Words to live by

We try our best.

To be truly elegant

"Starch makes the gentleman, etiquette the lady."

"Fashions come and go; bad taste is timeless."

"To be truly elegant one should not be noticed."

From The Rake:

Born in 1778, [Beau] Brummell is celebrated as the originator of dandyism. A very British reaction to the excessive continental fashions that dominated early Georgian London. It was here that young affluent males adopted flamboyant ‘Macaroni’ fashions picked up from visiting Italy and France as part of The Grand Tour – a coming-of-age trip undertaken by British nobility and the landed gentry from the 17th century onwards. They’d wear high, powdered wigs, make-up, perfume, elaborate and rare fabrics and silk stockings. They were the fops.

Brummell advocated and championed good tailoring, sombre fabrics, a limited colour palette, personal hygiene, starch and polish. He was to Regency London what we would now call an ‘influencer’, albeit with more class...

...Tying the perfect knot in your cravat was a skill and Brummell would discard his failures that were imperfect or, indeed, too perfect. With the benefit of modern technology, Brummell could have made an instructional video for YouTube or a live video on Instagram. The Regency equivalent was to allow gentlemen to watch you prepare for the day live from your dressing room. It is reputed that Brummell could take up to five hours whilst attending to his ‘toilet’, so I hope the events were catered.

The perfectly polished shoe is still a good sign of character and Brummell famously requested that his boots should be polished with Champagne. I have heard that some devoted polishers use this method to create the desired patina. But to put this into context, we should remember that Brummell was a contemporary of The Napoleonic war and to use France’s finest export for cleaning boots was perhaps a personal gesture of patriotism.

He was quite a character, was George - he got the name "Beau" at an early age for his meticulous attention to detail when dressing - courting attention wherever he went, he famously gained entry to the "inner circle" of the Prince of Wales, then spectacularly fell out of it again with a few choice remarks which upset the then Regent (soon to become George IV). In the meantime, he enthralled a nation, and forever defined the key elements of men's fashion to this day (the plain shirt, the tie, long trousers, black shoes).

An inspiration to fashionistas everywhere, it is no wonder there's a stutue to him on Jermyn Street (home of tailoring)...



George Bryan "Beau" Brummell (7th June 1778 – 30th March 1840)

To have genius and be obscure

“Dandies... as you know - scorn all emotions as being beneath them, and do not believe, like that simpleton Goethe, that astonishment can ever be a proper feeling for the human mind.”

“For with dandies, a joke is the only way of making yourself respected.”

“Beauty is single. Only ugliness is multiple, and even then its multiplicity is soon exhausted.”

“Ever since the creation of the world there have been men like me specially intended to astonish men... men like you.”

"The most beautiful destiny: to have genius and be obscure."



As James J. Conway over at Strange Flowers says of Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly:

[He was] the author of Du dandysme et de George Brummell, published in English as The Anatomy of Dandyism. Appearing in 1844, this slim volume was the first serious appraisal of the cult of the dandy which grew around George “Beau” Brummell in Regency England. Like jazz, like Samuel Beckett, like Tina Arena, dandyism had to go to France to be taken seriously.

For Brummell and his associates, dressing well required hours in front of the mirror to arrive at an ensemble of suiting and grooming so perfect that it eluded notice. But Barbey d’Aurevilly knew that dandyism wasn’t just “the art of deportment, costume, and fortunate and audacious dictatorship of the toilet and exterior elegance. It is certainly that, but it is much more.” And if it were possible to codify the dandies’ self-presentation as a “look” (and caricatures of the time prove that it was) then that “look” had been and gone.

In any case, for Barbey d’Aurevilly, “mimicry is not resemblance. One can catch an air or a pose, as one can steal the shape of a dress-coat; but the comedy is wearisome, the mask is painful…” The French dandy was, by all accounts, quite the head-turner, and the effort he went to in constructing his look was much in evidence. Tall for the era, he stepped out in rouge and lipstick, with rings on his fingers, dye in his hair and lace at his cuffs. The whole arrangement owed little to the cool reserve of les rosbifs; as Barbey d’Aurevilly noted, “I have been as dandy as one can be in France,” further commenting that “the country of Richelieu will never produce a Brummell”.

It may never have produced a Brummell, but d'Aurevilly's influence was far-reaching, paving the way as he did for such legends of Dandyism as Charles Pierre Baudelaire and Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam - and of course the "decadents" of the Aesthetic movement, including Oscar Wilde.

Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly (2nd November 1808 – 23rd April 1889)

Always correct

Check the instructions to see if you measure up...

Weekend reading

Paul Poiret's Monsieur Magazine.

"A Journal of Elegance", indeed.

The elegant man gets dressed

Honoré de Balzac’s 1830 Treatise on Elegant Living was a keystone text on dandyism, preceding Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Anatomy of Dandyism (1845) and Charles Baudelaire’s “The Dandy” (in The Painter of Modern Life, 1863), and marking an important shift from the early dandyism of the British Regency to the intellectual and artistic dandyism of nineteenth-century France.

The Treatise is the first true philosophical expression of dandyism, and is full of well-crafted aphorisms: “Elegant living is, in the broad acceptance of the term, the art of animating repose,” runs one classic definition of dandyism, and “The man of taste must always know how to reduce need to a minimum” asserts the role elegant living can play in times of both opulence and strife. Further embellished with anecdotes and historical and personal illustrations, Balzac’s Treatise even features a fictitious encounter with the original dandy himself, Beau Brummell...it represents a decisive moment in the history of dandyism, and an entertaining exposition on the profundities of what lies deepest within all of us: our appearance.

And here are just some of those profundities:

• “To distinguish our life through elegance, one must still have been endowed with that indefinable faculty that always prompts us to choose truly beautiful or good things.”
• "It is not enough to become or to be born rich to lead an elegant life: one must feel it."
• "Studied elegance is to true elegance what a wig is to hair."
• "Clothing does not consist so much in clothes as in a certain manner of wearing them. Consequently it is not the rags in themselves as it is the spirit of the rags that one must grasp."
• "The boor covers himself, the rich man or the fool adorns himself, and the elegant man gets dressed."

I need a copy...

An excellent appreciation of The Treatise by Christian Chensvold may be found at Dandyism.net

Honoré de Balzac (20th May 1799 – 18th August 1850)


Balzac by Aubrey Beardsley

More Dandyism

I thought I'd dress casual today...

...just like Lord Lichfield!

Dandyism

“Dandyism may be taken as the art of selection, practiced by a lover of the visible world.” — Douglas Ainslie



“A dandy does nothing. Can you imagine a dandy addressing the common herd except to make game of them?” — Charles Baudelaire



“I’ve always been backward on morals, but I do know how to dress appropriately for any given occasion, and that’s more than half the battle.” — Thorne Smith



“In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.” — Oscar Wilde

Dandyism.net