Reclaiming Brummell

I know I’m a little bit late to this, but about a week ago the writer Alexandra Rowland wrote a long twitter thread criticizing Beau Brummell. This thread was then adapted into an article for Esquire. The author raised some good points but I also think they missed some important aspects of Brummell’s legacy. Seeing as I’m a Brummell buff and I even sell the beautiful Fratelli Mocchia di Coggiola Brummell shirt depicted above in my shop, I wrote this response as a letter to the editor at Esquire.com. They never responded, so I’m publishing it here on my blog. I hope it adds a different and valuable perspective to the discussion.

Dear Editor,

My name is Nathaniel Adams and I’m the co-author - with the photographer Rose Callahan - of “I am Dandy: The Return of the Elegant Gentleman,” and “We Are Dandy: The Elegant Gentleman Around the World.” I don’t think it’s unfair of me to say that I’m one of the world’s experts on the subject of dandies and dandyism. I gave a TEDx talk on fashion and free speech a few years ago and I’ll be speaking at Disneyland in a few weeks on the subject of Style and Empowerment. 

It is in the spirit of this last topic that I would like to respectfully respond to Alexandra Rowland’s vigorous takedown of Beau Brummell. I’m afraid that their characterization of him as a stuffy uptight conservative misses the point of why he matters and why his legacy can be seen as a radical and pro-experimental one, rather than the opposite, as they argue. Personally I’m a relatively flamboyant dresser who embraces lots of color and the other things Rowland claims Brummell tore out from the masculine sartorial vocabulary, and I - and many of the hundreds of dandies from all over the world from Tokyo to Johannesburg whom I’ve interviewed (who range from conservative to flamboyant in their personal tastes but all bespeak elegance and beauty in male style,) - see Brummell as a kind of mascot of sartorial liberation rather than a historical gatekeeper of conformity.

Beau Brummell was indeed a jackass by many standards - he was rude, he took great pleasure in cutting people down, he liked to start rumors about things like him polishing his boots with champagne, and he did set the style of his time and was fanatical in his fastidiousness. Whether you see value or vice in these things is a matter of degree and opinion. The dandies of the Regency were admittedly pretty frat-boyish  - they spent most of their time gorging themselves on food and wine, gambling away fortunes, going to prizefights, and visiting prostitutes. But to say that men were expressing themselves more through their style before Beau Brummell is exactly backward. Before Brummell, men were mainly expressing wealth and social status through their jewels and fine threads, beautiful and glittering though they may have been. After Brummell the clothes, their cut, and their arrangement became the actual medium of expression, rather than a mere billboard for affluence. Brummell turned dressing itself into an art and intellectual exercise in its own right. And since then Brummell’s radical use of masculine elegance as a kind of power has been employed to great effect by all kinds of men - including and especially marginalized ones - from Oscar Wilde and Jack Johnson in the last two centuries to the Sapeurs of Brazzaville and the Mr. Erbil club of Iraqi Kurdistan today. 

Rowland has most of their facts on Brummell straight - and I agree with their assessment that he was probably a big old jerk - but I think they've missed what the actual legacy of Brummell as an icon is and what his name and gift for innovation (even if it was an innovation of subtlety,) means to men like me and many others around the world who strive to proudly carry on the tradition of dandyism as a radical sartorial choice. 

I'm glad to see so many different people debating the significance of someone like Brummell and the meaning of dandyism, but it can be tempting to make a 200 year-old historical figure into a caricature or easy target for blame because of his unlikeable personality or without reckoning with the broader implications of the legacy of his life's work. I remain hopeful that people like me and Rowland who clearly share a belief in and love of sartorial self-expression can continue to have meaningful discussions on who deserves what place in the historical pantheon of fashion while simultaneously uniting agains the Athlesiure Class that threatens to drown us all in drab spandex.

Ever yours,

Nathaniel “Natty” Adams 

Whose Dandyism?

Jules Barbey D'Aurevilly, the first man to put on paper a critical analysis of dandyism as a cultural phenomenon opens one of the chapters of his work On Dandyism and George Brummell with the frank admission that "Dandysim is almost as difficult a thing to describe as it is to define." This difficulty, at once one of the most intriguing and frustrating things about studying dandyism, has persisted and animated the pens of writers as diverse and accomplished as Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, Cyril Connolly, and W.H. Auden.

D'Aurevilly, as the title of his essay-cum-biography suggests, took Brummell as his main subject, holding him up as the prime example of a dandy and therefore the embodiment of dandyism as an idea realized. He was not wrong in doing this, although one trap D'Aurevilly never fell into was to assume the fallacy that because Beau Brummell was the ideal dandy all other dandies must therefore follow the style of Beau Brummell. This yawning logical gap neatly avoided by the thoughtful and observant Frenchman has all too often been leapt across (back and forth and back again without the least attempt at original thinking,) by those who would, 200 years after Brummell, declare that dandyism must follow the sartorial principles laid down by that prime mover. There could hardly be anything less dandyish (or more humorless,) than such undeviating idolatry, and one would hope that anyone as spirited and clever as the Beau would have little regard for those who would hold so fast and dearly to what was, at the time, a fiercely independent style.

"Dandyism" is not a synonym for Beau Brummell's personal sartorial philosophy or taste. He did not proselytize like some stylish messiah, telling people that he had developed a creed called dandyism and there was a proper way to practice, preach, and worship it. Dandy was a name other people gave to Brummell (as well as plenty of other men at the time whose individual style bore little resemblance to the Beau's elegance-through-simplicity,) and dandyism was a term that was used to refer to a considerably broader set of ideas than Brummell's own notions about the proper way to dress. Brummell is the exemplar of dandyism not because he was objectively the best dressed (although he may well have been,) or because his own personal style was the correct way to dress (although it may well have been,) but because he was the most radical in his style, the most original in his lifestyle and personality, and the most successful in its promotion.

Brummell's oft-quoted remark that "If John Bull turns round to look after you, you are not well dressed: but either too stiff, too tight, or too fashionable," is an excellent summation of his own professed sartorial philosophy (albeit clearly tongue-in-cheek if not a downright lie - Brummell quite obviously did want people to turn to look at him and this was exactly the kind of flippant remark he was fond of making without really meaning,) and it makes reference to one of the key elements of dandyism - that style is more important than fashion. But it is not a definition of dandyism by any means and it is certainly not a dogmatic rule that could stand up on its own 200 years later. If this alone were the definition of dandyism, applied today it would form a loop big enough to accommodate any man in a nicely-cut but determinately not-flashy suit - from James Bond to David Beckham. Not only that, but it would exclude many of the men who came after Brummell and who are now widely considered to be dandies: Count D'Orsay, Baudelaire, Count Montesquiou, Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Stephen Tennant, Cecil Beaton, Evander Berry Wall, Lucius Beebe, Bunny Roger, and Tom Wolfe. It seems to me that any definition which would exclude such men for their sometime-flamboyance isn't a definition worth having. 

It is true that Brummell's own style was notable for its restraint, simplicity, and anti-flamboyance. It may have been a style which favored subtlety, but this doesn't mean that it was, relatively speaking, a subtle style. It was, in fact, impressive, radical, and aggressive in its simplicity - a stunning reaction to the foppery of his time. Studying Brummell's life, there's every reason to suspect that if he had arrived at a time when the fashion was to dress in a subdued or restrained manner he would have pursued a bolder aesthetic in his own dress. 

Defining what dandyism is is a much greater task - one which I hope to achieve in my book. To be sure, dandyism is about dressing well and pursuing a life of elegance, wit, and originality. But one thing it certainly isn't is an unwavering allegiance to Brummell's (or Wilde's, or Loos', or Horsely's) personal ideas about clothing. Dandyism is a far too great subject to be reduced to one man's thoughts about dress. Rather, it is partly a way of thinking about dress - or, more specifically, the belief that dress is something which should be carefully thought about, with beauty, elegance, and originality as paramount considerations. And one should never forget that dress is only one criteria of dandyism and that a monkey in a suit - or David Beckham - will never truly be a dandy. 

Despite all my kvetching about arguments from two century-old authority I'll still let D'Aurevilly have the last word:

"Those who see things only from a narrow point of view have imagined [dandyism] to be especially the art of dress, a bold and felicitous dictatorship in the matter of clothes and exterior elegance. That it most certainly is, but much more besides. Dandyism is a complete theory of life and its material is not its only side. It is a way of existing, made up entirely of shades, as is always the case in very old and very civilized societies, where comedy becomes so rare, and the properties hardly have the better of boredom."    

The Chap: The Prince of Whales

The following is an excerpt from an article I wrote for the Chap Magazine on the fat dandy Prince George IV:

...While the crowned heads of Europe were sweating at the thought of separation from their royal torsos, George IV, then Prince of Wales, saw a singular opportunity presented by the revolution in France. Along with the refugee noblemen arriving at Dover came some of the greatest unemployed chefs in all of Europe, and the hungry Prince was ready to put them through their paces. The aristocratic English diet at the time was centered on heroic portions of beef, and the Prince himself, in his typical pre-Brumellian attire of pink and white silk coats and waistcoats, spangled breeches, lacy-sleeved shirts, all embroidered with heraldic devices and flowers, dotted with silver and precious stones, and treated to generous applications of colorful foil, genuine diamonds, and French paste, attended regular dinners at Covent Garden’s  “Sublime Society of Beef-Steaks,” at which he and his vulgarian crew of noblemen would put away several pounds of cow flesh washed down with an ocean of arrack punch....

...It’s no wonder that by the age of fifty the Prince weighed 17 stone, ballooning to over 22 stone by the time he died. He did his best to control his 50-inch waist with whalebone corsets and stays, but it would seem that most of his astounding wardrobe, which included hundreds of suits, thousands of shirts, dozens of elaborate military uniforms, silk bathing gowns, white beaver robes for lounging, astrakhan caps in the Polish style, underpants of black silk, muffs made of Muscovy sable and sea otter, doeskin pantaloons, scarlet flannel waistcoats lined in calico, muslin-and-gold woven handkerchiefs costing about £1800 each at today’s rates, velvet nightcaps, boots with gold and silver tassels, and a dozen different jeweled eyeglass cases, along with thousands of snuffboxes, brooches, clasps, and rings, was outgrown at a ludicrous rate.The impression of a human disco ball – spherical and covered in diamonds – isn’t too far off from the truth. George, now King, spent his later years being helped into the ocean to bathe (infrequently,) by a lever and pulley-operated harness system installed at the Brighton Pavilion and shoved up ramps onto unfortunate horses in order to take exercise (even less frequently.)...