Fop Culture

Its flamboyant attitude has influenced modern-day peacocks such as Bowie, Prince and Harry Styles. But the dandy philosophy can be traced back hundreds of years, when an impeccably groomed Englishman changed men’s fashion forever.

By Zarah Crawford 17/12/2024

What is a dandy? The word has its origins in the late 18^th century, deriving from Jack-a-dandy: slang for a “conceited fellow”. Since then, the term has been used as an insult and bestowed as the highest compliment to a man (or woman) of style. While by extension dandyism—the philosophy of the dandy, with its celebration of surface, artificiality and the performance of self—has been both valorised as a heroic stance against conformity and pilloried as an expression of the most inane, reactionary snobbery.

In its most common usage, a dandy is understood as a man who draws attention to himself through flamboyant and often androgynous clothing (frills and brightly coloured fabrics)—think Prince in his ruffled shirts and purple Spandex, or Harry Styles and Timothée Chalamet attempting to pull off pussy-bow Gucci blouses on the red carpet. However, such affected peacockery is anathema to the rigorously restrained aesthetics and philosophy of true dandyism. With the launch of The Dandy, a new fragrance from the venerable house of Penhaligon’s—its notes of whiskey and smoke evoking the era of sleek, tuxedoed Art Deco gigolos and lounge lizards—and, more crucially, the news that the theme for next year’s Met Gala will be “the Black dandy”, coinciding with the New York Metropolitan Museum’s fashion exhibition— Superfine: Tailoring Black Style—the meaning of dandyism is about to be once again analysed and refracted through the lens of contemporary pop culture.

There have been dandies throughout the ages, but the dandyist philosophy has its roots in the British industrial revolution and the sartorial perfection of one George Bryan Brummell, better known as Beau Brummell. The grandson of a grocer, Brummell combined superlative tailoring, an ironic wit and glacial froideur to become the superstar of the bon ton—i.e. the highest echelons of Regency high society—and in the process he created the prototype for the modern suit and tie, and arguably, the first example of modern masculine celebrity cool.

Prior to Brummell, men in English aristocratic circles were still in the sway of late 18^th century French courtly fashion—heavy embroidery, bejewelled buckles, silk stockings and powdered wigs. Brummell’s revolutionary style was unequivocally British. His simple monochromatic uniform of a tailored coat, waistcoat, skin-tight breeches, and cravat was adapted from the riding clothes of English country gentlemen—essentially sportswear—and a timely rejection of the decadent fripperies of the French Royal court. This was the original “quiet luxury”, where simple, high-quality tailoring is worn to actively blur others’ perceptions of the wearer’s wealth and social status.

Brummell’s hair was meticulously tonsured but unpowdered, he was fastidiously clean and close shaven, a new ideal of sexy, effortless masculinity that left his social peers—particularly his close friend, the Prince Regent, the future King George IV—looking like gaudy fops. It is emblematic of the paradoxical nature of dandyism that such seemingly effortless style required great efforts to achieve. His gloves were made by two separate glove makers—one for the fingers and the other specialising in the fit of the thumb. He claimed to polish his hessian boots with the froth of the finest champagne and hired a manservant of his exact proportions to, upon delivery from Brummell’s tailor, wear his master’s clothes for a day to ensure they did not appear too vulgarly new.

Oscar Wilde. Image copyright Hiroshi Sugimoto taken from the Time Machine exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art 2024. ⁠

The most painstaking part of Brummell’s daily five-hour toilette was the arranging of his cravat—a piece of stiffly starched snow-white linen that his valet tied and draped over and over until it achieved an acceptable level of sculptural perfection. A famous anecdote tells of a morning visitor entering Brummell’s dressing room to find him and his long-suffering valet standing amidst an avalanche of discarded, crumpled linen. “Those are our failures,” Brummell pronounced drolly.

But Brummell’s starched cravat served another purpose beyond the sartorial, as once tied in place it made it difficult for him to turn or lower his head. This ensured that the Beau continuously regarded the world with his nose in the air, his unflappable composure aided by the fact that his only possible physical reaction to anything surprising was a disdainful eyebrow raise. His tailoring, too, cut close to his body and artfully padded to emphasise the Grecian proportions of his silhouette, functioned figuratively and literally as a suit of armour, protecting him against the venalities of the dizzyingly high society he had ascended to rule.

Ironically for a man who had invented himself as an exquisite object, Brummell’s number one rule of style was to never draw undue attention. He once advised that, “If people turn to look at you in the street, you are not well dressed, but either too stiff, too tight or too fashionable.” Naturally, Brummell existed to be looked at, but his obsession with sartorial detail was so meticulous as to render its perfections invisible to the man in the street. The line of a shoulder, the proportions of a cuff, were subliminal signals that could only be read by other elite initiates of the dandy sensibility.

Inevitably, Brummell’s tenure as the king of Regency fashion came to a squalid end. He had amassed enormous gambling debts, and believing his social position unassailable, insulted the portly and comparatively slow-witted prince. Upon encountering the heir apparent strolling with a companion in Regent’s Park, Brummell had enquired, “Who’s your fat friend?” Without royal protection, in the throes of late-stage syphilis and with the threat of debtors’ prison looming, Brummell fled to France. There, in a squalid two rooms in Caen, the Beau descended into madness, constantly washing, and ironing his tattered linens in anticipation of the noble visitors who never arrived. He was buried in a pauper’s grave.

Beau Brummell was gone but his dandyist philosophy did not die with him. Across the Channel, just five years later, Jules Amadee Barbey d’Aurevilly published the essay On Dandyism and George Brummel which would become a canonical text for a new generation of French poets, artists and writers. The decadent poet Charles Baudelaire particularly revered the Beau, penning a chapter of his 1863 treatise, The Painter of Modern Life, titled simply, The Dandy, as a paean to those he called “natural aristocrats” with “no profession beyond elegance” externalising their superiority of mind through their fastidious dress, exacting taste and stoic manner. The Industrial Revolution had created a large wealthy middle class and the means of mass production. And Baudelaire believed that within such an increasingly homogenised society, dandies were the last Romantic heroes, making a stand for originality and the bravery to be oneself. “Dandyism is a setting sun; like the declining star, it is magnificent, without heat and full of melancholy.”

Illustration of Bryan Ferry by Peter Bainbridge

The Irish playwright and poet Oscar Wilde, often referred to as a dandy, was another who fell under the Beau’s thrall. Brummell would have no doubt considered Wilde’s long hair, knickerbockers and beringed fingers the height of vulgarity. Wilde’s dandyism lay not in his wardrobe but in his affecting of a fearlessly unique persona, his wit and manner, much like Brummell’s, brought him fame but also protected him from those who disapproved of his ambiguous sexuality and overt self-promotion. While Wilde himself may not have been the personification of the dandy archetype, in his work he often celebrated the impenetrable shallowness and style of the dandy ideal. Lord Henry Wotton, the protagonist in his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is dazzingly chic and hopelessly debauched, a Faustian dandy who preys on the vanity of his circle of young male admirers, leading them into dissolution and disgrace.

Wilde’s inspiration for the The Picture of Dorian Gray was the French decadent classic À Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. This is the story of the jaded aristocratic aesthete Des Esseintes, so repulsed by bourgeois society that he sequesters himself in a bizarre and luxurious private world where he is free to indulge his fascination for the artificial, the arcane and the grotesque_—from flesh-eating plants and Byzantine jewels, to an organ on which he creates melodies, not of music but esoteric perfumes.

It is widely assumed that the model for the neurasthenic Des Esseintes was perhaps the most imperious dandy of the fin de siècle, Robert de Montesquiou. Immensely wealthy and flagrantly queer, Montesquiou was admired for his razor-sharp elegance—famously captured in contemporary portraits by Whistler and Boldini—and his forward-thinking art patronage. He was one of the first to champion and collect Art Nouveau, but also pilloried for his pretension and brittle snobbery. Like Huysmans’ protagonist, Montesquiou was obsessed with creating daring and dazzling interior spaces (silver gilt ceilings, walls lacquered midnight blue and hung with medieval tapestries) all lit by sinuous Gallé lamps. Perhaps his most notorious contrivance was a Majorelle—arguably the greatest furniture maker of the period—glass-fronted credenza in which he proudly displayed his collection of rainbow-hued silk socks.

Marlene Dietrich making her Hollywood film debut as the tuxedo clad Amy Jolly in the film ‘Morocco’, directed by Josef von Sternberg. Photo by Eugene Robert Richee/John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images.

Throughout the 20^th century up until now, many men and women have trod in the footsteps of Brummell and co, though few have the leisure or means to create entire worlds à la Montesquiou. Women too can be dandies, like Coco Chanel who rose from singing in cheap music halls to become a fashion legend. “My life didn’t please me, so I created my life,” she once said. Similar to Brummell, her style was inspired by the sporting wear of British country gentlemen, borrowing and adapting the equestrian clothes of her aristocratic lovers to create the eternally chic and classic Chanel suit. This suit was to become her uniform until she died. Even in old age she remained alarmingly slim and soignée, beetle-black bob wig framing her skull-like visage, puffing on her ever-present cigarette, her armful of Verdura costume bracelets clattering as she spat out dandyist aphorisms like, “Elegance is refusal” and “Many people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.”

On the roster of modern male dandies, there are plenty of notables—Charles Watts, the late drummer for The Rolling Stones, in his impeccable British tailoring, stoically keeping the beat behind his ragtag bandmates, or David Bowie as the occultist dandy, The Thin White Duke. But it is the man whom Tom Ford, a meticulous dandy himself, described as “the world’s most formidable style icon”, who is Brummell’s truest heir. In the 1970s, Bryan Ferry, with his cool, retro-tailored tuxedos, pencil thin moustache and brilliantined hair, conquered the charts and seduced the peerage—a connoisseur of wine, women, cars, clothes, houses. The society interior decorator Nicky Haslam said of rockstar Ferry that “he was more likely to redecorate a hotel room than to trash it”, while British author and social commentator Peter York wrote that he was “a man of such meticulous self-curation that he could hang on the wall of the Tate.” One of Baudelaire’s “natural aristocrats”, the son of a Yorkshire miner whose job was to tend the pit ponies, Bryan Ferry once described himself with an epithet worthy of the Beau at his height, as “an orchid born on a coal tip”.

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