Last fall, after jewel thieves robbed the Louvre in broad daylight, a striking individual was spotted at the scene of the crime. He was dressed in a jacket, tie, and waistcoat, with an umbrella in his hand, a fedora cocked jauntily on his head, and one hand thrust into his pocket. Speculation ran rife online. Was this a dapper detective? Perhaps an associate of the criminals?
A couple weeks later, a teenager switched his Instagram from private to public to reveal that le Poirot nouveau was, in fact, a fifteen-year-old tourist. Pedro Elias Garzon Delvaux had been visiting the Louvre with his family and ended up in the Associated Press photograph by accident (although his sidelong glance at the camera may suggest a certain premeditation). His purposeful stride indicated not an imminent conference with high-level members of the Sûreté but an imminent conference with his mom and dad and grandpa.
This episode might stand as a pleasingly absurd and misunderstood coda to the absurd and misunderstood drama of the dandy. In the end, the suit turned out to mean nothing more than itself. When asked why he had been dressed like a latter-day Alain Delon, Delvaux merely replied, “I like to be chic.”
Peter K. Andersson’s new study, The Dandy: A People’s History of Sartorial Splendour, traces a lineage of subcultures focused on “striving for perfection and distinction in the wearing of the western male suit.” These subcultures flourished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and spanned the globe. We get French calicots and gandins, English mashers and gents and stage-door johnnies and teddy boys and mods, American dudes, the Swedish grilljannar, the German Gigerl, the slouchy Viennese Schlurf, the South African tsotsi and swenka, and the Congolese griffe and sapeur. Even the names of these subcultures are evocative: the schlumpy Schlurf, the transformation of the kingly “Edwardian style” into the demotic “teddy boy.” Tsotsi may derive from the American “zoot suit” (itself a pleasingly Seussian formation), swenka likely comes from “swank,” and sapeur is a fanciful acronym for La Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes.
Andersson works on two levels. To the popular audience, he points out that dandyism, far from being the province of upper-class twits, has most often been associated with lower-middle-class and working-class strivers, hustlers, and fighters. He gives us extraordinary stories of long-haired, jazz-loving Schlurfs fighting in the streets with Nazis, and stilyagi (“style-hunters” of the Soviet Union) being attacked and having their hair forcibly cut. He shows us the antiracist dandy and the queer dandy; he shows us the anticolonial dandy engaged in high-stakes fashion competitions while wearing “the white man’s suit like a hunter [dressed] in the skin of the leopard he has shot.”
To his more academic audience in cultural studies, Andersson argues that dandyism is not necessarily a form of societal or class rebellion. Dandyism is simply a tradition of exaggerated suit-wearing. In fact, “youth culture throughout the modern age has been just as much—if not more—about nonsensical sarcasm as about revolution.” He argues that academics tend to read political and psychological messages into a costume and a way of life that are both more trivial and more existential than these sociocultural readings would allow. Andersson’s own writing style has a certain flair reminiscent of Whit Stillman’s screenplays, in his ability to mourn, with a straight face, “the fate of popular dandyism.”
Nor does he suggest a psychoanalytic interpretation of the dandy, although he could. There’s a dreamlike quality to the dandy style: a style of exaggerations and extremes. Dandyism tends toward an Expressionist aesthetic of painted-on shadows and funhouse silhouettes. Perhaps something is being worked out here—displaying the self to hide the self, the desire to stand out wrestling with the desire to conform. The dandy embodies (or is clothed by) multiple overlapping paradoxes. Dandy styles are constrained by the silhouette of the suit, but luxe in their fabrics, patterns, and accessories. Dandies “perfect” the classic masculine uniform, complete with cigar and stick—but in its very perfection the uniform becomes too elegant, too ornate, too flamboyant for normal manhood. Dandies are individualists who travel in packs. They favor artifice and carelessness. Theorizers of modernity didn’t know how to handle them: Do they represent a dangerous leveling of the old hierarchies or “the anti-democratic threat of deviance”?
Reading The Dandy, I began to appreciate the perversity of this style. Dandies exaggerate each element of the suit until it becomes comical. The specifics of the ways that the dandy deforms the basic, honest man’s suit are irrelevant, and each generation comes up with its own crazy variant: tight-laced corsets or gigantic shoulders, great big hats or bitsy ones. Dandies love accessories: capes, monocles, cravats, cigars (one writer claims that a nonsmoking dandy sports a chocolate cigar). Even within one country, styles oscillate wildly, with subdued colors giving way to loud patterns as trousers “veer from the skin-tight to the balloon-like.” The only important thing is that the suit be recognizably a suit, and yet more than a suit, or other than a suit. The dandy lives in the uncanny valley of conformity.
Dandies can’t walk right—they slouch and slump and scoot. (Charles Dickens gives his “gents” a “paralytic swagger.”) They can’t hold a walking stick like a normal person. They tuck it under their arm so it juts out and hits passersby; or, worse, they cuddle the head of it up to their mouths as if instead of a cane they’re holding a kitten. I had seen images of cartoon dandies kissing or mouthing their canes before, and it had always subtly disturbed me, but I had assumed I was witnessing images of individual rather than collective perversion. No such luck.
There are many reasons for the forces of real, not caricatured, respectability to reject the dandy. The dandy mocks them, even if that mockery is sometimes more like fond teasing or enthusiastic imitation. The dandy is a pretender: a counter-jumper, a shop assistant dressing up as a lord—and adding a twist of “sarcasm” in his exaggerations and his lazy attitude. People who are not lords, and who find lords funny, might enjoy this element of dandyism, but the objects of the comedy of rank tend not to appreciate the joke.
And normal people—not lords, but people who consider themselves respectable—also often react to the dandy with disdain or even disgust. It had never occurred to me that there had been outbreaks of anti-dandy violence, and yet Andersson quotes startlingly harsh rhetoric (that dandies are not humans but “animals” or “beings”) and details the physical assaults to which unnecessarily dressed individuals might be subject. Even people who might be expected to sympathize with the dandy instead found ways to distinguish their stylized lives from his: “The pince-nez is conciliatory, the monocle provocative”; the flâneur is observant, discreet, intellectual, whereas the dandy or gandin is flashy, silly, flirty.
Of course, the dandy can always fight back. In the 1960s, mods (a dandy subculture) fought with rockers at beachside towns on bank holidays. Andersson gives the mods their rightful place in a long line of bruising beaus, from the “swell mob” in early nineteenth-century London to the rowdy Schlurfs.
The dandy is young and foolish. Andersson gives a sense of the difficulty of distinguishing between levels of folly. Some dandies seem like youth on the razzle, while others seem like violent types who will do anything for cash; some are dissatisfied and economically alienated youth rebelling against staid convention and social hierarchy, whereas others come across as lads who have had one over the eight. But of course, any individual young person could be in any of these categories depending on the day. Dandies are frequently found in court records. Andersson offers an evocative catalogue: They are associated with “pickpocketing, rowdyism, idleness, homosexuality, dressing above one’s station,” and “bicycling.” In Sweden they are accused of pretending to be dogs and running off, in a shower of scattered glassware, to chase a phantom cat.
So what happened to the dandy? Andersson notes that the collapse of a shared culture and shared fashion standards has made dandy subcultures nearly impossible to maintain. When everyone is merely subcultural, no subculture can gain its force from the way it exaggerates the mainstream. Andersson suggests that the hipster is the dandy’s only living heir. I would suggest that the dandy’s closest contemporary cousins might be the young men, mostly black, who wear their jeans slung so low that the entirety of their briefs can be seen. These young men outrage their elders; they get profiled as belonging to a criminal class, regardless of their actual behavior; they take the respectable uniform of our downscale day and make it bizarre; they don’t stride, but rather ambulate in a kind of swingy waddle. And they are showing off: the brand names on their underwear, the curves of their bodies, their insouciant disregard for convention, and their ability to walk with their jeans down below their drawers.
This comparison assumes that the important thing about the suit is simply its status as conventional clothing. Andersson wisely spends little time on the question of whether the suit has distinctive features that attract dandies like bees to clover. Others wax poetic about the perfection of the Western male suit: its consummate elegance, its streamlined silhouette. These arguments toward an objective aesthetic of men’s fashion are unpersuasive on their face, and they would be especially out of place in a history of dandyism, since the dandy tends toward exuberance alongside elegance and prefers exaggerated silhouettes to streamlined ones. Andersson gestures toward changes in material conditions: “ready-made clothes and new media.” Basically, he says, the suit came along when people could afford it.
The suit could be worn by men of social position, but it wasn’t tied to an aristocracy. It allowed a confusion between wealth and rank—and with the Industrial Revolution, it became available to people who didn’t have either. This is the first half of Andersson’s diptych argument: Dandyism has most often been a fashion movement from below, not above. (This is an oversimplification, as higher and lower echelons of society eagerly look to one another for new fashions, but it’s more true than our image of the dandy as a clubman with a listing in Debrett’s.) Some of the reaction the dandies provoked can be attributed to class anxiety or racism, and this fact has led theorists to claim the dandies as activist-heroes.
The Zoot Suit Riots, in which white Americans, mostly servicemen, attacked Latino dandies, occurred in 1943 and are an important moment for this line of argument. Later authors made the zoot suit a symbol of Latino pride, and former zoot suiters who were present during the riots sometimes bring such terms into their reminiscences. One historian of black dandyism notes that these eye-catching men were engaging in “self-spectacularization.” They knew they would stand out in the white world anyway, that they would be treated as an idea or a caricature rather than an individual, and so they chose to stand out on their own terms.
Political theorists of the dandy like this one are naming the same reality discerned by Gregory of Nyssa, who argued that the injustice of poverty includes the distortion and destruction of the beauty of poor people’s created bodies: “You see a man who is transformed by his grievous afflictions into the form of an animal. His hands have been made into hooves or claws, leaving footprints on the man-made streets. Who can recognize that they are the prints a man has made having passed along the way?” To adorn the bodies of members of a subordinated or despised group is to restore their beauty, and therefore assert or demonstrate their rightful status as image-bearers of God.
The fierce reaction the dandies provoked wherever they went makes it tempting to argue that dandyism is a resistance to repressive social structures or the power of the police. And in some sense, it is. The dandies were threats—you can tell because people in power felt threatened. But the dandy is a rebel because his cartoon sensibility resists all attempts to regulate, corral, and improve. He doesn’t want to perfect the New Soviet Man; he wants to perfect the wearing of the Western male suit. In his posture and his pastimes, in his haircut and his hedonism, the dandy is the opposite of the recruit. Dandyism is a rebellious desire to display one’s difference, and although that difference may not be political, nonetheless—and this is where the sociologists begin to sway to the siren song and peer over the railing of the boat—such a rebellion has obvious appeal to those who are shut out of power or privilege. Dandyism is one channel, like addiction or politics or song, carved by the internal emotional currents of oppression.
Here Andersson intervenes with a reminder that dandies liked looking cool because it attracted the opposite sex. (Or, you know, whoever.) Dandies liked rumbling in the streets because they were young. Dandies liked flashy clothes not because they were rebelling against the class system or asserting the equal dignity of gay love but because flamboyance is fun. Who doesn’t want a little attention? You might even make the news!
If this is why people want to be dandies, is dandyism still attainable? Has Pedro Delvaux achieved true dandyism? (Arguing over the boundaries of “true” subcultural status is another pointless pleasure.) From one perspective, the true dandy must be a part of a living subculture. Delvaux can sport his eccentric suit, but he has not (yet) created a crowd of comrades. There’s a poignancy to a dandy alone—speaking a dead language made intelligible only by reference to long-past styles. Part of the dandy’s exuberance and joy comes from the communal element of his sartorial display. Dandyism gets some of its vigor from the solidarity bred by rebellion, against political conditions or against the conditions of existence or even just against parents and teachers.
And yet perhaps when the dandy stands alone, he reveals his deepest meaning. Andersson himself, in high school, was just such an isolated style icon: “I had no group to belong to and no current trend to allude to.” In fact, “most likely, I was the only dandy for miles.” For Andersson, the dandy style he affected as a teen expressed an inner alienation from the school world of “hiphop music and jocks in sportswear.” He was not a member of the striving lower middle class. He was not a member of a politically or culturally marginalized group. He had no reason to be alienated. There was aggression in his sartorial perfection—his “tweeds and brogues,” his umbrella and his “saunter”—but there was self-mockery too. He was, by his own admission, “a rebel without a cause,” but “that is precisely what unites all men in this book.”
This is an existential stance. A blank rejection of whatever surrounds us. And what surrounds us is insufficient: We don’t fit in here; nobody does. Andersson, turning up to homeroom in a suit, was not saying, “I should have been born in some earlier time.” If he had been born in an earlier time, he would have just worn a weirder thing. What the suit says is “I respectfully refuse.”
When I compare my own high-school fashion crimes to Andersson’s, the teenage dandy’s respect stands out at least as much as his refusal. I was a punk, not a dandy. I advertised “my difference” with Boy Scout button-ups and fishnet stockings, black lipstick applied hastily at the bus stop, tiger-print skirts rolled up at the waistband, and a great big ragged tutu so ridiculous that my mother forbade me from wearing it: “I’m just worried that people will think you’re mentally ill.” This was a literal-minded rebellion, an absurd collage of everything that might be sexy or scary or otherwise obviously attention-grabbing. There is something sardonic, by contrast, in Andersson’s use of the “western male suit” as the language of his rebellion. And also something poignant. Adam, expelled from Eden but not from high school, slouched into gym class the next day in a cravat.
You see, I’m doing it too—I’m imposing a meaning I want the dandy to bear. I’ve fallen into the same trap as the sociologists. I demand that the dandy be meaningful, be necessary—when Andersson, not just a historian but a theorist of dandyism, argues that the absence of these qualities defines “the ideals of dandyism.”
Last fall, after jewel thieves robbed the Louvre in broad daylight, a striking individual was spotted at the scene of the crime. He was dressed in a jacket, tie, and waistcoat, with an umbrella in his hand, a fedora cocked jauntily on his head, and one hand thrust into his pocket. Speculation ran rife online. Was this a dapper detective? Perhaps an associate of the criminals?
A couple weeks later, a teenager switched his Instagram from private to public to reveal that le Poirot nouveau was, in fact, a fifteen-year-old tourist. Pedro Elias Garzon Delvaux had been visiting the Louvre with his family and ended up in the Associated Press photograph by accident (although his sidelong glance at the camera may suggest a certain premeditation). His purposeful stride indicated not an imminent conference with high-level members of the Sûreté but an imminent conference with his mom and dad and grandpa.
This episode might stand as a pleasingly absurd and misunderstood coda to the absurd and misunderstood drama of the dandy. In the end, the suit turned out to mean nothing more than itself. When asked why he had been dressed like a latter-day Alain Delon, Delvaux merely replied, “I like to be chic.”
Peter K. Andersson’s new study, The Dandy: A People’s History of Sartorial Splendour, traces a lineage of subcultures focused on “striving for perfection and distinction in the wearing of the western male suit.” These subcultures flourished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and spanned the globe. We get French calicots and gandins, English mashers and gents and stage-door johnnies and teddy boys and mods, American dudes, the Swedish grilljannar, the German Gigerl, the slouchy Viennese Schlurf, the South African tsotsi and swenka, and the Congolese griffe and sapeur. Even the names of these subcultures are evocative: the schlumpy Schlurf, the transformation of the kingly “Edwardian style” into the demotic “teddy boy.” Tsotsi may derive from the American “zoot suit” (itself a pleasingly Seussian formation), swenka likely comes from “swank,” and sapeur is a fanciful acronym for La Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes.
Andersson works on two levels. To the popular audience, he points out that dandyism, far from being the province of upper-class twits, has most often been associated with lower-middle-class and working-class strivers, hustlers, and fighters. He gives us extraordinary stories of long-haired, jazz-loving Schlurfs fighting in the streets with Nazis, and stilyagi (“style-hunters” of the Soviet Union) being attacked and having their hair forcibly cut. He shows us the antiracist dandy and the queer dandy; he shows us the anticolonial dandy engaged in high-stakes fashion competitions while wearing “the white man’s suit like a hunter [dressed] in the skin of the leopard he has shot.”
To his more academic audience in cultural studies, Andersson argues that dandyism is not necessarily a form of societal or class rebellion. Dandyism is simply a tradition of exaggerated suit-wearing. In fact, “youth culture throughout the modern age has been just as much—if not more—about nonsensical sarcasm as about revolution.” He argues that academics tend to read political and psychological messages into a costume and a way of life that are both more trivial and more existential than these sociocultural readings would allow. Andersson’s own writing style has a certain flair reminiscent of Whit Stillman’s screenplays, in his ability to mourn, with a straight face, “the fate of popular dandyism.”
Nor does he suggest a psychoanalytic interpretation of the dandy, although he could. There’s a dreamlike quality to the dandy style: a style of exaggerations and extremes. Dandyism tends toward an Expressionist aesthetic of painted-on shadows and funhouse silhouettes. Perhaps something is being worked out here—displaying the self to hide the self, the desire to stand out wrestling with the desire to conform. The dandy embodies (or is clothed by) multiple overlapping paradoxes. Dandy styles are constrained by the silhouette of the suit, but luxe in their fabrics, patterns, and accessories. Dandies “perfect” the classic masculine uniform, complete with cigar and stick—but in its very perfection the uniform becomes too elegant, too ornate, too flamboyant for normal manhood. Dandies are individualists who travel in packs. They favor artifice and carelessness. Theorizers of modernity didn’t know how to handle them: Do they represent a dangerous leveling of the old hierarchies or “the anti-democratic threat of deviance”?
Reading The Dandy, I began to appreciate the perversity of this style. Dandies exaggerate each element of the suit until it becomes comical. The specifics of the ways that the dandy deforms the basic, honest man’s suit are irrelevant, and each generation comes up with its own crazy variant: tight-laced corsets or gigantic shoulders, great big hats or bitsy ones. Dandies love accessories: capes, monocles, cravats, cigars (one writer claims that a nonsmoking dandy sports a chocolate cigar). Even within one country, styles oscillate wildly, with subdued colors giving way to loud patterns as trousers “veer from the skin-tight to the balloon-like.” The only important thing is that the suit be recognizably a suit, and yet more than a suit, or other than a suit. The dandy lives in the uncanny valley of conformity.
Dandies can’t walk right—they slouch and slump and scoot. (Charles Dickens gives his “gents” a “paralytic swagger.”) They can’t hold a walking stick like a normal person. They tuck it under their arm so it juts out and hits passersby; or, worse, they cuddle the head of it up to their mouths as if instead of a cane they’re holding a kitten. I had seen images of cartoon dandies kissing or mouthing their canes before, and it had always subtly disturbed me, but I had assumed I was witnessing images of individual rather than collective perversion. No such luck.
There are many reasons for the forces of real, not caricatured, respectability to reject the dandy. The dandy mocks them, even if that mockery is sometimes more like fond teasing or enthusiastic imitation. The dandy is a pretender: a counter-jumper, a shop assistant dressing up as a lord—and adding a twist of “sarcasm” in his exaggerations and his lazy attitude. People who are not lords, and who find lords funny, might enjoy this element of dandyism, but the objects of the comedy of rank tend not to appreciate the joke.
And normal people—not lords, but people who consider themselves respectable—also often react to the dandy with disdain or even disgust. It had never occurred to me that there had been outbreaks of anti-dandy violence, and yet Andersson quotes startlingly harsh rhetoric (that dandies are not humans but “animals” or “beings”) and details the physical assaults to which unnecessarily dressed individuals might be subject. Even people who might be expected to sympathize with the dandy instead found ways to distinguish their stylized lives from his: “The pince-nez is conciliatory, the monocle provocative”; the flâneur is observant, discreet, intellectual, whereas the dandy or gandin is flashy, silly, flirty.
Of course, the dandy can always fight back. In the 1960s, mods (a dandy subculture) fought with rockers at beachside towns on bank holidays. Andersson gives the mods their rightful place in a long line of bruising beaus, from the “swell mob” in early nineteenth-century London to the rowdy Schlurfs.
The dandy is young and foolish. Andersson gives a sense of the difficulty of distinguishing between levels of folly. Some dandies seem like youth on the razzle, while others seem like violent types who will do anything for cash; some are dissatisfied and economically alienated youth rebelling against staid convention and social hierarchy, whereas others come across as lads who have had one over the eight. But of course, any individual young person could be in any of these categories depending on the day. Dandies are frequently found in court records. Andersson offers an evocative catalogue: They are associated with “pickpocketing, rowdyism, idleness, homosexuality, dressing above one’s station,” and “bicycling.” In Sweden they are accused of pretending to be dogs and running off, in a shower of scattered glassware, to chase a phantom cat.
So what happened to the dandy? Andersson notes that the collapse of a shared culture and shared fashion standards has made dandy subcultures nearly impossible to maintain. When everyone is merely subcultural, no subculture can gain its force from the way it exaggerates the mainstream. Andersson suggests that the hipster is the dandy’s only living heir. I would suggest that the dandy’s closest contemporary cousins might be the young men, mostly black, who wear their jeans slung so low that the entirety of their briefs can be seen. These young men outrage their elders; they get profiled as belonging to a criminal class, regardless of their actual behavior; they take the respectable uniform of our downscale day and make it bizarre; they don’t stride, but rather ambulate in a kind of swingy waddle. And they are showing off: the brand names on their underwear, the curves of their bodies, their insouciant disregard for convention, and their ability to walk with their jeans down below their drawers.
This comparison assumes that the important thing about the suit is simply its status as conventional clothing. Andersson wisely spends little time on the question of whether the suit has distinctive features that attract dandies like bees to clover. Others wax poetic about the perfection of the Western male suit: its consummate elegance, its streamlined silhouette. These arguments toward an objective aesthetic of men’s fashion are unpersuasive on their face, and they would be especially out of place in a history of dandyism, since the dandy tends toward exuberance alongside elegance and prefers exaggerated silhouettes to streamlined ones. Andersson gestures toward changes in material conditions: “ready-made clothes and new media.” Basically, he says, the suit came along when people could afford it.
The suit could be worn by men of social position, but it wasn’t tied to an aristocracy. It allowed a confusion between wealth and rank—and with the Industrial Revolution, it became available to people who didn’t have either. This is the first half of Andersson’s diptych argument: Dandyism has most often been a fashion movement from below, not above. (This is an oversimplification, as higher and lower echelons of society eagerly look to one another for new fashions, but it’s more true than our image of the dandy as a clubman with a listing in Debrett’s.) Some of the reaction the dandies provoked can be attributed to class anxiety or racism, and this fact has led theorists to claim the dandies as activist-heroes.
The Zoot Suit Riots, in which white Americans, mostly servicemen, attacked Latino dandies, occurred in 1943 and are an important moment for this line of argument. Later authors made the zoot suit a symbol of Latino pride, and former zoot suiters who were present during the riots sometimes bring such terms into their reminiscences. One historian of black dandyism notes that these eye-catching men were engaging in “self-spectacularization.” They knew they would stand out in the white world anyway, that they would be treated as an idea or a caricature rather than an individual, and so they chose to stand out on their own terms.
Political theorists of the dandy like this one are naming the same reality discerned by Gregory of Nyssa, who argued that the injustice of poverty includes the distortion and destruction of the beauty of poor people’s created bodies: “You see a man who is transformed by his grievous afflictions into the form of an animal. His hands have been made into hooves or claws, leaving footprints on the man-made streets. Who can recognize that they are the prints a man has made having passed along the way?” To adorn the bodies of members of a subordinated or despised group is to restore their beauty, and therefore assert or demonstrate their rightful status as image-bearers of God.
The fierce reaction the dandies provoked wherever they went makes it tempting to argue that dandyism is a resistance to repressive social structures or the power of the police. And in some sense, it is. The dandies were threats—you can tell because people in power felt threatened. But the dandy is a rebel because his cartoon sensibility resists all attempts to regulate, corral, and improve. He doesn’t want to perfect the New Soviet Man; he wants to perfect the wearing of the Western male suit. In his posture and his pastimes, in his haircut and his hedonism, the dandy is the opposite of the recruit. Dandyism is a rebellious desire to display one’s difference, and although that difference may not be political, nonetheless—and this is where the sociologists begin to sway to the siren song and peer over the railing of the boat—such a rebellion has obvious appeal to those who are shut out of power or privilege. Dandyism is one channel, like addiction or politics or song, carved by the internal emotional currents of oppression.
Here Andersson intervenes with a reminder that dandies liked looking cool because it attracted the opposite sex. (Or, you know, whoever.) Dandies liked rumbling in the streets because they were young. Dandies liked flashy clothes not because they were rebelling against the class system or asserting the equal dignity of gay love but because flamboyance is fun. Who doesn’t want a little attention? You might even make the news!
If this is why people want to be dandies, is dandyism still attainable? Has Pedro Delvaux achieved true dandyism? (Arguing over the boundaries of “true” subcultural status is another pointless pleasure.) From one perspective, the true dandy must be a part of a living subculture. Delvaux can sport his eccentric suit, but he has not (yet) created a crowd of comrades. There’s a poignancy to a dandy alone—speaking a dead language made intelligible only by reference to long-past styles. Part of the dandy’s exuberance and joy comes from the communal element of his sartorial display. Dandyism gets some of its vigor from the solidarity bred by rebellion, against political conditions or against the conditions of existence or even just against parents and teachers.
And yet perhaps when the dandy stands alone, he reveals his deepest meaning. Andersson himself, in high school, was just such an isolated style icon: “I had no group to belong to and no current trend to allude to.” In fact, “most likely, I was the only dandy for miles.” For Andersson, the dandy style he affected as a teen expressed an inner alienation from the school world of “hiphop music and jocks in sportswear.” He was not a member of the striving lower middle class. He was not a member of a politically or culturally marginalized group. He had no reason to be alienated. There was aggression in his sartorial perfection—his “tweeds and brogues,” his umbrella and his “saunter”—but there was self-mockery too. He was, by his own admission, “a rebel without a cause,” but “that is precisely what unites all men in this book.”
This is an existential stance. A blank rejection of whatever surrounds us. And what surrounds us is insufficient: We don’t fit in here; nobody does. Andersson, turning up to homeroom in a suit, was not saying, “I should have been born in some earlier time.” If he had been born in an earlier time, he would have just worn a weirder thing. What the suit says is “I respectfully refuse.”
When I compare my own high-school fashion crimes to Andersson’s, the teenage dandy’s respect stands out at least as much as his refusal. I was a punk, not a dandy. I advertised “my difference” with Boy Scout button-ups and fishnet stockings, black lipstick applied hastily at the bus stop, tiger-print skirts rolled up at the waistband, and a great big ragged tutu so ridiculous that my mother forbade me from wearing it: “I’m just worried that people will think you’re mentally ill.” This was a literal-minded rebellion, an absurd collage of everything that might be sexy or scary or otherwise obviously attention-grabbing. There is something sardonic, by contrast, in Andersson’s use of the “western male suit” as the language of his rebellion. And also something poignant. Adam, expelled from Eden but not from high school, slouched into gym class the next day in a cravat.
You see, I’m doing it too—I’m imposing a meaning I want the dandy to bear. I’ve fallen into the same trap as the sociologists. I demand that the dandy be meaningful, be necessary—when Andersson, not just a historian but a theorist of dandyism, argues that the absence of these qualities defines “the ideals of dandyism.”
