Dandies

Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture

Susan Fillin-Yeh

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN:
  9780814726969
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814771266
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture considers the visual languages, politics, and poetics of personal appearance. Dandyism has been most closely associated with influential caucasian Western men-about-town, epitomized by the 19th century style-setting of Oscar Wilde and by Tom Wolfe's white suits. The essays collected here, however, examine the spectacle and workings of dandyism to reveal that these were not the only dandies. On the contrary, art historians, literary and cultural historians, and anthropologists identify unrecognized dandies flourishing among early 19th century Native Americans, in Soviet Latvia, in Africa, throughout the African-American diaspora, among women, and in the art world.
Moving beyond historical and fictional accounts of dandies, this volume juxtaposes theoretical models with evocative images and descriptions of clothing in order to link sartorial self-construction with artistic, social, and political self-invention. Taking into consideration the vast changes in thinking about identity in the academy, Dandies provides a compelling study of dandyism's destabilizing aesthetic enterprise.
Contributors: Jennifer Blessing, Susan Fillin-Yeh, Rhonda Garelick, Joe Lucchesi, Kim Miller, Robert E. Moore, Richard J. Powell, Carter Ratcliffe, and Mark Allen Svede.

Chapter 1

The Layered Look
Coco Chanel and Contagious Celebrity

Rhonda K. Garelick

Fashion murdered dandyism, claims Roland Barthes: “To inoculate contemporary clothing with a bit of dandyism, via Fashion, was fatally to destroy dandyism itself. . . . Fashion was, in a sense, given the task of neutralizing dandyism. . . . [I]t is in fact Fashion that killed dandyism.”¹ While Barthes was right to see the profound connection between modern fashion and dandyism, he was wrong about the fatal nature of their confrontation. Rather than kill dandyism, fashion actually helped escort it from its nineteenth-century incarnation as a social and literary movement into its twentieth-century version: modern media celebrity.² We can attribute a large part of fashion’s role in this transition to the work of legendary French couturiere Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. Chanel’s designs extended and developed dandyism’s innovations, ushering women into dandyism’s all-male inner circle. By borrowing heavily from dandyism’s vocabulary of performance, Chanel revolutionized the way we perceive the female body.

The Dandy

Long before the rock star and the motion picture idol, the dandy had made an art form of personality. As both a literary and historical movement (there are famous fictional dandies, such as Huysmans’s Des Esseintes or Wilde’s Dorian Gray, as well as famous real dandies, such as George “Beau” Brummell or the Comte Robert de Montesquiou) dandyism necessarily merges the realms of art and the everyday, blurring distinctions between the natural and the unnatural. Dandyism also dismantles social distinctions by creating an aristocracy of the self that does not require nobility of birth. The dandy exists in a parallel hierarchy based on personal attributes rather than genealogy or property.

British-born Beau Brummell (1778–1840) enjoyed meteoric social success despite his common birth. Brummell’s theatrical originality won him the affection of the royal family and effectively launched dandyism in both England and France. His reign coincided with the Regency of the future King George IV (1795–1820), who was for a time Brummell’s closest friend.

Brummell was known for his impeccable grooming, his exquisitely simple and elegant clothes, and his androgynous appeal. His meticulousness was such that he was known to have hired three glove makers at once: one to make the palm, one for the fingers, and one for the thumb. Brummell’s greatest achievement, however, lay in his ability to provoke surprise, desire, and envy, while, on his part, evincing no emotion at all. According to Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Brummell’s social power was such that he could sometimes persuade creditors to overlook steep gambling debts merely by agreeing to greet them publicly in the street. Presumably, the social status acquired by any man whom Brummell deigned to acknowledge would be far more valuable than money.³

But, of course, Brummell was not just a famous historical person, he was the inspiration for much of the literary dandyism of the nineteenth century. Balzac and Barbey wrote of him; Lord Byron was fascinated by him, as were Benjamin Disraeli, Bulwer Lytton, Carlyle, Stendhal, and Baudelaire. Dandyist literature, in turn, inspired more young men to adopt dandyist ways, creating a cycle of life and art imitating each other. As a result, a real, historical dandy such as Brummell or later, Baudelaire is always part literary or theatrical creation. In similar fashion, a dandyist text is often a striking blend of purely fictive and “real” or biographical elements. Balzac, for example, in his nonfiction essay “Traité de la vie élégante” (Treatise on elegant living), includes an “interview” with Beau Brummell.⁴ In it, he recounts verbatim advice he claims Brummell gave him on how to write and how to dress. The interview lends convincing journalistic flavor to the treatise (originally published in the right-wing newspaper La Mode in 1830), but in reality, Balzac had never interviewed or even met Brummell. Balzac’s description of his meeting with Brummell, then, adds verisimilitude to the text while turning it to pure fiction. This is the quintessentially dandy-ist touch, an extradiagetic reference that adds an air of authenticity and turns out to be pure fabrication.

The Dandy and the Media Celebrity or Star

As the twentieth century neared, dandyism’s spectacle of a unique male personality performing for an elite began losing ground. Mechanical reproduction and the rise of mass culture turned personality into a reproducible—and often female—commodity. Dandyist uniqueness and unreproducibility ceded to the thrill of the new stardom and its mass reproduction of performers’ likenesses and biographies.⁵ Cabaret stars such as Yvette Guilbert, La Goulue, and Loie Fuller captivated all social classes, even the aristocracy, especially in France. At the newly popular department stores, shoppers could buy clothes modeled after the costumes of their favorite performers. The emergence of cinema only intensified the new lure of celebrity culture.

Media stardom is a complex, multilayered phenomenon that resembles dandyism. “The star phenomenon,” writes Richard Dyer, “consists of everything that is publicly available about stars. . . . [A] star’s image is also what people say or write about him or her, as critics or commentators. . . . Star images are always extensive, multimedia, intertextual.”⁶ Unlike mere actors, stars always bring with them an extra layer of personal narrative that supplements whatever role they portray on stage or screen. Personal anecdote merges, in other words, with public, artistic creation. John Wayne, for example, always played “John Wayne,” along with his various fictional movie roles. Katharine Hepburn also played a version of her famous, offscreen self while also portraying different characters. Modern fashion or haute couture partakes of the same layering effect, as we shall soon see.

Fashion

Fashion’s distinguishing characteristic is its changeability. Unlike simple dress or costume, fashion consists of a sequence of relatively rapid changes in style. Historians find fashion’s roots in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, when a hitherto unknown realism began to appear in European art. The depiction of more natural, recognizable clothed human forms in early Renaissance painting and sculpture set new visual standards for dress. For perhaps the first time in history, one could find sartorial inspiration in art. In other words, one could try to look like a figure in a picture.⁷ Like dandyism, then, fashion results from a curious admixture of the quotidian and the aesthetic realms. Both dandyism and fashion reify the body; both conflate the seduction of the human with the lure of the inanimate world.⁸

But fashion as we know it today, the “haute couture” associated with individual designers’ names, did not take shape until the second half of the nineteenth century, when Englishman Charles Frederick Worth opened his Paris studio in 1857. Other famous couturiers from the period include Mme Jeanne Pacquin, who began designing in 1891, and Paul Poiret, who started gaining recognition around 1908.

Haute couture was (and, in a sense, still is) an industry devoted to extremely wealthy women. By the second decade of this century, however, mass production of clothing in factories had become common, allowing secretaries and housemaids to wear copies or “knockoffs” of couture creations.⁹ Ironically then, haute couture, an elite art form, wound up creating something of a democracy of style, weakening clear-cut visual distinctions of social class that had long been held in place by sumptuary laws.¹⁰ Like dandyism, then, fashion is both profoundly elitist and oddly democratic.

Coco Chanel

Richard Klein has astutely noted the connection between dandyism and the work of Coco Chanel, as well as Chanel’s status as a transitional figure: “I think the secret of Chanel’s genius was that she was the last dandy of the nineteenth century, and in becoming one, destroyed . . . the nineteenth-century woman; she invented the woman of modernity.”¹¹ What created this transition—from dandy to “woman of modernity,” in Klein’s words—is precisely media celebrity, which both transformed dandyism and made a revolutionary of Chanel.

Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel was not the first famous fashion designer. She was not even the first famous female fashion designer: among those preceding her were the Callot sisters, Madeleine Vionnet, and Madame Palmyre. Chanel was, however, the first celebrity fashion designer, the first couturiere to insert her own personality into her designs so powerfully that “wearing a Chanel” turned into “wearing Chanel,” wearing the persona constructed a priori by the designer for herself. In this way, Chanel made use of the layering of extratextual, extra-diagetic narrative characteristic of the media celebrity. While John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn “wore” their own personae in all their films, the Chanel customer acquired some of the designer’s persona. In this way, Chanel’s clients wound up wearing Chanel’s own life story right along with that little black dress or gold-buttoned bouclé suit.

But in Chanel’s case, the layering effect of media celebrity is more complex and pervasive than it is in the realm of strict performance. The stage or screen performer gestures only toward his or her own autobiographical—even if fictional—narrative. But as a fashion designer Chanel did not merely embody her own stardom, she conferred it upon others. Those who wore her clothes acquired a bit of Coco’s narrative through a process we might call theatrical, contagious celebrity. Chanel’s longtime assistant Lilou Marquand wrote of her employer, “[M]ore than dresses to sell, she had a message to transmit. Her dream was to take a woman off the street and transform her.”¹² Chanel’s close friend Maurice Sachs wrote of the same phenomenon:

Chanel . . . created a feminine personage of a sort . . . never before seen. Her influence spread far beyond the limits of her work; her name was fixed in people’s minds. . . . She represented a new being. . . . [S]he exercised [a reign] over all the women of society. . . . They talked of her in all Europe, in all America. Her fame spread over the world.¹³

That “new being,” born of the Chanel narrative, finds its roots in the early years of an orphaned peasant girl from the French provinces.

Chanel’s Self-Invention

Gabrielle Chanel was born in 1883 in Saumur-sur-Loire, the illegitimate daughter of a peasant woman and a peddler. When her mother died in 1895, Gabrielle’s father abandoned the family and left his daughter to the care of the Sisters of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Mary, at their orphanage in the town of Aubazine. It was the nuns who would teach Gabrielle to sew.¹⁴

After leaving the orphanage, Gabrielle had a brief, teen-aged career singing in the local café-concerts. Soon after, Coco, as she came to be known (after a song she sang about a rooster who crows “Ko-ko-ri-ko”), discovered her talent for design and opened a small hat shop. From millinery she moved on to dress design, relying routinely on the financial help of the many wealthy lovers she learned to attract. By the age of thirty-one, Chanel had established h...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction: New Strategies for a Theory of Dandies
• 1 The Layered Look: Coco Chanel and Contagious Celebrity
• 2 “Indian Dandies”: Sartorial Finesse and Self-Presentation along the Columbia River, 1790–1855
• 3 Dandyism and Abstraction in a Universe Defined by Newton
• 4 Dandies, Marginality, and Modernism: Georgia O’Keeffe, Marcel Duchamp, and Other Cross-Dressers
• 5 “The Dandy in Me”: Romaine Brooks’s 1923 Portraits
• 6 Claude Cahun, Dandy Provocateuse
• 7 Cross-Dressing at the Crossroads: Mimicry and Ambivalence in Yoruba Masked Performance
• 8 Sartor Africanus
• 9 Twiggy and Trotsky: Or, What the Soviet Dandy Will Be Wearing This Next Five-Year Plan
• Epilogue: Quentin Crisp: The Last Dandy?
• Contributors
• Index