“Do You Call this Thing a Coat?”: Wit, the Epigram and the Detail in the Figure of the Ultimate Dandy, Beau Brummell

Abstract

Identified as the ultimate “man of fashion,” the dandy possesses a unique longevity amongst men’s style icons. I argue that the dandy and fashion itself persist because they share an appealing quality of wit—the expression of an unexpected insight in a moment of surprise. I will focus on George “Beau” Brummell (1778–1840) to study this wit as manifested in the verbal epigram and sartorial detail. The dandy’s epigrams are rarely discussed within fashion studies, and are often regarded as separate from his material contributions. In The Fashion System, Roland Barthes characterizes the fashion writing of magazines, largely composed of utterances which may be regarded as epigrams, as a “rare and poor rhetoric.” I will argue that Brummell’s famous epigrams intend to astonish through their pithy insights. The sartorial detail is often read as operating through the logic of distinction; this is the basis of Barthes’s claim that the fashion system “kills” the dandy by replicating his constant innovations. I will contend that the dandy’s details contain the spark of a surprising insight. The verbal epigram and sartorial detail can thus be seen as expressions of the same impulse to surprise which characterizes both wit and fashion.

Keywords:

• Dandy
• Beau Brummell
• wit
• detail
• Barthes

Notes

1. Whilst I am familiar with the literature on female dandies which includes luminaries such as Virginia Woolf and Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel—see for example, Fillin-Yeh 2001, or Vinken’s novel argument that haute couture is the ultimate female dandyism (2005, 21–23)—my argument will focus on the classical male dandy. However, my broader argument about the relationship of wit to fashion can certainly be elaborated to include female dandyism.

2. In the early twenty-first century there has been a definite revival of the dandy archetype. Some celebrity dandies stand out as resembling Brummell during this period. In fashion Karl Lagerfeld represents the designer-as-dandy through a cultivated style that remains essentially recognizable whilst varying its details (sunglasses, gloves, white ponytail, Dior suit), and who is as renowned for his witticisms (“Karlisms”) as he is for his designs. Subcultures of well-dressed gentlemen and self-identified dandies have also developed. Online examples include global street-style blogs (most famously the sartorialist.com), ongoing media coverage of the sprezzatura-obsessed attendees of the annual Pitti Uomo men’s fashion trade exhibition in Italy, and the satirical but style-obsessed editors of the Fuck Yeah Menswear tumblr who celebrate “waxing poetic on waxed jackets, highbrow humor in high waters, and double entendre in double-breasted sport coats” (Burrows and Schlossman 2012, ix).

3. See Potvin 2016 for an account of the role of a concept of “elegance” in creating a unique space for emergent dandy identities in the early twentieth century, and its role in constituting a civilizing discourse for these alternate masculine/queer identities.

4. This account, Brummell’s biographer Captain Jesse writes, was denied by the Beau himself. Jesse believes the separation occurred because Brummell had made “sarcastic remarks” at the expense of the Prince’s paramour, Mrs Fitzherbert (1844, 271); Kelly also provides a number of alternate explanations but notes, ultimately, there was “no clear falling-out” (2005, 278). One final humiliation was too much to bear, however: the Prince Regent, intending to make his unhappiness with his former intimate known, publicly refused to acknowledge Brummell during an encounter at Hyde Park. Instead of being discomfited, Brummell allegedly turned to his companion and “in a distinct tone expressive of complete ignorance” asked “A——, who’s your fat friend?” (Jesse 1844, 273–274).

5. Saturated with semiological terminology, The Fashion System is quite difficult to read, and invites a curious form of critical oneupmanship where reviewers vie to outdo each other in providing unflattering assessments. For example, the text has been called “the most boring book on fashion ever written” (Moeran 2004, 36); “structuralism’s Moby Dick” (Carter 2003, 144); “a semiological disaster … more of a nightmare than a dream” (Barnard 1996, 92); “impenetrable and rather obsessive” (Pine 2004, 356); and “an austere and baroque book … in which a linguistic theory … develops, flourishes, and self-destructs” (Pellegrin 2010, 54).

6. In a crucial passage from the Foreword, Barthes presses home the idea that the fashion system is oriented around economic concerns: “Why does Fashion utter clothing so abundantly? Why does it interpose, between object and its user, such a luxury of words?” ([1967] 1983, ix). The purpose of the Fashion system for Barthes is as follows: “In order to blunt the buyer’s calculating consciousness, a veil must be drawn around the object—a veil of images, of reasons, of meanings … [T]hus the commercial origin of our collective image-system … cannot be a mystery to anyone” (xii). This simplistic position requires contemporary critical re-evaluation.

7. Edelkoort is a trend forecaster whose Anti-Fashion manifesto—subtitled “Ten reasons why the fashion system is obsolete”—inspired the “The End of Fashion” conference held in Wellington, December 2016. My own paper, “Liberating the Wit of Fashion: Barthes’ ‘Fashion System’ vs Carlyle’s ‘Philosophy of Clothes’” critiqued the way in which the notion that the “end of fashion” itself was presupposed on an assumed notion of a particular fashion system (2016b). Amed, the editor of The Business of Fashion website and print publication, spent much of 2016 questioning whether the notion of a single, unified global “fashion system” was in crisis. In the editorial for a special print issue on the fashion system, he described it “seemingly at breaking point” (2016, 3) in the way that fast, instant, and runway fashion seemed to be temporally splintering.

8. Whilst exceedingly valuable as a primary resource, Jesse’s work does include much extraneous and irrelevant secondary material. It is hard to disagree with an uncredited review published in The Dublin Review: “The whole would have been a more creditable production, if it were just one fourth of its present size. A number of silly letters are transcribed into it, and a quantity of still more silly verse, that would have been better omitted, with the evident purpose of puffing it out into two volumes” (1844, 104).

9. The uncredited review of Jesse’s biography noted immediately above ends its survey of the Beau’s later life with the following dire warning: “Many a young man, who enters life with bright prospects, with ample means, fascinating exterior, and brilliant talents, may be tempted to distinguish himself in the fashionable world as Brummell did. If such there be, and this page should meet his eye, let him remember the squalid and filthy old age of the once witty and fastidious Brummell; and, above all, recollect that he died in a madhouse” (The Dublin Review 1844, 104).

10. Kelly (2005) devotes considerable attention to Brummell’s varied sexual history, aiming to efface the myth that he was asexual or homosexual, as the dandy was often later portrayed (consider, for example, the aesthete-dandy figure of Oscar Wilde).

11. Brummell’s vegetable misadventures were not confined to Lady Mary’s fondness for cabbage. Hazlitt recounts the story that, “Having taken it into his head, at one time, to eat no vegetables, and being asked by a lady if he had never eaten any in his life, he said, ‘Yes, madam; I once ate a pea’” ([1820] 2007, 331). Hazlitt measures the Beau’s response as follows: “This was reducing the quantity of offensive grossness to the smallest assignable fraction: anything beyond that his imagination was oppressed with; and even this he seemed to … hasten from the subject with a certain monosyllabic brevity of style” ([1828] 1934, 153). By inflating an appearance of the smallest object into the cause of the greatest offense, Brummell’s response to even the most uncontroversial inquiry became a matter of nervous anticipation.

12. The idea of “pet preference” furnishes a number of other similar anecdotes, including the idea that he engaged different glove-makers to assemble different components for his gloves: “one for the hand, a second for the fingers, and a third for the thumb!” (Bulwer-Lytton, quoted in Moers 1960, 32), or that he was so particular about his collar that he had one tailor to construct the bulk of his coat and a separate man Jenkins to finish the collar itself (Hazlitt ([1820] 2007), 331).

13. To quote Mauss and Humbert’s A General Theory of Magic, “There is no such thing as an inactive, honorary magician. To qualify as a magician you must make magic; conversely, anyone who makes magic is, at least for the moment, a magician” ([1902] 2001, 108).

14. For the classic treatment of sympathetic magic, see Part Three of the abridged 1922 version of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough ([1922] 2014).

15. There is a wide range of general interest publications that trace important changes in the evolution of fashion via the detail—see for example The Killer Detail: Defining Moments in Fashion (Armanet and Quin 2013) or 1000 Fashion Details (Arollo 2011). For those focused on costume history, the Victoria & Albert Museum produces a book series “Fashion in Detail” which explores the detail in differing garments. They are organized historically (e.g. Nineteenth Century Fashion in Detail (Johnston 2009)) or by theme (Underwear Fashion in Detail (Lynn 2010)). And in terms of fashion education, there is a plethora of textbooks that identify the fashion detail as a significant object to be studied, for example Detail Drawing for Fashion Design (Drudi 2013) or Wargnier’s series Focus on Fashion Detail (2012).

16. Veblen’s text is itself regarded by some as a satire. Certainly, a humorous construction can be placed on certain passages. For example, one gleans clearly whether Veblen was what we would call today a cat or a dog person. On felines: “The cat is less reputable … because she is less wasteful; she may even serve a useful end. The cat’s temperament does not suit her for the honorific purpose. She lives with man on terms of equality, knows nothing of that relation of status which is the ancient basis of all distinctions of worth, honour and repute” ([1899] 1998, 140). On canines: “The dog ... is often spoken of … as the friend of man, and his intelligence and fidelity are praised. The meaning of this is that the dog is man’s servant and that he has the gift of an unquestioning subservience … He is the filthiest of the domestic animals in his person and the nastiest in his habits. For this he makes up in a servile, fawning attitude to his master, and a readiness to inflict damage on all else” (141).

17. Veblen’s ill-disguised hostility towards fashion, and its influence on the association between fashion and futility, is a subject to be pursued in a separate paper.

18. Within his system, Barthes also discusses the detail as a genus of “Fashion” (that is, an object or support of a signifying matrix which can have its meaning altered by a variant)—but this meaning is not relevant here and, indeed, goes some way to demonstrating the difficult terminology found in his text (see Barthes [1967] 1983, 106).

19. For Barthes—following the French tradition of the philosophical dandyism of d’Aurevilly, Balzac, and Baudelaire—dandyism is an “ascetic” philosophy comprised not only of an “ethos … but also a technique” ([1962] 2004, 67).

20. We will forgive Barthes his odd aside about “the psychological traits (probably narcissistic and homosexual) which have made dandyism into an essentially masculine phenomenon” (69), although this viewpoint certainly deserves to be challenged, and is precisely the assumption that Kelly (2005) wishes to contest, as discussed above at note 10.

21. Despite the fascinating originality of her object of study, Vainshtein ultimately positions the dandy as a “heroic suffering consumer” who prefigures “oppositional style”; for this reason, I find her argument of limited use for my own purposes (2010, 105).

22. Moers notes that Brummell “imposed on his generation the practice of starching linen neckcloths, in order to produce a cravat folded with exactitude,” but emphasizes that he himself advocated only a light starching (1960, 35).

23. Intriguingly, in the course of my research I found it difficult to find a term which encompassed the whole of the male package, without emphasizing the penis as the primary object (such as “phallus”) or separating the penis from the two testicles (e.g. “meat and two veg”). However, the silhouette of both combined is certainly distinct from one that emphasized either component. Taking the question to Facebook, a lively discussion yielded “menitals” as a suggestion that encapsulated the unity of objects and also conveyed maleness (Svelte 2016a).

24. The sexual aspect of the detail takes us into the rich territory of fetishism; see generally Steele (1996) for an overview of fashion fetishisms and the details by which they manifest.

25. See for example, McDowell (1989, 33) or Sauro (2010, 92).

26. One is reminded, of course, of Christian Louboutin’s famously red-painted soles; Steele (1996) provides further food for thought about why the Beau’s boots might be a source of fascination for some.

27. McDowell, for example, claims that the blacking was made from a mixture of “spent champagne and honey” (1989, 33).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dita Svelte

Dita Svelte’s research focuses on the intriguing intersections between wit and fashion. He argues that the surprising and seductive creative possibilities of wit are echoed in the phenomenon of fashion itself, and that this wit might assist in explaining fashion’s own enduring appeal and powerful allure.

[email protected]