BRITISH DANDIES

Author Interview

DOMINIC JANES

The Chap’s new literary editor Ed Needham meets the author of British Dandies: Engendering a Scandal and Fashioning a Nation www.strong-words.co.uk

The Chap is delighted to welcome to its ranks our new literary editor, after Alexander Larman bowed out due to far too many other literary commitments.

Ed Needham is the editor of Strong Words, a magazine launched in 2018 all about new books, full of loquacious reviews, author interviews and stories behind the great novels of history. Ed’s first interview for The Chap is with Dominic Janes, the author of British Dandies: Engendering a Scandal and Fashioning a Nation (Bodleian Library, £30), a social and cultural history of the phenomenon of dandyism, from 18th century macaronis to the aesthetes of the late 19th century.

CHAP: What first drew you to investigate the dandy?

JANES: When I was at school, people had this thing about ties. You couldn’t experiment because everyone wore school uniform, but if you wanted to be fashionable you wore your tie really short, rather than the really long, Donald Trump thing.

“Fashion is about being up to date with the latest trends that a lot of other people are up to date with. With individuals who proclaim themselves to be dandies, they are not just following the next fashion trend, but have said, “I have a personal style, and sometimes that is going in a different direction to where fashion in general might be, but that’s fine because it is very much about me”

So even in school people were playing around with how you could fit in but also get ahead at the same time. Later in my academic career, that led me to thinking about why men who wanted to play around with clothing so often got slapped down, and I found when researching this book that a lot of it was about accusations of gender impropriety, effeminacy and calling out dressy men for being alleged homosexuals. So I thought, here’s some juicy stuff, and that’s how I started.

CHAP: When was the peak age of the dandy?

JANES: The peak controversy, when everyone is talking about dandies and using the word ‘dandy’, is really around the end of the Napoleonic Wars. This is a period when newspapers are debating the phenomenon and there are all sorts of cartoons about it. There are also controversies earlier in the eighteenth century and later in the nineteenth century, but they don’t focus on using the word dandy, so there is dandy-like behaviour, but the fullon dandy craze is a very Regency thing.

CHAP: How did one go beyond being merely fashionable to achieve the status of dandy?

JANES: A lot of fashion is actually about conformity: you are up to date with the latest trends that a lot of other people are up to date with. So you stand out, but you don’t stand out too much. With individuals who proclaim themselves to be dandies or are called out as dandies, they are not just following the next fashion trend, but have said, “I have a personal style, and sometimes that is going in a different direction to where fashion in general might be, but that’s fine because it is very much about me.” So there is a character in dandyism and exemplary dandies which is about individualism. Another thing is a certain degree of dedication. So you have a project where paying attention to how you dress is very much part of who you are, and you do it whether or not other people think it is appropriate.

CHAP: Whose attention did the dandy most wish to attract?

JANES: People who satirised the figure of the dandy said it was narcissistic, and about someone who is strictly entertaining themselves. And you might say, what’s wrong with that? But a lot of people had problems with it. The second thing is a sense of competition among people who were claiming a bit of individuality, and this is where dandyism shades into celebrity. If you are going to do celebrity, it is helpful to do a look that goes along with it. And celebrities are competing with other celebrities for attention. So one of the reasons why dandyism for men sometimes gets attacked is because people think, this is someone who wants to be a celebrity, but doesn’t have what it takes in terms of being a sportsman, or a poet, or the Duke of Argyll or whatever. They are trying to reinvent themselves by doing a bit of shopping.

CHAP: To what extent was all this peacocking associated with debauchery? Did it serve a lascivious purpose?

JANES: If you go back to eighteenth-century styles of dandyism, there is a tradition of what was called libertinism, that basically means you can go off and have sex, but it was also a political programme, because it was about resisting the moralisers and the church-goers. So the kind of dandyism you got with the ‘macaronis’ (wealthy young men who’d brought no end of European affectations and giant pompadours back from their Grand Tour) had an element of sexual liberation about it. The Regency dandyism was much less about sexual adventuring, and more about saying that even during the conditions of wartime I can have an elegant existence. And the final kind, which is the aesthetes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for a lot of them this behaviour was queer signalling, because dressing with a great deal of care by this time was increasingly associated with a kind of narcissistic, homosexual kind of thing. There was that popular association where you could put an orchid in your buttonhole and people would say, oh, that person might be gay. And if you wanted to meet other people who were interested in that kind of thing, it was a good way of signalling to them.

CHAP: Which garments, fabrics or accessories were considered particularly scandalous and took a certain amount of courage to wear?

JANES: This varies through time, but one of the consistent themes through the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is male costume that is very precisely cut to the body, particularly jackets cut in very tightly at the waist. That was regarded as daring and a bit transgressive, because in women’s fashion where they were heavily corseted, having a very tight waist was specifically regarded as a kind of sexual symbol of female desirability. So turning up with a jacket cut very tightly to your waist – it seems you had to be pretty brave to do that. On the issue of fabrics, in the eighteenth century they regularly pass laws against the import of French fabrics and in particular things like silks. So if you are in a period when there is an embargo, people will notice if you are wearing brightly coloured French silks, and call you out for being unpatriotic.

CHAP: Who or which group of people has the strongest claim to represent the spirit of dandyism more recently?

JANES: Not so much recently, but in the sixties and seventies a lot of pop stars, such as Mick Jagger, were playing around with long versus short hair, silk shirts rather than cotton shirts, and quite a few definitely fit into a kind of sixties version of dandyism. Cecil Beaton does a lot of dandy photographs in the interwar period, and he is still busily photographing in the sixties, so when he photographs Mick Jagger there is a link from the earlier to the later twentieth century. I am not sure that we are in a great age of dandyism right now. A lot of visual creativity is going into digital selfpresentation, a phenomenon of digital dandyism, and I get the feeling that some of the creative energy is being drained off from more traditional clothing into those areas.

CHAP: Do you have a most admired dandy?

JANES: That’s always tricky, because you feel the ghosts of the others standing there, glowering and tapping their canes. I’ve written quite a lot about Oscar Wilde, and although I think there are problems with him, in that he is almost like a living cliché with all the epigrams and so on, he was so important in terms of cultural change, identification and the elaboration of celebrity that I am still fascinated by him. n