Dandies
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...
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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.
List of IllustrationsPrefaceIntroduction: New Strategies for a Theory of Dandies11The Layered Look: Coco Chanel and Contagious Celebrity352"Indian Dandies": Sartorial Finesse and Self-Presentation along the Columbia River, 1790-1855593Dandyism and Abstraction in a Universe Defined by Newton1014Dandies, Marginality, and Modernism: Georgia O'Keeffe, Marcel Duchamp, and Other Cross-Dressers1275"The Dandy in Me": Romaine Brooks's 1923 Portraits1536Claude Cahun, Dandy Provocateuse1857Cross-Dressing at the Crossroads: Mimicry and Ambivalence in Yoruba Masked Performance2048Sartor Africanus2179Twiggy and Trotsky: Or, What the Soviet Dandy Will Be Wearing This Next Five-Year Plan243Epilogue: Quentin Crisp: The Last Dandy?270Contributors281Index285
\ From the Publisher"It was Charles Baudelaire who, in the middle of the nineteenth century, proposed the figure of the dandy—black-clad, elegant, ineffably cool, self-constructed—as the prototypical hero of modern culture. Now, in the twentieth century, Susan Fillin-Yeh and her co-authors build upon this icon to create a wider vision of this marvelous self-creation. For Fillin-Yeh and her cohorts, the dandy may be a woman, may be a non-western figure, may be a transvestite: The point is that dandyism, in the modern world, may take many forms and occur in many places, and this book shows us the rich variety of possibilities that dress, disguise, masquerade, may offer those both in the center and on the margins. Each of these essays is a gem, extending, and enriching the idea-ideal of the dandy in the most interesting and provocative ways imaginable."\ -Linda Nochlin,New York University\ "A finely wrought ensemble of studies orienting us to a 'hyperaesthetics' of sartorial and bodily fashioning. To see such diverse ways that people have bodily troped and conceptually trumped cultural categorizations of gender, race, colonial and socioeconomic positionality is inspiring and—well—just dandy!"\ -Michael Silverstein,University of Chicago\ "Should be of great interest to any civilized person—the dandy, a mutation of taste, is not definable. The book offers a group of excellent essays that attempt to pin it down."\ -Alex Katz,\ "Both lively and scholarly, this is the collection many have been waiting for. At last the dandy emerges from the western European upper class (and male) closet resplendent in a rainbow of cultural, ethnic, sexual, gender and racial colors. Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture is a fascinating investigation into the constructed self, and a major contribution to art and cultural history!"\ --, -Whitney Chadwick,author of Women, Art, and Society\ \ \
