A dandy is a man who places particular importance upon physical appearance and personal grooming, refined language and leisurely hobbies. More narrowly, a dandy refers to a self-made man both in person and persona, who emulated the aristocratic style of life and dress especially during the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Britain and France, regardless of his middle-class origin, birth, and background.dandy: "One who studies ostentatiously to dress fashionably and elegantly; a fop, an exquisite." (OED).Cult de soi-même, Charles Baudelaire, "Le Dandy", noted in Susann Schmid, "Byron and Wilde: The Dandy in the Public Sphere" in Julie Hibbard et al., eds. The Importance of Reinventing Oscar: Versions of Wilde During the Last 100 Years 2002 This type of man became a kind of stereotype, subculture, or stock character.
Early manifestations of dandyism were Le petit-maître (the Little Master) and the musk-wearing Muscadin ruffians of the middle-class Thermidorean reaction (1794–1795). Modern dandyism, however, emerged in stratified societies of Europe during the 1790s revolution periods, especially in London and Paris.Le Dandysme en France (1817–1839) Geneva and Paris, 1957. Within social settings, the dandy cultivated a persona characterized by extreme posed cynicism, or "intellectual dandyism" as defined by Victorian novelist George Meredith; whereas Thomas Carlyle, in his novel Sartor Resartus (1831), dismissed the dandy as "a clothes-wearing man"; Honoré de Balzac's La fille aux yeux d'or (1835) chronicled the idle life of a model French dandy whose downfall stemmed from his obsessive Romanticism in the pursuit of love, which led him to yield to sexual passion and murderous jealousy.
In the metaphysical phase of dandyism, the poet Charles Baudelaire portrayed the dandy as an existential reproach to the conformity of contemporary middle-class men, cultivating the idea of beauty and aesthetics akin to a living religion. The dandy lifestyle, in certain respects, "comes close to spirituality and to stoicism" as an approach to living daily life,Prevost 1957. while its followers "have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking … [because] Dandyism is a form of Romanticism. Contrary to what many thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these [material] things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of mind."Baudelaire, Charles. "The Painter in Modern Life", essay about Constantin Guys.
The linkage of clothing and political protest was a particularly English characteristic in 18th-century Britain;Ribeiro, Aileen. "On Englishness in Dress", essay in The Englishness of English Dress. Christopher Breward, Becky Conekin, and Caroline Cox, Eds., 2002. the sociologic connotation was that dandyism embodied a reactionary form of protest against social equality and the leveling effects of egalitarian principles. Thus, the dandy represented a nostalgic yearning for feudal values and the ideals of the perfect gentleman as well as the autonomous aristocratreferring to men of self-made person and persona. The social existence of the dandy, paradoxically, required the gaze of spectators, an audience, and readers who consumed their "successfully marketed lives" in the public sphere. Figures such as playwright Oscar Wilde and poet Lord Byron personified the dual social roles of the dandy: the dandy-as-writer, and the dandy-as-persona; each role a source of gossip and scandal, confining each man to the realm of entertaining high society.Schmid 2002.
Etymology The earliest record of the word dandy dates back to the late 1700s, in Scottish Song. Since the late 18th century, the word dandy has been rumored to be an abbreviated usage of the 17th-century British jack-a-dandy; the term was used to described a conceited man."jack-a-dandy", The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993) Lesley Brown, Ed. p. 1,434.
In British North America, prior to the American Revolution (1765–1791), British soldiers would mock Americans with the song "Yankee Doodle". Its first verse "Yankee Doodle went to town, / Upon a little pony; / He stuck a feather in his hat, / And called it Macaroni…" derided the rustic manner and perceived poverty of colonial Americans. By satirizing the American character's small horse and minimal attempts at fashion, the lyrics suggested that a true dandy would have a large strong horse and fine clothing."Yankee Doodle"
An Anglo–Scottish border ballad dated around 1780 utilized dandy in its Scottish connotation and not the derisive British usage populated in colonial North America. See: Notes and Queries 8th Ser. IV. 81. Since the 18th century, contemporary British usage has drawn a distinction between a dandy and a fop, with the former characterized by a more restrained and refined wardrobe compared to the flamboyant and ostentatious attire of the latter.Encyclopædia Britannica, 1911, p. 0000.
British dandyism
Beau Brummell (George Bryan Brummell, 1778–1840) was the model British dandy since his days as an undergraduate at Oriel College, Oxford, and later as an associate of the Prince Regent (George IV)all despite not being an aristocrat. He was always bathed, shaved, powdered, perfumed, groomed and immaculately dressed in a dark-blue coat of plain style."In Regency England, Brummel's fashionable simplicity constituted, in fact, a criticism of the exuberant French fashions of the eighteenth century" (Schmid 2002:83) Sartorially, Brummell's tailoring was perfectly fitted, clean and displaying much linen; an elaborately knotted cravat completed the aesthetics of Brummell's suite of clothes. During the mid-1790s, the handsome Beau Brummell became a personable man-about-town in Regency London's high society, who was famous for being famous and celebrated "based on nothing at all" but personal charm and social connections.D'Aurevilly, Barbey. "Du dandisme et de George Brummell" (1845) in Oeuvres complètes (1925) pp. 87–92.
During the national politics of the Regency era (1795–1837), by the time that Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger had introduced the Duty on Hair Powder Act 1795 in order to fund the Britain's war efforts against France and discouraged the use of foodstuffs as hair powder, the dandy Brummell already had abandoned wearing a powdered wig and wore his hair cut à la Brutus, in the Roman fashion. Moreover, Brummell also led the sartorial transition from breeches to tailored pantaloons, which eventually evolved into modern trousers.
Upon coming of age in 1799, Brummell received a paternal inheritance of thirty thousand pounds sterling, which he squandered on a high life of gambling, lavish tailors, and visits to brothels. Eventually declaring bankruptcy in 1816, Brummell fled England to France, where he lived in destitution, pursued by creditors. In 1840, at the age of sixty-one years, Beau Brummell died in a lunatic asylum in Caen, marking a tragic end to his once-glamorous legacy.Wilson, Scott. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Locations 6018–6019). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition. Nonetheless, despite his ignominious end, Brummell's influence on European fashion endured, with men across the continent seeking to emulate his dandyism. Among them was the poetical persona of Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron, 1788–1824), who wore a poet's shirt featuring a lace-collar, a lace-placket, and lace-cuffs in a portrait of himself in Albanian national costume in 1813; Count d'Orsay (Alfred Guillaume Gabriel Grimod d'Orsay, 1801–1852), himself a prominent figure in upper-class social circles and an acquaintance of Lord Byron, likewise embodied the spirit of dandyism within elite British society.
In chapter "The Dandiacal Body" of the novel Sartor Resartus (Carlyle, 1831), Thomas Carlyle described the dandy's symbolic social function as a man and a persona of refined masculinity:A Dandy is a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse, and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of Clothes wisely and well: so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress. . . . And now, for all this perennial Martyrdom, and Poesy, and even Prophecy, what is it that the Dandy asks in return? Solely, we may say, that you would recognise his existence; would admit him to be a living object; or even failing this, a visual object, or thing that will reflect rays of light.Carlyle, Thomas. "The Dandiacal Body", in Sartor Resartus (1833–1834).
In the mid-19th century, amidst the restricted palette of muted colors for men's clothing, the English dandy dedicated meticulous attention to the finer details of sartorial refinement (design, cut, and style), including: "The quality of the fine woollen cloth, the slope of a pocket flap or coat revers, exactly the right colour for the gloves, the correct amount of shine on boots and shoes, and so on. It was an image of a well-dressed man who, while taking infinite pains about his appearance, affected indifference to it. This refined dandyism continued to be regarded as an essential strand of male Englishness."Ribeira 2002:21.
French dandyism
In monarchic France, dandyism was ideologically bound to the egalitarian politics of the French Revolution (1789–1799); thus the dandyism of the jeunesse dorée (the Gilded Youth) was their political statement of aristocratic style in effort to differentiate and distinguish themselves from the working-class sans-culottes, from the poor men who owned no stylish knee-breeches made of silk.
In the late 18th century, British and French men obeyed Beau Brummell's dictates about fashion and etiquette, especially the French bohemians who closely imitated Brummell's habits of dress, manner, and style. In that time of political progress, French dandies were celebrated as social revolutionaries who were self-created men possessed of a consciously designed personality, men whose way of being broke with inflexible tradition that limited the social progress of greater French society; thus, with their elaborate dress and decadent styles of life, the French dandies conveyed their moral superiority to and political contempt for the conformist bourgeoisie.Meinhold, Roman. "The Ideal-Typical Incarnation of Fashion: The Dandy as … ." essay in Fashion Myths: A Cultural Critique. Bielefeld, Germany: transcript, 2014. pp. 111–125. books.google.com/books?id=1XWiBQAAQBAJ
Regarding the social function of the dandy in a stratified society, like the British writer Carlyle, in Sartor Resartus, the French poet Baudelaire said that dandies have "no profession other than elegance … no other [social] status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons. … The dandy must aspire to be sublime without interruption; he must live and sleep before a mirror." Likewise, French intellectuals investigated the sociology of the dandies (flâneurs) who strolled Parisian boulevards; in the essay "On Dandyism and George Brummell" (1845) Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly analysed the personal and social career of Beau Brummell as a man-about-town who arbitrated what was fashionable and what was unfashionable in polite society.Walden, George. Who's a Dandy?Dandyism and Beau Brummell, Gibson Square, London, 2002. . Reviewed in Uncommon People, The Guardian, 12 October 2006.