The Dandy: Peacock or Enigma?
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About this book
A look at the phenomenon of the dandy from Regency England to the contemporary Congolese Sapeurs with stops at Wodehouse Wilde Grant and more The dandy is not just an elaborately or even well-dressed man nor is he an exclusively English phenomenon. He is something far more universal and intriguing and this study explores his cultural significance. It starts with Beau Brummell acknowledged as the very first dandy a man whose ancestors had been servants yet who invented a new paradigm of courtesy wit independence and elegance to lord over the aristocrats of England. Brummell died in exile forgotten and impoverishedthe best dandies often die in debt. But his image lived on to haunt and inspire generations around the world from the boulevards of Paris and St. Petersburg in the 1830s to the studios of Hollywood a century later. Byron Disraeli Bulwer Pushkin Chopin Delacroix Balzac Baudelaire Wilde Proust Boni de Castellane Hugo von Hofmannstahl Beerbohm Nol Coward Cary Grant Fred Astaire Vladimir Nabokov Ortega y Gassett Mikhael Bulgakov Evelyn Waugh Scott Fitzgerald Tom Wolfe Nick Foulkesall were bedazzled by the image of the dandy.
