainly as slavish as that of Beau Brummell, the original dandy.
Shaun Cole and Miles Lambert are the editors of Dandy Style: 250 Years of British Men’s Fashion (Yale University Press, published 9th February).
The book accompanies a show at Manchester Art Gallery, opening in November 2021
‘Edward VII popularised the dinner jacket, the homburg and tweed’