Review: I Am Dandy - The Return of The Elegant Gentleman, by Rose Callahan and Nathaniel Adams

Photograph by Rose Callahan from I am Dandy, Copyright Gestalten 2013

In his memoir, The Naked Civil Servant, Quentin Crisp described his attitude to style as ‘swimming with the tide - but faster’; taking perceived character flaws and making them central to his outward persona. This requires a very deliberate act of reinvention: ‘you have to polish up your raw identity until it becomes a lifestyle, something interesting by which you are proud to be identified and something with which you can barter with the outside world’. One anecdote to which Mr Crisp often returned when discussing style concerned a gentleman of his acquaintance, whose name was Mr Tillet, but who was better known as The Angel. Crisp described the man as ‘shorter than I am, but twice as wide… his head was as long from the chin to the crown as the skull of a donkey. His pate was bald, but the rest of his body was covered with fur, right down to his fingernails. When his employer first saw him, she fainted’.

Others may have found these physical characteristics to be an unconquerable disadvantage. Tillet, however, decided to make a virtue of necessity. He sought out a position in which his distinctive features could begin to work in his favour and went on, in Crisp’s words, to make ‘more money in four short years as a wrestler than the divine Joe Louis made out of a lifetime in the boxing ring’. This, then, is the key to style: ‘he took that which made him so like himself, and put it in its appropriate setting’. Although Rose Callahan’s investigations failed to turn up any specimens quite so exotic as this, the elegant gentlemen featured in I Am Dandy take a similar approach in their relationship to the outside world.

So what exactly is a dandy? A couple of theories are offered up in the introduction. The editor of this rich volume, Nathaniel Adams, describes dandyism as not quite an artform or a philosophy, but something approaching a personality disorder. He identifies Callahan’s subjects as ‘men who, stranded on a desert island, would still dress up every day, using fish bones as tie pins and polishing their shoes with squid ink’. In his introductory essay Dandies Offer Hope To A World in Crisis, Glenn O’Brien suggests that the radical individualism showcased by Callahan’s portraits represents an existential revolution against mass-market capitalism:  ‘I love the outlandish getup as long as it is not a disguise or concealment, but instead a display, a flaunting of one’s identity…  If there is a cardinal sin in our world it is not self-absorption but mass absorption, the dissolution of the individual into the mass.’

Portrait of Nathaniel Adams by Rose Callahan from I am Dandy, Copyright Gestalten 2013

Maybe it is easier to say what dandyism looks like than define what it actually is; but we must also ask what makes a man become a dandy? It is tempting to search the interviews (conducted by Adams) for common themes, a unifying factor. Many of her subjects first demonstrated their interest in appearances at a precocious age; many also bemoan the cheapness of modern, mass-produced goods, and a corresponding lack of quality. Many dandies are prone to a kind of magical thinking - dandyish affectations such as pipe-smoking, cravat-wearing and absinthe-drinking, all involve a certain amount of ritualistic preparation, with the aim of delivering a pay-off of spiritual wellbeing. It is also interesting to note that many of the dandies Callahan photographs are not especially handsome. Modern fashions may not display them to maximum advantage, so they have taken a creative approach to their presentation; as Patrick McDonald (not unattractive himself) observes, ‘the clothing is my paint, and I’m the canvas’.

Some see dandyism as a means of setting themselves apart from the lumpy proles. Falling into this category are the rather smug Robin Dutt and the profoundly emetic Doran Wittelsbach, who reminded me of no less an eminence than Henry Conway, of ‘Fuck Off I’m Rich’ fame. Fortunately, these appear to be a minority. Others, such as Sean Crowley, realise the inherent absurdity of dandyism, and revel in it. Crowley, a denizen of Brooklyn who has created a museum of faded English aristocracy in his apartment, takes Bertie Wooster, a satirical creation, as his style icon. This exuberant eccentricity is also displayed by dandies like Guy Hills, with his custom-made four-seater bicycle designed to deliver his children to school in style. Between these extremes, many of the other dandies see their mode of dress as a means of demonstrating respect for others, treating every encounter as an occasion.

Gustav Temple takes these elements and adds a political subtext to them, using his status as a dandy to launch a guerrilla war in favour of a general raising of standards. An advocate of 'anarcho-dandyism', Temple has taken part in a series of spectacular actions, including a 'Civilise the City' protest in 2004, at which he and his associates declared Piccadilly Circus a 'hat-doffing zone', entering branches of Starbucks to order Oolong tea and requesting deviled kidneys at McDonalds, and an attempt to scale a Rachel Whiteread installation in the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, wearing vintage mountaineering gear*. Temple identifies with outsiders such as Wilde and Disraeli who adopted and surpassed the styles of their social betters, describing his intention to 'subvert class roles, to show it's not about being well-bred or educated, it's about attitude', and envisioning a world in which all bus and train compartments would be first class.

In terms of influences, Beau Brummel crops up regularly, as does the British artist Sebastian Horsley. As expected, there are icons from the golden age of Hollywood, including Cary Grant; perhaps more surprising are the regular references to Edward VIII and George VI, who inspire reverence among beard-wearing dandies. Minn Hur and Kevin Wang, of the men's suiting company HVRMINN, employ an element of danger in their look, reminiscent of a time when criminals looked sharp and glamorous – a trope we often revisit in our culture, from Morrissey’s obsession with the Krays to the range of picturesque television dramas set in nineteenth century Whitechapel.

It is notable that dandyism has been the historical prerogative of white men; a few of the interviewees are doing their bit to redress this. Michael Andrew, a sharply-dressed author from Texas with a penchant for Italian tailoring, notes that the archetype for the well-dressed black man is the pimp. He bemoans ‘the absence of well-dressed African-American males in pop culture on a consistent basis’, and creates his own space through his 'polished loafers, velvet jackets and wool trousers'. The Churchwell brothers, a pair of medical professors from Tennessee, are motivated by memory of their father, the first black reporter for The Nashville Banner, forced by segregation to file his copy from home, but still determined to dress up for his job. The existence of female dandies is a similarly vexed issue. In his 2002 essay Who’s A Dandy, the journalist and MP George Walden argued that no woman could be a dandy as they are automatically expected to be fastidious about clothing. However, one could make a case for women like Madonna, who create and recreate their public persona with the requisite flair and attention to detail**, or historical figures such as the ‘dishonest, profligate and almost entirely talentless’ dancer Lola Montez, who made their careers entirely through the force of their personality.

Ultimately, Callahan’s subjects’ motivations and habits are too disparate for them to be psychologised en masse. If there is a unifying theme, it is a desire to curate the self, to consciously decide which aspects of their personalities to highlight to the public. I once spoke to an author who had been advised by Hemingway’s former mistress to develop a ‘figura’, a public persona distinct from the private individual. One dandy who has done this successfully is Dickon Edwards; seeing himself as being fundamentally unsuited to work, he has instead made ‘being Dickon Edwards’ his primary occupation. He has at times appeared as a musician, in the bands Orlando and Fosca, a model and a writer, but he is possibly best known as an early embracer of blogging, spotting the potential of online interaction for promoting an image of the self. This raises an interesting question: will social media lead to a resurgence of dandyism, as we become more involved in creating personas? Alternatively, the selective nature of online interaction could encourage a shallow engagement with style; poses could be picked up casually, captured once on camera, and used to project a glorious image in perpetuity while our real-world appearances fall into neglect, turning us all into inverted Dorian Grays.

Of course, with any compendium of taste, there is the danger of succumbing to Stendhal Syndrome, recalling that author’s first visit to Florence during which he was overcome by the beauty of it all, declaring that ‘everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call 'nerves.' Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling’. In their introduction, the editors acknowledge that time constraints limited them to interviewing dandies from the US, UK and France. There is some evidence of this haste in the text: interviewing the 'world's best-dressed journalist' Gay Talese, they state that he ‘always wears shirts with a white cuff and collar’, next to a photo of him which directly contradicts this. If I Am Dandy is best read in short bursts, however, that shouldn’t imply a lack of quality; as you would expect, the dandies have interesting stories to tell, and a good turn of phrase, while Adams’s commentary avoids listing designer labels and accessories, endeavouring to give an all-round view of the interviewees.

It feels as though the early twenty first century is an ideal time for the rebirth of dandyism, and the political motivations expressed by Gustav Temple and Glenn O’Brien provide a framework for the modern dandy. If collective action and trade unionism seems increasingly passé, then committing to a dandified lifestyle is a means of signalling one’s rejection of mass-production and perpetual consumerism, of aiming at something higher. This is a protest more suited to the social mores of today than the march or strike – as Dickon Edwards once sang, ‘I wish there were demos and marches for those who are allergic to crowds’. After all, when even patricians like David Cameron are desperately adopting the guise of the respectably middle class, then it must be time to rebel against the spectacle of the bland.

* It is interesting to note that Rachel Whiteread seems to attract protests; in 1993, she was dubbed 'the worst artist of the year' and awarded a prize of £40,000 by the K Foundation, who threatened to burn the money on the steps of the Tate if she didn't come to collect it in person.
** Lady Gaga, on the other hand, is not a dandy; her outfits belong to the world of performance art, like Leigh Bowery.