The Dandy

The dandy is a central figure in 19th-century constructions of masculinity and social class, associated principally with men who devote fastidious attention to dress. That broad emphasis has posed challenges in defining the term, which persists into the present as a label for a wide range of responsiveness to fashion and a collective gaze. Although the dandy has forerunners in earlier figures of sartorial extravagance—the fop of Restoration drama, the “macaroni” of the late eighteenth century—and the term itself gains currency in the 1780s, the dandy emerges as a distinct type during the Regency, above all in the figure of George “Beau” Brummell (b. 1778–d. 1840). Brummell stands apart from earlier figures in associating male fashion with a form of paradoxically austere discipline, coupled with a cool social detachment that shades into disdain for those who fail to emulate his rigorous elegance. (Although Brummell and dandyism would exert a profound influence on French writers, this entry necessarily focuses on the English tradition.) This emphasis on outward appearance obviously unsettles traditional notions of masculinity, as it aligns the dandy with a conventionally feminine posture, which leads to a frequent association of the dandy with unorthodox sexuality. Early reception of the dandy also foregrounds perplexities surrounding social class. Was the figure a rearguard defense of a waning aristocratic order, a barbed parody of that milieu, a substantive attack on bourgeois society, or merely a parvenu’s fantasy? The dandy figures centrally in Victorian revisions of the gentleman, in which an older order of inherited privilege rather than achieved character is frequently repudiated as a mode of dandyism. Brummell’s fabled detachment also stimulated the construction of the dandy as an intellectual ideal, a standing critique of bourgeois society and thought. This is especially prominent in French appropriations of dandyism, from Barbey d’Aurevilly and Baudelaire through Camus. Other commentators, however, have stressed the sustained influence of dandyism as a material practice. This emphasis points to the dandy’s dependence on the social orders he might seem to resist, notably the rise of commodity culture. Scholarship on the dandy and dandyism frequently articulates this tension, and typically tends to emphasize one of the rival facets. After a survey of general studies of the dandy, this entry is organized around three historical sections, which mark distinct phases in the development of dandyism. The first runs from 1800 to 1840, the second from roughly 1840 to 1870, and the third from roughly 1870 through the end of the Victorian age. Each of these three sections is divided into a list of primary works, followed by scholarship addressing literary and social contexts (which may include biographies). The entry concludes with a section on dandyism in the history of fashion and a section on post-Victorian contexts.