The Romantic Era: Dandies
“He was a tall, heavy-looking young man of five-and-twenty. His air was grave and stately, and his manners were very formal. He had not been long seated before he complimented Mrs. Bennet on having so fine a family of daughters; said he had heard much of their beauty.”
- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813), Chapter 13
Dandyism, a phenomenon that only started to exist as a reaction to the ideals of the French Revolution, is a description of a man who values paying attention to their appearance, refined language and personal grooming. It is a phenomenon that mostly occurred in France and England. The lifestyle and fashion of a dandy, is very much part of the Romantic era. This essay will look into the key elements of dandyism and men’s fashion in times of romanticism.
A dandy is par excellence a man. But not a man who lets his birth rank define his social status. A dandy believes that interest in literature, art, rhetorics and most importantly his physical appearance and way of dressing, is enough to become a ‘self made man’, regardless of your background (Cole, p. 188). Self expression became a tool to claim your desired standing in existing societal hierarchies.
An example of dandyism in Romantic literature is La Fille aux Yeux d’Or by Honoré de Balzac. It tells the story of the sorrowful life of a dandy, living a life full of sexual passion and jealousy. An example of a writer who was a dandy himself, was Oscar Wilde. He wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray. One of the characters was Lord Henry, obsessed with beauty, wit, and pleasure, always impeccably dressed, with flamboyant mannerisms speaks in clever epigrams and lives by a philosophy of indulgence and aestheticism. In short, he captures all the trademarks of a true dandy (Liebman, 1999).
One thing all dandies have in common, is their obsession with their appearance. Through fashion they expressed the way they looked at life. Typically it consists of four main ingredients: the shirt, the vest, the pants the jacket. But it does not stop there, from a handkerchief, to the stockings, to the hat, to the bow, to the little pointy shoes. With high precision the dandy curated every minor and major detail of his outfit (McMaster, 54-70).
Dandyism is a phenomenon within romanticism. Both of these rely on idea that power and social status are not dependent on innate characteristics. Contrary to the droit divine, dandies found way to become part of the aristocracy while coming from middle class backgrounds. Also living in passion, emotion through literature and art is very much intertwined with the developments withing romanticism. Even though some argue that dandies still exist, I firmly believe that true dandies only existed within the age of romanticism, since it was not only a clothing style, but a lifestyle that was subject to the zeitgeist of a period in time.
Sources
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. 1813.
Cole, Shaun, and Miles Lambert, eds. Dandy style: 250 years of British men's fashion. Yale University Press, 2021.
Higgins, Sarah. Contemporary Dandyism and the New Romantics. Diss. Institute of Art, Design+ Technology, 2024.
Liebman, Sheldon W. "Character Design in" The Picture of Dorian Gray"." Studies in the Novel 31.3 (1999): 296-316.
McMaster, Juliet, et al. "Dickens, the Dandy, and the Savage: A Victorian View of the Romantic." The Novel from Sterne to James: Essays on the Relation of Literature to Life (1981): 54-70.
Murray, Christopher John. Encyclopedia of the romantic era, 1760–1850. Routledge, 2013.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Edited by Robert Mighall, Penguin Classics, 1813.
