The Chap - Thomas Crown Affair

Excerpts from my article on The Thomas Crown Affair in the most recent issue of The Chap magazine.

...he makes a series of telephone calls to various men in skinny ties, pork pie hats, and sunglasses. It is clear to the viewer at this point that he’s either masterminding a heist or managing a ska band… 

...He has a telephone in his sauna, a hidden bar in his bookshelf, and a god-awful plaid sofa set that looks like it was upholstered with Walkers shortbread boxes. He serves brandy in snifters the size of his head and smokes cigars the size of…well, very large cigars indeed. He’s prone to maniacal spasms of laughter, he likes to drink scotch while looking in the mirror, and he owns a bright orange bathrobe which suggests that he may have skinned a Muppet… 

...His beach attire includes a safety-orange shirt unbuttoned to somewhere near his bellybutton, a pair of denim shorts with a two-inch inseam, and a big gold medallion lost in his blonde chest hair like a Spanish doubloon beneath the sand…

More Press for "I am Dandy"

Last Sunday, October 20th, we had our second New York book event at Against Nature, the shop which I manage. As always, Rose has an excellent summary with beautiful photos over at The Dandy Portraits.

The big event of the night was when legendary New York Times street style photographer Bill Cunningham showed up and took some photos of the party. Rose and I were thrilled yesterday to find ourselves on the Evening Hours page of the Sunday Times.

An excerpt from the book - the profile of Dr. Andre Churchwell, pictured above, third from left - is featured in this month's issue of The Chap, along with a profile of yours truly! You can't read it online so you'd better go order a copy.

Esquire's blog did a very nice write-up of the book.

And GQ's blog featured a few of my favorite looks from the book.

Our friend at the Fine Young Gentleman wrote about the Bergdorf Party.

And Buffalo Dandy wrote a nice review of the book.

I'm sure there will be more press coming, especially because Rose and I both have a few events coming up:

On Tuesday, November 5th I'll be reading from the book at the Freerange Nonfiction Reading Series at Culturefix on the Lower East Side.

The following night, Wednesday, November 6th, I'll be judging Literary Death Match at Cake Shop.

And the following night, Thursday, November 7th, Rose and I will be signing books and celebrating with our friends (and newlyweds!) Matt and Enrique at The Fine and Dandy Shop. RSVP now!

And on November 18th, an exhibition of Rose's photographs will open at the National Arts Club, with a party to celebrate.

We hope to see you all in the coming weeks. Stay dandy!

The Chap: Bohemians

In the latest issue of The Chap, I discuss bohemianism - the ultimate anti-dandyism. Below is a small excerpt.

As the great decadent siècle came to its fin, the influence of the dandies had waned. Oscar’s ignominious tumble down the ladder leading from stars back to gutter had soiled the archetypal aesthete’s velvet reputation – to be an elegant man was to be suspect, to be an elegant artist unconscionable. So it was that a new generation of poetry and paint-brush poseurs had to forge a new fashion which bespoke their anti-establishment attitudes. The green carnation in one’s lapel was old hat sartorial subversion – the new subversion required actual old hats, preferably big floppy ones of Continental provenance.

Into this tightly-laced world leapt the Bohemians with gypsy-inspired bravado. Their de facto suzerain, the painter Augustus John, led the way:
 But now a new kind of exhibitionism was born; in its way, as exact and conscientious as my father’s cult of the clothes-brush; a kind of inverted Dandysim. If my shoes were unpolished, they were specially made to my own design. If I abjured a collar, the black silk scarf that took its place was attached with an antique silver brooch which came from Greece. The velvet additions to my coat were no tailor’s but my own afterthought, nor were my gold earrings heirlooms, for I bought them myself: the hat I wore, of a quality that only age can impart…My abundant hair and virgin beard completed an ensemble which, if harmonious in itself, often failed to recommend me to strangers. 

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.)... 

The Chap: Lesser-Known Dandies

The following are some excerpts from an article I wrote on lesser-known dandies for The Chap Magazine:

...Robert Coates, son of a wealthy English sugar planter in Antigua, came to England with dreams of being an actor. But before Coates ever took to the boards, he made his theatrical debut on the streets of London, glittering from boot to hat in his heirloom diamonds and, when not marching around town with the proud stride of a man trying to catch up with his nose, riding in a two-seater open-topped chariot – the convertible of its day. The vehicle was gilded and shaped like a clam, and he sat up in it, Venus-like, and looked out over the giant silver-plated rooster affixed to the yoke....

...Evander Berry Wall was a New York Gilded Age socialite who boasted that he'd gambled away two million-dollar inheritances speculating on horseflesh at racetracks around the world. His memoir is a catalog of million-dollar friends, thousand-dollar dinners, and long nights spent in champagne-soaked evening clothes...Wall wore mad plaids and was famous for owning 5000 neckties, which he wore “a yard long, wound around twice, and knotted into a bow.”

......[Jacque] Rigaut’s obsession was suicide, a fixation and artistic calling which remained with him until the day he died. He declared with proud Wildean flippancy that “suicide should be a vocation,” and then worked at it until an early retirement at the age of 30...His oeuvre is suitably slim for an obscure dandy, but his legacy in this grand company is assured with the boastfully immortal words: “Try, if you can, to arrest a man who travels with suicide in his buttonhole.”...

The Chap: Seersucker Social

The following is an excerpt from an article I wrote for The Chap magazine about Washington D.C.'s Dandies and Quaintrelles 2011 Seersucker Social. The beautiful photographs are provided by Rose Callahan of The Dandy Portraits:

...For the Capitol city of a superpower nation, Washington DC is sadly insular, non-cosmopolitan, and aesthetically conservative. The suits are gray or navy, the ties are red or blue, and not since the pith-helmeted and moustachioed Teddy Roosevelt has a president looked like anything other than a businessman. The summer heat can be stifling, adding to the soporific atmosphere of the city.

            It was with the admirable aim of introducing his notoriously staid home city to a form of more “refined leisure” that Eric Brewer founded Dandies & Quaintrelles. The group is dedicated to organizing events which embody an egalitarian elegance worthy of the Bill of Rights...

...Seersucker is by no means a new addition to the pantheon of summer fabrics. The word arrived in the English Language from the Hindi sirsakar, which in turn got it from the Persian shiroshakar, by way of Tamerlane's 14th-century invasion. The original means “milk and sugar,” a reference to the alternating textures of the puckered stripes of cotton. The fabric is most commonly found in white with another color in eighth-inch vertical Bengal stripes. It is less frequently found in gingham checks, and I once nearly fainted in admiring awe at a white-on-white striped seersucker dinner jacket with a built-up linen shawl collar and turn-back cuffs. Because the fabric is so light and crisp (holding a crease much better than plain linen,) it's perfect for summer suits, usually half-lined......At the very start of the twentieth century, seersucker began its journey to become one of this country's best-loved fabrics. Although the British wore seersucker in the empire's equatorial colonies, its popularity boomed in the heat of the American South. It soon became a staple of the Southern Gentleman's wardrobe, and the traditional uniform for going to the Kentucky Derby, getting tanked on Mint Juleps, and losing your son's college fund on a long-shot. The fabric later gained in popularity when those sly young Ivy-Leaguers appropriated the garments as separate pieces rather than full suits. 

Even the hallowed halls of the Senate occasionally see seersucker. Once a year, both lady and gentleman Senators celebrate Seersucker Thursday, a tradition started by Republican Senator Trent Lott. The event harks back to a time before air-conditioning, when the heat was so punishing that sweat-covered legislators, probably driven mad, did things like enact prohibition....

The Chap: Jack Johnson

The following is an excerpt from my article on world heavyweight dandy Jack Johnson for the Chap Magazine:

...Jack Johnson was now the first black World Heavyweight Champion. He had everything but modesty: he wore patterned bow ties with a wing collar, bespoke suits in large windowpane checks, coats with wide fur lapels, a diamond stick pin, pearl shirt studs, and rings the size of plums. He carried an ivory-handled cane and always wore a jaunty hat, be it pork pie, boater, or trilby. His white girlfriends would be dressed to match in sable and mink. He drove sports cars at top speed, once causing a white police officer to fine him fifty dollars. Johnson peeled a hundred from a wad, and gave it to the officer, who stammered that he didn’t have change. Johnson told him not to worry about the change, because he’d be speeding on his way back, too.

People clamored for the former undefeated Heavyweight Champion Jim Jeffries to come out of retirement and wipe the smile off Johnson’s face, and finally public opinion and the promise of a fortune brought Jeffries off of his Alfalfa farm and back into the ring. Johnson wiped the mat with him on July 4^th, 1910, and the next day race riots erupted across America.White America finally had its revenge when Johnson was arrested on Federal “white slave” trafficking charges for taking a white prostitute across state lines.... 

The Chap: Benjamin Disraeli

The following is an excerpt from an article I wrote on Benjamin Disraeli for The Chap Magazine:

...Byron famously said that the most important men of his generation were Beau Brummell, himself, and Napoleon. If ever there was a man who embodied this trinity, it was Benjamin Disraeli, who achieved success first as dandy, then author, then politician.

Disraeli’s friendship with the famous dandy Count d'Orsay was his first step on the social ladder: “D'Orsay attacked me yesterday in Bond St. attired with a splendor I cannot describe, so dishevelled were his curls, so brilliant his bijouteries and the shifting tints of his party-colored costume. He knows who I am.” He boasted: “I've become this year very popular with the dandies. D'Orsay took a fancy to me, and they take their tone from him... I'm as popular with first-rate men as I'm hated by the second.”
He was soon quaffing claret and exchanging bon mots with the fashionable few, having affairs with married women, and dazzling London with his showy costumes and exotic Jewish looks. He wore velvet trousers and jackets, shirts with ruffles, flashy colored waistcoats, and glittering jewelry, including gold chains strung across his chest. He was famous for his perfect jet-black curls, particularly his dramatic forelock, one of the few pieces of his hair to stay with him to the end. One man remembered him thusly:
             "There was something irresistibly comic in the young man dressed in the fantastic, coxcombical costume he then affected – velvet coat of an original cut thrown wide open, and ruffles to its sleeves, shirt collars turned down in Byronic fashion, an elaborately embroidered waistcoat whence issued voluminous folds of frill, and shoes adorned with red rosettes – his black hair pomatumed and elaborately curled, and his person redolent of perfume..."

The Chap: Palm Beach

The following is an excerpt from my article on the Palm Beach style for the Chap Magazine's October/November 2011 issue:

...While on assignment in Palm Beach for LIFE Magazine in 1958, French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson, reporting on a high-society charity ball, said “They have the poise to appear like this. They can wear fancy dress and feel natural.” 

The comment is more complimentary of the matrons of Florida’s foremost luxury resort than any one of Mr. Cartier-Bresson’s photographs is. There isn’t a smile to be seen in any of the snapshots, despite captions describing drooling poolside octogenarians as enjoying themselves or making the dubious claim that the sour-faced woman on the aptly-named shopping boulevard Worth Street is actually waiting for something as human as a friend. If the sequin-and-feathered women in the photograph of the charity ball are at their most natural, then they must be made of igneous rock.

Palm Beach has been a playboy’s (or, indeed, playgirl’s) paradise for over 100 years now. The resort’s fashions, as Cartier-Bresson suggests, have always been loud enough to demand a certain muted bearing from their owners. Brash color has been the basis of the Palm Beach look for much of its existence. The men wear trousers of flamingo pink, chartreuse, or lime green, suit jackets of fire-engine red and safety orange, and velvet slippers with embroidered toes. The wives keep chromatic pace in near-neon leggings and light blouses, necks ringed with the most arresting Hermes, Charvet, and Pucci scarves. The mistresses wear bikinis, if anything, and the children, like the help, are considered best unseen... 

The Chap: The Style of Politics

The following is an excerpt of an article I wrote for the Chap Magazine's February/March 2012 issue:

...When Winston Churchill dismissed Mohandas Gandhi as “a half-naked, seditious fakir,” Gandhi, rather than describe the Prime Minister as a bloated imperialist in pinstripes, explained that he wore his loincloth as “the symbol of India's distress.” The sans-culottes of the French Revolution took their name because they wore long pants rather than the fashionable knee-breeches of the bourgeoisie (two decades later, the arch-dandy Beau Brummell made long pants de riguer fashion throughout Europe.) In the English Civil War Parliamentarians were called “Roundheads” for their close-cropped hair, in contrast to the foppish curls of the Royalists, first as an epithet and then taken up by the Parliamentarians in defiance. The song “Yankee Doodle,” (one of the first recorded uses of the word dandy,) was originally sung by the red-coated British Soldiers (called “Lobsterbacks” by the colonists,) who mocked the colonists' slovenly appearance; saying they were stupid enough to think a feather could transform them into fashionable “Macaroni”-wigged dandies. The ragged Continental militias soon claimed the song as their own.
            A different sartorial radicalism is seen in the struggle for black civil rights. At the beginning of the 20^th Century, a popular minstrel character was “The Dandy Colored Coon,” mocked for trying to dress above his station, looking ridiculous in a battered top hat, cracked monocle, and patched tailcoat. In subsequent years, entertainers like the immaculately-attired Duke Ellington - “Harlem's Aristocrat” - challenged this stereotype by dressing better than their white audiences.
            A crucial aspect of the protests of Martin Luther King was the assertion of dignity. For black Americans, whose ancestors had been sold naked as chattel, clothes were a symbol which affirmed their humanity. The image of black men and women in their Sunday best, led by Dr. King in his sack suit and fedora and Bayard Rustin in a thin knit tie and slim-lapel jacket, were striking. Malcom X, in his tab-collar shirt, tie clip, and sharp squared glasses looked like a serious-minded man who could cut you with the crease of his pants. These people demanded respect with their appearance and dignified manner...

The Chap: The Sapeurs

photo by Baudouin Mouanda

The following is an excerpt from an article I wrote for The Chap magazine's April/May 2011 issue on my trip to the Congo to meet The Sapeurs:

...I arrived in Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo armed with nothing but a white linen suit and a small French phrasebook. Having spent the autumn traveling in Europe, I'd wisely sent my linen beauty to Abu Dhabi with my mother. When I visited her, I picked it up and handed over the heavy wool, ready for my trip further toward the equator. I disembarked from the plane and was immediately taken aside, along with two non-black South Africans, told we needed someone to pick us up from the airport, and brusquely deprived of our passports. In a room with quite a few of the unsettlingly bored soldiers so common in Africa, a man with a smile like an out-of-tune keyboard slid up to us and gave us the “my friends, this is Africa” line before telling us about his friend outside who could pick us up for $50 each. Bribing someone at an African airport is something a paleface can brag about, but when you've already spent a good chunk of money on Ugandan moonshine and Cuban cigars, the novelty fades fast.

            I had come to Brazzaville to meet the Sapeurs: a group of dandies approaching the seriousness of a cult. Brazzaville is the capital of the Republic of Congo, which is not the dreaded Democratic Republic of Congo, although it lies directly across the strikingly fecal Congo River from the DRC's grey concrete capital, Kinshasa. It is an almost sure thing that the more disclaimers stuck on the front of a country the worse off it is and the less likely it is that any of the labels approximate the reality within its borders: the only thing worse than a “Democratic Republic” is a “People's Democratic Republic.” So, as far as countries with prefixes go, I could be worse off. Brazzaville is poor like most Central-African nations, and it went through a civil war several years ago, the evidence of which is still pock-marked on quite a few facades. This is the reason the United States State Department's profile of the country includes the delightful sentence “In March 2003, the government signed a peace accord with the Ninjas, and the country has remained stable and calm since the signing.”
            Like many people, I'd never heard of Brazzaville. The country itself was only brought to my attention by the Sapeurs. They are the members of an unofficial club called “Le SAPE,” which, in French, stands for “The Society for the Advancement of Elegant Persons.” Recently, a photo book called Gentlemen of Bacongo by the Italian photographer Daniele Tamagini was published to great acclaim. The cover is arresting: a black man in a bright pink suit with matching bowler hat and shoes, striding purposefully toward the camera down a dirt street with crumbling one-story buildings lining it, a cigar clamped tight in his theatrically scowling face. The pictures inside were astonishing: here were men in beautifully-fitted suits in the kind of bright colors which can only be pulled off with conviction by people with the blackest complexions. And they were living amongst squalor...

About "Lives of the Dandies"

For the past several years, I have been researching and writing a book about the lives of dandies of the past 200+ years, some famous, some obscure, all fascinating. The "Lives of the Dandies" blog is an opportunity to share snippets of my work, my research, and various dandy-related topics.

As an undergraduate at NYU, I wrote my senior thesis on Dandyism in the 20th Century, unknowingly setting out on what would later become for me a scholarly obsession. My undergraduate thesis, looking back on it, was just as half-cocked and unremarkable as one might expect. Around that time, I also wrote two articles for Dandyism.net: one on Beau Brummell's biographer Ian Kelly playing Brummell in an off-broadway play, and one on a dandyism discussion panel in New York City. That was the extent of my dandy-related output for some years.

However, while attending the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, I revisited my dandy obsession, completing a book-proposal and a substantial amount of content for the book. My proposal won the prestigious Lytton Fellowship, which awarded me a sizable grant to continue work on the book. Since then, I have been traveled the world writing and doing research - spending time on Savile Row speaking with world-famous tailors and cutters and looking through archives dating back to the Regency period, conducting interviews both in person and online with the likes of Stephen Fry, Gay Talese, Ian Kelly, and many others, reading hundreds of books, archived newspapers and magazines, meeting some of the most eccentric and extraordinary living dandies, and traveling as far as the Congo to spend a week with the famous Sapeurs.

Since my descent into the world of the dandy, which seems to stretch on through an ever-widening series of caves, canals, and boulevards with no end in sight, I have also become a regular writer for The Chap magazine on dandy-related subjects, the manager of the appropriately-named Against Nature bespoke atelier in New York, and a collaborator with Rose Callahan of The Dandy Portraits - a photo project which will ultimately become its own book. 

This blog is my opportunity to share a few of the bits and pieces I've either collected or generated on my journey. I hope you enjoy it.