Artist / Rebel / Dandy: Men of Fashion

Artist / Rebel / Dandy

This presentation celebrates exquisitely crafted personal ensembles and visual representations associated with individual dandies around the world. The featured personalities are grouped to suggest kinship across chronological and geographic borders under the themes of historians, connoisseurs, revolutionaries, romantics, and explorers.

The items on display represent the dandy as an international figure, but they also reflect the tableaux visible every day in RISD’s creative environment. They illustrate how experimental self-invention, the constructive urge to challenge the status quo, and the power of well-crafted clothing work together in the lives of these remarkable individuals who are at once artists, rebels, and dandies.

Bulletin of Fashion
1853

This plate from the trade journal Bulletin of Fashion illustrates men’s fashions from the mid-19th century. This period is often understood as the “great masculine renunciation,” as codified by psychologist J. C. Flugel in his 1932 text The Psychology of Clothes. Modern scholarship and research has revealed that while many men were lost in a sea of black suits, there were others, like those idealized in this fashion plate, who continued to relish the personal choice and liberty of dress.

Portrait of a dandy

Given the many characterizations that have proliferated from the early 19th century to today, no clear definitions emerge, yet these representations reveal that the dandy figure has continuously distinguished himself by conflating art, life, the body, and its accoutrements into a unified concern.

From literary to satirical and fine art portraits, this section presents a range of images of the fellow described by Thomas Carlyle in the 1830s as the “clothes-wearing man".

A Macaroni Dressing Room
1772

A Macaroni Dressing Room offers a window into the intimate world of the Macaroni, or the fashionable mid-18th-century Englishman who dressed and spoke in an affected manner. Oxford Magazine reported in 1770, “There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender, lately started up amongst us. It is called Macaroni.” From 1760 to 1800, hundreds of humorous prints, also known as drolls, were produced in London. The engravers and print sellers Mary & Matthew Darly became known as the “Macaroni Print-Shop” because of their merchandise. In this print, a fashionable printed-cotton dressing gown, or banyan, is worn by the sitter, who is having his wig powdered. The pictures on the wall show such topics as “Rotten Row Macaroni” and “Morning Devotion.” A banyan worn by the Prince of Wales faces this print.

Dandies having a treat
1818

Robert Cruikshank’s hand-colored etchings are ruthless, comical jabs at the dandy “species.” This grouping shows the dandy out and about in the city-at the tea shop, lounging in the opera box, on promenade-and always the butt of a joke. Cruikshank draws attention to the exaggerated components of fashionable menswear of the late 1810s, including corseted waists so severely constricted that one opera attendee has suffered a fainting fit, a malady typically perceived as feminine. With these caricatures, the Cruikshanks successfully imprinted on the popular imagination the image of the dandy as not only effete, but also one so devoted to appearance as to be devoid of brain and character. While to modern eyes these caricatures might suggest a prejudiced connection between dandyism, effeminacy, and homosexuality, such conflations were not made until after the criminal trial of Oscar Wilde, more than 70 years later.

"The dandy is often interpreted incorrectly as a fussy and flamboyant fellow. But when we look back at the original dandy - the early-nineteenth-century figure of Beau Brummell - we find a silhouette that is pared down, fitted, and uniform-like. This is precisely what I relate to as a menswear designer - clothing that is no less and no more than suits the role. In this way, I see the dandy’s place in today’s fashion culture as one who promotes simplicity and uniformity in men’s fashion. Menswear does not need to scream fashion. In fact, fashion should not even speak; the wearer should speak for the fashion".

Thom Browne, fashion designer

Beau Brummell

The figure of the dandy has evolved into diverse expressions over the course of two centuries, but always tracks back to the extremely neat, buttoned-up figure of George Bryan “Beau” Brummell (1778–1840). Born outside the aristocracy, Brummell forged a path to the heart of exclusive London society by deploying the emergent craft of tailoring, whose practitioners helped sculpt Brummell’s dashing and artful figure of wit and authority. Sadly, no garments are known to have survived from the wardrobe of this dandy forefather.

During his lifetime, Brummell’s example reverberated throughout England, France, and America. In the 200 years since Brummell’s heyday, the vision of the dandy has been reinterpreted numerous times, though the idea of bespoke clothes as a manifestation of thoughtful self-construction has remained constant.

Today’s dandies—respectful of the past while decidedly contemporary and intellectual in their sartorial pursuits—come closest to embodying the dandy as potently as Brummell did in their attention to craftsmanship and their use of clothing to instigate social change.

Charles Baudelaire
1863

In The Painter of Modern Life (1863) Charles Baudelaire took Barbey d’Aurevilly’s concept of the artist dandy a step further by focusing on his intellectual stance, positioning him as a rebel against mainstream society. Baudelaire declared the dandy to have an “aristocratic superiority of mind” and to be in possession of the “characteristic quality of opposition and revolt.” In Baudelaire’s vision, the artist dandy conveyed a spiritual message that transcended and opposed the vulgarities of the everyday world, paving the way for change.

Baron De Mayer in shirst sleeves
1903

Sitter Baron Adolph de Meyer and photographer Kasebier both published their work in Steichen’s Camera Work and were members of London’s Linked Ring photographic group. De Meyer has been described as “a dandy, a flaneur-an arbiter of taste and trends” who would follow his career as a fine art photographer with work as the staff photographer at Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines. In this portrait, one in a dream-like series captured by Kasebier, de Meyer appears in his shirt sleeves. While not shocking, at this time such a state of undress would have signaled a level of familiarity between the subject and photographer. This was indeed the case with de Meyer and Kasebier, who traveled in the same artistic circles.

Derby Hat
Dunlap & Company, hatter
Late 1800s

Worn by Byron Satterlee Hurlbut. Gift of the Estate of Mrs. Byron Satterlee Hurlbut

"The “idea” of the dandy has become something of a truism in discussions of nineteenth-century culture. His figure has perhaps been identified too readily by many critics and historians with grand and diffuse concepts of modernity: a catch-all cipher for literary, artistic, philosophical, sexual, and social revolution. In all of this theoretical supposition there is a danger that the empirical substance of dandyism—the grounded experience of fashionable masculinity out of which dandy figures were constructed—gets lost and contemporary meanings and relevance obscured".

Christopher Breward, fashion historian

Shirt
T. Hodgkinson
1900

Relatively unknwon today, the devonaire Francis J. Carolan was often discussed at the turn-of-the century in the same breath as industrialist Henry C. Frick and other dandy elites. Carolan was part of the fashionable set in San Francisco, where high-end shops procured shirts like these, crafted on London Pall Mall street, for the nouveau riche. Carolan’s taste for sumptuous fabrics was reported in The Sunday Oregonian on August 1, 1909: “These haberdasher artists whisper softly that Francis J. Carolan is especially fastidious about this part of his clothing,” “this part” here referring to his silk underwear. As evidenced by this suite of richly patterned and tinted cotton and silk shirts, Carolan did not shy from the bolder side of the dandy spectrum.
Worn by Francis J. Carolan. Anonymous gift. Monogrammed cotton plain weave, cotton novelty weave, and silk novelty weave

Shirt
A. Sulka & Company
ca. 1920

Because the skilled tying of the cravat was once the sign of a true dandy, the detachable collar was considered an unthinkable shortcut until about 1900, when younger dandies, like Francis Carolan, embraced the vogue. Detachable collars were worn later in the century by flaneurs such as Richard Merkin. While often associated with women’s fashion, the influential fashion publication Gazette du Bon Ton also included numerous style and comportment articles focusing on menswear. These articles frequently were penned by Roger Boutet de Monvel and illustrated by his brother, Bernard. From the 1910s to the 1920s, the series discussed topics including the history of neckwear as here.
Worn by G. H. Stone. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Edward L. Stone

"Indeed, if there is a purpose, an end use for the contemporary dandy’s bespoke pursuits, it may be just this: a slowing of time—time to craft the bespoke suit, to appreciate its finer points, to see it as part of a living history. Where Brummell sought modern masculinity via understated luxury, today’s young dandy would rather take a slow ride through the fast city, paving his road to the future and a set of new rules for dress and comportment in the technological age".

Laurie Anne Brewer, curator

Reproduction of Shoes
2010

The coarse wig, stiff button-down Brooks Brothers shirt, and paint-splattered Ferragamo shoes were Andy Warhol’s signature accessories, central to his carefully crafted public image. The wig, intentionally ill-fitting and dyed an unnatural silver color, obscured the artist’s baldness and, even better, drew attention to its function as a fashionable counterfeit. In a similar manner, Warhol twisted the conservative, old-school reference of the shirt to fit his avant-garde agenda.

Warhol wore luxurious brogue-style Ferragamo shoes in his studio, and in 2006 the Ferragamo family purchased a pair of his shoes at auction. In 2010 they issued a new limited-edition line that replicates Warhol’s originals, down to the paint spatters on the toe.

Worn by Andy Warhol. Gift of Museo Salvatore Ferragamo

An Emperor’s New Untangling
Sruli Recht
2012

Writing of the custom-made “An Emperor’s New Untangling” shirt, made of genetically modified spider silk, Reykjavik-based designer Sruli Recht poetically describes the process of knitting the suprisingly strong fibers into “the emperor’s new clothing, an undergarment to protect the hearts of an empire.” The “Horset,” the man’s corset-like garment made of horsehair, is made by “Asthildur Magnusdottir, a woman of iron will and a brain in each finger, [who] wove 3cm a day in the dead darkness of an epic Icelandic winter…from the waste products of the horse farms and slaughterhouses.” These pieces show that the combination of soft, gossamer lightness and hard structure can coexist in the contemporary man’s wardrobe. In Recht’s words, “It’s about making things that people didn’t know they needed, but now can’t live without-perhaps because they are functional, perhaps because they look nice, but mostly because they provide them with a new way of experiencing things in life.”