A look at the phenomenon of the dandy from Regency England to the contemporary Congolese Sapeurs, with stops at Wodehouse, Wilde, Grant, and more The dandy is not just an elaborately or even well-dressed man, nor is he an exclusively English phenomenon. He is something far more universal and intriguing, and this study explores his cultural significance. It starts with Beau Brummell, acknowledged as the very first dandy, a man whose ancestors had been servants, yet who invented a new paradigm of courtesy, wit, independence, and elegance to lord over the aristocrats of England. Brummell died in exile, forgotten and impoverished—the best dandies often die in debt. But his image lived on, to haunt and inspire generations around the world, from the boulevards of Paris and St. Petersburg in the 1830s to the studios of Hollywood a century later. Byron, Disraeli, Bulwer, Pushkin, Chopin, Delacroix, Balzac, Baudelaire, Wilde, Proust, Boni de Castellane, Hugo von Hofmannstahl, Beerbohm, Noël Coward, Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, Vladimir Nabokov, Ortega y Gassett, Mikhael Bulgakov, Evelyn Waugh, Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Wolfe, Nick Foulkes—all were bedazzled by the image of the dandy.

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.

Dandyism's queerness, both in the traditional sense of its strangeness and oddness regarding conventionality and in the contemporary sense of resisting and contesting imprisoning gender and sexual labels, including homosexuality, underscores reading Machado and his poetry differently. Given the poet's fondness for the visual arts, as well as the pictorial quality of his verse, the image of the museum functions as an appropriate phenomenological space where to house, organize, categorize and display Machado's diverse poetry in order to examine and analyze the desires of this dandy period."--Jacket.

Don Juan , Byron's best poem, is a sensational radical satire. It uses the legend of Don Juan to expose the male fantasies behind Romanticism and nineteenth-century public culture. Critics feared that the poem was a 'manual for vice' and would corrupt society. Should England's best selling author have been censored? This book looks at how Europe's most famous literary celebrity shows his dark side in Don Juan , a canonical long poem and a pop culture masterpiece.