Dandyism

Dandyism is the act of presenting oneself as a member of high society, especially through one's attire. In an 1863 essay, Charles Baudelaire identified the passion that drove the dandy to perfection with the “burning need to create for oneself a personal originality, bounded only by the limits of the proprieties.” The “eyes of a dandy” are “in love with distinction” (499). Classical dandies had an exceptionally developed sense for distinctions, which they eagerly displayed in public, in regular meeting places for the urban high society such as the afternoon promenades on the city boulevards and parks, the literary saloons, the clubs and balls, the opera and theater, and so on. The dandy was the ultimate trendsetter in all matters of taste and etiquette, above all in his personal attire.

To Baudelaire, and many others, George “Beau” Brummell was the prototype of a dandy, admired and copied by many young men. Brummell did not come from high nobility but from its upper servant class. The milieu in which he grew up, however, was rich, leisured, and exclusive enough. His career as a dandy in English high society during the Regency period (1811–1820) was quite remarkable and well known all over Europe. In his sociological study, Thomas Spence Smith characterized Beau Brummell as follows:

The dandy is the extreme representative of cultural refinement. A dandy runs the risk of crossing the narrow border that separates him from a fop, a man who makes a fool of himself by being over-concerned with his appearance and clothes. A dandy, however, makes his whole life a highly styled object of art. As Baudelaire observed, dandies lived in a time when the society of estates, with its strict social hierarchies, gradually gave way to greater social mobility and equality: “Dandyism appears above all in periods of transition, when democracy is not yet all-powerful, and aristocracy is only just beginning to totter and fail” (Baudelaire 1964, 28).

Brummell lived concretely in times of social turmoil during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. A gentleman born in the outskirts of the noble society but particularly keen to the issues of social, cultural, and economic change, as well as the new possibilities they opened up, could establish a kind of new aristocracy of taste as a final gesture of decadence and great heroism.

The social esteem a dandy enjoyed in high society was based on a presumption of his having substantial economic resources and a life of leisure. However, his lifestyle determined his social position, primarily through the wide attention it garnered, and not viceversa. [Page 422]Just as the position of a courtier at Versailles was defined by his ability to distinguish himself from his peers and emulate the taste and style of the king, so, too, could a dandy distinguish himself above his peers by the skilful manipulation of the signs of excellence. According to the values of the ancient regime, the dandy was a pretender, his taste and lifestyle more refined than his social origins actually entitled him to. Through his refined style, he, in fact, defended the aristocratic privilege of leisure against the new bourgeois standards of achievement through work. He was a symbol of the real distinction between classes. The dandy was thus the last defender of the aristocratic pathos of distance against the general leveling out of social distinctions.

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