What is inside the dandiacal carapace?
blogAccording to Thomas Carlyle, writing in 1831, the dandy is a “clothes-wearing man”[1]. This has always seemed to me a rather superficial definition, one that fails ask why a man might be “heroically consecrated” to dressing well.
Charles Baudelaire gets closer in The Painter of Modern Life (1863) when he says that “dandyism in certain respects comes close to spirituality and to stoicism.” For Baudelaire, the dandy is a rebel opposed to the vulgarity of his own age, an aristocrat of the mind swimming against the tide of democracy.
For me, the Dandy is the man who aims to reduce the amount of entropy in his life. This does not mean that he goes against nature – as the popular misconception of dandyism suggests – rather that he shapes it, cultivates it, surfs it. Dandyism is a formalised way of thinking about life, an attempt to refine ones life to the point where it is beautiful.
Dandyism is not just a twit in a straw boater or a label for anyone who wears something smarter than the shabby uniform of jeans and T-shirt.
1 “A dandy is a clothes-wearing man – a man whose trade, office, and existence consist in the wearing of clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, person and purse is heroically consecrated to this one object – the wearing of clothes, wisely and well; so that, as others dress to live, he lives to dress.” Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle.