Dandyism : Italo Alves
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Dandyism : Italo Alves
In the last decade of French colonial rule in the Congo, young men from Kinshasa were establishing clubs devoted to fashion. One of the best-remembered clubs from that time was the Existos, short for existentialistes, named after the philosophical school of J.-P. Sartre, whom the students returning from their stays in Paris greatly admired. These clubs were a mix of mutual aid associations, discothèques, and fashion ensembles, and united the employed and the unemployed, the educated and the uneducated. Their members formed a cult of elegance and strove for distinctiveness and pleasure from wearing designer suits and fashion accessories.1 The clubs of the 1950s set the tone for a subculture that would become known as “La Sape.” From the French verb “saper” (meaning to dress or dress elegantly), the word became a “backronym” for a certain Société des ambianceurs et des personnes élégantes, the Society of Ambiance-Makers and Elegant People, which continued a tradition of elegant dress in contemporary Kinshasa and Brazzaville, as well as in the Congolese diaspora in Europe. Today, in cities like Paris and London, young sapeurs spend their salaries on expensive Italian three-piece suits, taking pride in the tradition that dates back to the colonial enterprises in the Congo Basin.2 Other lower-class groups have found in self-stylization and the cult of elegance a way to respond to their adverse social environments. Around the same time as the first fashion clubs emerged in the Congo, rural bandits associated with the Cangaço movement in Brazil would loot the property of wealthy landowners and spend the following days wearing their expensive French silk and taffeta scarves and embroidering their clothes and hats with folk motifs.3 For these outlaws, their self-adornment served as a form of symbolic revenge against the landed elite; not only a form of terror by self-display, but a way of appropriating markers of refinement and status that were simply not available otherwise.4 In another example, Mexican immigrants in 1930s Los Angeles, who did not identify with Mexican culture but also did not want to integrate into mainstream white American culture—a group known as pachucos—organized their habitation of this in-betweenness sensibly, adopting the large and colorful zoot suit as their symbol. These groups, I suggest, are different instantiations of the same thing: dandyism. “Dandyism” names a bundle of practices united by their trans-historical resemblance. What allows us to call the Congolese sapeurs “dandies” is the emergence, in the seventeenth century, and the crystallization, in the nineteenth century, of the social trope of dandyism. Initially employed across France and England, the word “dandy” served to designate the bourgeois aesthete who aspired to the modes of the aristocracy. The persistence of this trope across different historical and cultural contexts—from Regency England to colonial Congo, from rural Brazil to urban America—suggests that dandyism is more than a recurring cultural phenomenon. To say that the sapeurs, the cangaceiros, and the pachucos are dandies suggests a validity that goes beyond the concept’s time and place of inception—that is, it suggests a certain trans-historical valence. In this sense, its application to its modern, massified forms—the sapeurs, the cangaceiros, the pachucos, among many others—is not a category mistake. Because dandyism is a trans-historical concept, its exposition cannot do away with some of the historical developments of the practices it names, which is how we should proceed. At the same time, I will suggest that dandyism, more than a trans-historical concept, is also a political one. It is political because it names a practice that not only lives in the world, but also interferes in it. In exploring the politicality of dandyism, my goal is to expose three constitutive aspects of this interference. More specifically, I aim to investigate the content, type, and form this interference takes. Respectively, I claim that dandyism is, first, a concept about the social—one that points to the world we share with others; second, a normative concept—one that lays claim to how the social should be; and third, a concept that is engendered aesthetically—one that privileges the realm of non-discursive expression and its apperception. The fact that it is a normative concept that pertains to our shared social world is what makes the concept of dandyism political. At the same time, the fact that it lends itself to aesthetic inquiry forces us to ponder what counts—or should count—as properly political. Dandyism, I suggest, represents an aesthetic form of politics—one through which subordinate classes stake an insurgent claim to the privileges of leisure, unbounded self-creation, and freedom from necessity that have been historically monopolized by the upper classes, and one that finds in the upper classes a symbol of its enjoyment. To explicate this point, I will explore what I take to be three constitutive dimensions of dandyism’s political character: first, its social content—how it operates within and responds to class-specific relationships; second, its prescriptive character—how it makes claims about the just distribution of aesthetic freedom across class boundaries; and third, its aesthetic form—how it communicates these political aspirations through non-discursive, sensible modes of self-presentation rather than explicit argumentation. Rather than dismissing this class aspiration as mere false consciousness or an epiphenomenon of ideology, I suggest that by examining the sources fueling this desire, we may identify a shared feeling of discomfort with one’s allotted place in class society—and redemption with its expressive defiance. When avenues for overt political expression are limited, raising political claims often requires creative modes of articulation. Dandyism shows how political concepts can be encoded into aesthetic choices about the self. Rather than a merely “stylistic” practice, dandyism illustrates how aesthetic forms can communicate normative claims; how political claims can find coded expression through seemingly mundane aesthetic choices and embodied performances of everyday life. 1. The Social Content In Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s essay Of Dandyism and of George Brummell (1845), the figure of George “Beau” Brummell takes the stage as “the autocrat of opinion” and embodiment of quintessential dandyism. Brummell was an important figure in Regency England, and Barbey sees him as an archetype for a particular affectation and type of urban man. Described as ruling “even more by what he looked than by what he said,” Brummell is meticulous in his cultivation of sartorial elegance. His life is a whirlwind of soirées and public appearances, of glancing around and disappearing. “In society,” Barbey states as the maxim of dandyism, one must “stop until you have made your impression, then go.” Yet behind this façade of nonchalance, Barbey hints that Brummell “marked everything with his personality, existing only through a kind of exquisite originality”—his dandyism a kind of permanent, constant, and dedicated form of self-creation.5 The trope of the dandy crystallized in the mid-nineteenth century through the cultural exchange between England and France, though its origins can be traced to multiple lineages. In the 1800s, French aristocrats who were living in exile in England since the French Revolution and who became schooled in the mores of London high society found it safe to return to post-revolutionary Paris. Considering this transit, Feldman affirms that “dandyism developed simultaneously in London and Paris, each group of dandies looking across the channel for the very essence of ‘bon ton’ (for the English dandy) or ‘le high life’ (for the French fashionable).”6 The “dandy” was the most well-known of the crowd, but others categories emerged to describe similar sensibilities, like the clubistes, the fashionable, the merveilleux, and the incroyables in France, as well as the fops, the swells, and the lions in England.7 More than simply in transit, the concept crystalized in a class-specific setting and began to point to a specific class dynamic. Dandies were, fundamentally, sons of bourgeois families who, ashamed of the fact that their families had had to work for their money, sought a direct form of ascent into the leisurely life-forms of the aristocracy. The initial international transit of the aristocracy engendered, in its way, the bourgeois emulation of the aristocratic style.8 Barbey d’Aurevilly’s essay on Brummell is important not only in sedimenting the dandy as a typical physiognomy of the time, but also in showing the class-specific relationship in which the concept emerged.9 Born into a wealthy bourgeois family, with his father serving as the private secretary to the prime minister and his mother being the daughter of the keeper of the lottery office, Brummell formed a close friendship with George, the Prince of Wales, after the two met at Eton College. This friendship would persist, and Brummel would later become well-known in the goings-on of the court. This relationship between a bourgeois man and the aristocracy is highlighted as exemplary of the dandy trope by the literature of the period, which calls attention to the extent to which dandyism is imbued with a sense of respect, perhaps even reverence, for the customs of royalty and aristocracy.10 In its most archetypal form, the dandy wants to become an aristocrat. This class change, however, is a contradiction in terms. Being a true aristocrat is a matter of birth, not something one can simply achieve or buy one’s way into. One does not become, but rather is born an aristocrat. This contradiction is expressed in the title of Molière’s play Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. Premiering in 1670, its plot line of aristocratic ambition shares the basic elements of dandyism before this concept was known by its name. The play tells the story of Monsieur Jourdain, a wealthy bourgeois man who has made his fortune as a draper but who, due to a sense of lack of manners and taste, wants to become an aristocrat. To achieve this, he hires a group of experts, including musicians, dancers, fencers, and philosophers, to teach him the typical arts and sciences of the higher classes. His efforts backfire, however, as he ends up making a fool of himself, falling into a trap set by an impostor posing as the Prince of Turkey. Monsieur Jourdain was read as worthy of a double form of ridicule: not only he would never become an aristocrat (and therefore was ridiculed by the aristocratic sensibility), but he was also a class traitor (and therefore worthy of ridicule by the bourgeois sensibility). Jourdain’s character anticipates the paradox that would later define dandyism: the impossible aspiration to transcend one’s class through active self-creation, a project that is both transgressive in its ambition and inherently self-defeating in its execution. 2. Mass Dandyism Rejecting bourgeois brutishness and philistinism, aspiring to ascend into the aristocracy, committing oneself entirely to programmatic self-creation: these practices are part of the structure of dandyism. In its nineteenth-century form, dandyism is a bourgeois inclination of a particular reverence for the aristocracy. Its structure, however, is not unique to pre-industrial France and England, as more contemporary examples indicate. And to the extent that it persists in the face of similarly hierarchical relations between the lower and upper classes, dandyism may reveal something about class society itself. Beyond its origins among the European bourgeoisie and aristocracy of the nineteenth century, “dandyism” can be used to describe similar dispositions that appear more recently, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, very often in colonial or post-colonial settings.11 As the bourgeoisie became the de facto upper class, the characters in the hierarchical structure of dandyism changed, but the structure itself, I would suggest, remained the same. No longer exclusively a bourgeois longing for the modes of the aristocracy, dandyism now became a popular, lower-class, direct appropriation of the actual or imagined signs of the wealthy. No longer necessarily encoded as aristocratic, the new markers of self-expression simply point to a transcendence of the limits of the given. The zoot suit of the pachucos is not necessarily a piece worn by the rich. It is, however, a sign of how things—clothing included—could be different; how the self could be inclined to forms of presentation that are fundamentally useless, devoid, for instance, of the functionalist imperatives of labor, and turned toward enjoyment. To distinguish its popular instantiations from its bourgeois inception, I call this specific form of the practice “mass dandyism.”12 It is perhaps in mass dandyism that the class structure of dandyism—and its implied critique—becomes more palpable. Let’s take the example of pachuco culture. As a subculture, pachucos first appeared in the southwestern United States during the 1930s and 1940s, primarily among Mexican American youth in Los Angeles and El Paso. Pachucos were known for wearing the zoot suit, which featured an oversized jacket with wide shoulders, high-waisted trousers that tapered at the ankles, a watch chain, hat, and leather shoes.13 During World War II, the United States government was the greatest upholder of values such as national unity and sacrifice. If you were Mexican American, you were the target of contradictory pressures: If, on the one hand, labor shortages opened economic opportunities for you, racial discrimination still prevented you from finding employment. This marginalization amid calls for national unity formed the backdrop against which the pachuco style emerged.14 During the war, government and reform organizations intensified efforts to “Americanize” ethnic minorities, presenting conformity to Anglo-American norms as a patriotic duty. Programs like the “Americans All” movement encouraged Mexican Americans to abandon cultural distinctiveness for a unified national identity.15 Pachucos offered a refusal of this bargain, and were therefore object of growing Anglo-American hostility. The zoot suit’s conspicuousness became significant in this context of growing animosity against Mexican Americans. As Eduardo Obregón Pagán observes, “The public simply could not accept that working class youths of color obtained material goods through honest means.”16 The sight of Mexican American youth in tailored suits violated expectations about how poor, racialized people should appear.17 The high cost of the zoot suit and the fact that it was made of materials to be rationed suggested some broader defiance of institutionally imposed expectations toward Mexican Americans, especially those associated with their position in the class and labor division. It is in this sense that Catherine Ramírez notes that pachucos “demonstrated that they had the ability ‘to afford a life of idleness.’ Like upper-class Americans, they could give the impression that they did not (or did not have to) work.”18 This appearance of leisure—an aspect of the dandy’s self-presentation—becomes politically charged when adopted by those expected to occupy a position of subordination or, more simply, labor. As Sarah Howard notes, “The act of putting on the suit gave them a sense of power and a way in which to resist the limits placed on them.”19 Just like wartime in the United States was an important background for understanding the emergence of the pachuco style, the historical context of post-war Britain serves as a background for the emergence of the teddy boy style. World War II had left Britain economically depleted, leading to a period of austerity characterized by rationing, housing shortages, and emphasis on sacrifice for national recovery. The war had physically transformed urban landscapes, with many working-class neighborhoods destroyed by bombing and residents relocated to new housing developments. In this scenario, the Teddy Boy subculture represented a reaction to post-war austerity and its restrictions. Government policies limited consumer goods, including clothing, to prioritize economic recovery and export markets. The Neo-Edwardian suit adopted by the Teddy Boys defied these constraints through its deliberate excess—the suits featured embellishments like pocket flaps, trouser turn-ups, and double-breasted waistcoats that contravened clothing regulations, which functioned as modern sumptuary laws. These suits represented expensive investments at a time when practical clothing was the norm, especially for the working-class youth. By choosing clothing that was impractical and, most importantly, expensive, Teddy Boys could be seen as expressively contributing to the rejection of the ethos of sacrifice and utility prevalent in post-war British culture and laying claim to the right to pleasure and self-expression within conditions of scarcity. Unable to have actual class mobility, Teddy Boys claimed symbolic mobility through fashion, appropriating the appearance of leisure and refinement associated with the British aristocracy. I want to suggest that these popular appropriations of elegance and sophistication represent a defense of aesthetic enjoyment by people who are not normally accorded it. The dandy’s desire to emulate a certain social class in which free and elegant self-expression is possible represents an expressive reclamation of aesthetic enjoyment and self-expression. We should not dismiss these class-coded aspirations as mere expressions of false consciousness. As Stuart Hall argues, popular cultural forms do not either embody dominant ideologies to their full extent or are inherently resistant and oppositional. They are complicated formations that present both elements of domination and identification and resistance.20 The dandy’s reverence for the upper classes and ambition to become a member thereof might emerge, after all, from a sense of discomfort with one’s class position. * * * In The Hidden Injuries of Class, Richard Sennett discusses conversations with industrial workers in Boston, exploring their feelings about work, family, and aspiration. These second and third-generation immigrant workers believed integrating into American society meant adapting to new values and becoming intellectually “cultured” to gain respect. The word “cultured” expressed what the lower classes thought of their social expectations. A 1963 survey showed working-class parents dreamed of prestigious occupations for their children, like physicist or professor—jobs associated with intellectual freedom rather than just financial security.21 For the few who cross the line into the professions, their language is that of a “rebirth.” When one becomes a doctor, lawyer, or architect, one must learn to act like one, speak like one, and dress like one—to create oneself anew. This sense of a forced “rebirth” when encountering the habitat of the upper classes is articulated by French sociologist Didier Eribon. In his 2009 book Retour à Reims, Eribon describes having to give up his working-class identity to find acceptance in Parisian intellectual circles in the 1970s. Eribon, born into a working-class family in the city of Reims, gained access to university and intellectual circles through his mother’s sacrifices. However, living among the Parisian elite in the 1970s meant re-learning how to behave, dress, and express himself to be accepted by the intellectual aristocracy. He was trapped in what he terms the “social closet.” Even after actively attempting to “pass” as a member de jure of this new elite, Eribon reports how his working-class background marked him as never fully belonging there.22 Eribon’s account exposes the symbolic costs of upward class mobility. To gain entry into the rarefied Parisian intellectual circles, he was forced to renounce elements of his working-class origins. Yet this transformation could never be total—vestiges of his past lingered, marking him as an outsider never fully accepted by the establishment aristocracies. The “social closet” enabled navigating class differences enough to integrate on the surface, but at the cost of repressing and disavowing one’s roots. Eribon’s experience illustrates the social content of dandyism, characterized by compulsive self-refashioning as a response to the feeling of class discomfort. In discussing the question of the transfuge de classe that Eribon’s memoir illustrates, I want to call attention, again, to how dandyism is constituted by an ambition for the modes of the upper classes. This ambition is always contradictory, precarious, multifaceted, but seems to also be always motivated by certain discomfort with one’s class position and what is expected in terms of self-presentation from someone in that class position. The refusal of utility marks a similarity between ninetheenth-century bourgeois and twentieth-century mass forms of dandyism. The social content of dandyism is, so far, a descriptive interpretation of a bundle of practices. Dandyism’s social content illustrates why dandyism can be understood as a social concept. The fact that the dandy makes use of expressive forms of self-presentation that presuppose engagement with an audience makes the practice, to use Max Weber’s term, a form of “social action”: human behavior that engages with—and is oriented toward—the behavior of others.23 Not every practice that involves the behavior of others is social. An accident between two cyclists, to use Weber’s famous example, is just asocial as the weather or the sun rising in the morning. Neither of the cyclists coordinated their behavior with the other. However, if they had seen each other before the collision and pivoted their bikes each to one side to try to avoid it, then the action would have been social. Of essence, here, is not necessarily that the coordination between the cyclists constitutes a form of “action,” but that it is a “social” form, that is, one that requires the engagement in a shared world of meaning.24 The scenario is a bit murkier when we are talking about a “mass” practice. For Weber, “[a]ction prompted by a reaction to the mere presence of a ‘mass,’ or to which such presence contributed, without there being a meaningful relation, is not ‘social action’ in the sense used here.”25 The influence of the mass would be, for Weber, “causal” rather than “meaningful.” This definition, however, is fluid, and Weber is thinking of a fundamentally amorphous mass, to which it is difficult to attribute meaning-generating capacity. However, if an individual’s action is influenced by negotiations with meanings attributed by other subjects present in the mass, then—and to the extent that it happens—action becomes social.26 The sociality of dandyism is not enough to characterize its politicality, which would require not merely that the concept be descriptive of a certain social practice, but that it point to a normative element, which can be found, I suggest, in its aspirational element. Dandyism is always the emulation of the modes of classes that are hierarchically superior.27 The inspiration it draws from the aristocratic style is not due to its material well-being but to its elegance. This aspirational structure makes it so that dandyism ceases to exist as such once its claim to aristocratic elegance is concretized. If the claims to access to the aesthetic modes of the aristocracy are fulfilled—in other words, if the dandy successfully passes into the upper class—dandyism loses the aspirational motivation that constitutes it. Dandyism, in other words, only exists as a normative concept, an unfulfilled promise, a devoir-être projected into the future. 3. The Normative Character In its defiance of class-appropriate style, dandyism functions practically as a class-specific critique of the class-based distribution of the spheres of leisure, aesthetic fruition, uselessness, and purposeless elegance. Dandyism lays a normative claim to that which we may call the aesthetic. To explicate how dandyism can be a claim-laying practice, it is necessary, first, to understand how claims can emerge where no reflective discourse exists—dandies are not writing tomes about their theories of self, they are simply being dandies. Second, it is necessary to unfold its paradoxical impossibility—the fact that dandyism is bound to fail. On the first point, the type of self-fashioning that serves the dandy as medium can function as a privileged or even the sole expressive medium when more direct, reflective modes of articulating feelings, preferences, and experiences are blocked. In other words, when institutional avenues for articulating political demands appear inaccessible or unresponsive, everyday practices like dandyism present themselves as readily available conductors for conveying one’s sensed grievances, desires, and wills, if only obliquely through aesthetic appearance. As argued by Axel Honneth, political ideas can be blocked from achieving full articulation. Honneth analytically distinguishes between two phenomena: “processes of cultural exclusion,” whereby groups or individuals lack the cultural background necessary to access the tools of democratic participation, and, most importantly here, “processes of institutionalized individualization,” which hinder the self-understanding of the working class as a class with shared interests.28 These processes cause social problems to appear as individual problems, the result of poor life choices or individual circumstances. If we accept the diagnosis that processes such as institutionalized individualization hinder further discursive articulation of political claims and confine them to apparently individual problems, then the political-theoretical task should be to attend to how these individualized expressions might be interpreted as reactions to broader political issues, rather than dismissing expressions that arise out of individual perception as morally regressive or ideologically tainted. As Honneth argues, “unarticulated indications of moral condemnation of the existing social order are hidden . . . in largely individualized struggles for social recognition . . . . These may have the potential of becoming . . . claims capable of universalization, since they indirectly illuminate socially established asymmetries.”29 When the realm of articulated claim-making is foreclosed, the realm of everyday life becomes paradigmatic or privileged. “From this perspective,” Honneth says, “a number of social actions which seem at first glance to lack any normative-practical intent or direction might possibly be recognized as forms of expression of the consciousness of social injustice.” A theory interested in modes of expressing political ideas should pay attention to the structure of the “unwritten and experience-bound moral perceptions” of the lower classes.30 These perceptions are largely unwritten, unarticulated, and highly experience-bound, precisely because they are class-specific; they arise from the fact that they are expressions of a shared class-specific experience of the social world. Honneth’s treatment of hidden political claims demonstrates how practices like dandyism can harbor political signification. Dandyism can be understood as a class-specific expressive vehicle for staking a claim to the aesthetic that is motivated by a sense of class-based discomfort. It does not rely on abstract-universal principles of justice but rather responds aesthetically to the visible markers attached to one’s class. This suggests that we unconsciously or semi-consciously can make political demands through our self-presentation. Although participants may lack full conscious awareness that they are making a normative claim, the normativity of dandyism operates regardless. And if the experience of injustice has been individualized, relegated to the privatized realms of personal choice and self-making rather than systemic processes like the labor market, then we must agree that its expression might have been similarly individualized, identifiable in individual modes of self-presentation. It is in that sense that self-presentation in everyday life becomes especially politically charged. The management of one’s appearance seems, in a way, to resist this circumscription of grievances to the merely individual. Aesthetic self-fashioning retains the trace of a desired freedom—the freedom to style one’s existence without the constraints of necessity or socially imposed restrictions. The social element that dandyism contains—its class-specific relationship—can be said to contain a normative claim about the social world. In other words, the aspirational structure of dandyism points to how the class-based distribution of the aesthetic could be different. * * * I have argued that, in the case of dandyism, the aesthetic manifestation encodes a political aspiration to the aesthetic freedom of self-creation. The political character of dandyism is present not because of its coherence with existing social norms, but because of its incoherence. The contradictions are inherent to its expressive form of claim-making. What constitutes dandyism as a political concept is precisely its capacity to expose the arbitrariness of class distinction by demonstrating expressively that the visible markers of aristocratic refinement can be appropriated and performed by those deemed unworthy of membership. Class boundaries (social content) are contingent rather than natural (normative claim). The contradiction between the dandy’s appropriation of aristocratic codes and his continued exclusion from the aesthetic freedom he claims functions as an immanent critique of the normative order it superficially seems to affirm. In other words, it is the very failure of the dandy’s aspirational structure that functions as its critical mechanism. This frustration encapsulates and makes visible the structural contradictions inherent in class-based distinction, for if the markers of refinement can be stolen and perfected, then class distinction cannot be grounded in any inherent quality. The dandy’s unsuccessful bid for ascent into the upper class points to a gap between the universalist pretensions of class society and its particularistic practices of exclusion. By taking seriously the universalist pretensions of social esteem—the notion that one’s worth should be determined by one’s qualities rather than birth—while exposing how this universalism remains unfulfilled, dandyism functions as a political practice that makes perceptible the disjunction between social promise and social reality. This politicality operates not through explicit argumentation but through aesthetic expression. When a working-class dandy presents himself with the refinement supposedly exclusive to the aristocracy, he demonstrates that the qualities ostensibly justifying upper-class privilege are neither innate nor exclusive. The structural contradiction between universalist principles and their limited application constitutes the political core of dandyism—an aesthetically coded challenge to the class-specific distribution of aesthetic freedom and the arbitrary limitations placed on self-creation. 4. The Aesthetic Form I have argued that the concept of dandyism is political because it contains a normative aspect: the practices that constitute it represent a normative discourse about the social world. This claim has two parts: first, that its content is social— it points to the shared realm of human life, the world in which we must necessarily live together under a shared dimension of meaning. The political character of dandyism, however, depends on a second, normative element, namely that dandyism contains some sort of prescriptive claim—an immanent critique, to the extent that all critiques are normative claims—about how access to aesthetic freedom should be distributed. This, as I have argued, should be enough to configure dandyism as a political concept. The particular historical development of the concept, however, not only makes it political, but also—I suggest—forces us to rethink how the political can be conceptually founded and socially identified. It should be no coincidence that the dandy’s characteristic inclination is precisely that of valuing his own visible appearance. There is something in the aesthetic form in which dandyism presents itself that points to a primacy of the aesthetic. The aesthetic is not only part of the claim, but also its medium. Politics, for dandyism, appears in aesthetic form. As Baudelaire suggested, fundamental for the dandy is the cultivation of beauty as an end, and of elegance as a means. For Baudelaire, who writes on the social type in The Painter of Modern Life, dandies have no other calling but to “cultivate the idea of beauty in their persons, to satisfy their passions, to feel and to think.”31 They are soldiers in their own battles against everything trivial or vulgar. Baudelaire was the thinker who perhaps best developed this element of self-stylization associated with dandyism; for him, the dandy was a herald of modernité. Baudelaire saw modernity not only as a way of relating to the present but also to oneself. For him, the modern man cultivated a certain asceticism that was the key to self-elaboration. To be modern was not to accept oneself in the flux of passing moments, but to conceive of oneself as the object of a complex and difficult elaboration. Modern man was not a spectator, content to keep his eyes open and accumulate “a storehouse of memories,”32 but someone engaged in a programmatic project of self-creation: modern man was not a flâneur, but a dandy. This point is taken up by Foucault in What is Enlightenment? where he distinguishes between Kant’s negative view of modernity as a way out of humanity’s infancy, and Baudelaire’s positive view of modernity as heralding a demand for aesthetic self-creation. For Kant, the path is through autonomous reasoning; for Baudelaire, through sensible self-invention. Rather than liberating man, modernity instead “compels him to face the task of producing himself.”33 According to Foucault, this language of inventing, producing, and elaborating the self defines how the need for distinction operates in the modern subject. One’s identity transforms into an ever-unresolved problem demanding a constant recreation of oneself. The dandy creates himself as someone fit to live among the aristocracy, a class of taste rather than money, elegance rather than utility, leisure rather than work—in this sense, the very opposite of the bourgeoisie.34 In embracing the modes of the aristocracy, the dandy strives to escape the narrowness of his own identity and become something greater, something beyond his given self. In cultivating upper-class sensibilities from a subordinate class position, dandies articulate a series of claims associated with the aesthetic life of the aristocracy. Dandyism’s aesthetic priorities encode a set of normative claims about how social life and its distinctions of privilege ought to be organized that is unarticulated yet grounded in social experience. As such, to the extent that dandyism gives name to this expressive mode of social claim-making, it constitutes a form of politics via aesthetics. Mainstream approaches to issues of visuality and sensible appearance in politics tend toward a denigration of the sensible realm of appearances. This denigration is as old as Plato’s expulsion of the poets from the Republic. For Rousseau, sensible appearances are potentially alienating, corrupting one’s sincere relationship with the world and others. Appearances block authentic, immediate exchange of inner worlds. This view also appears in the young Marx’s critique of alienation, or in Sartre’s existentialism, which is in turn informed by a Heideggerian notion of authenticity. The idea is that civilization, modernity, or capitalist development has alienated the human being, the person, or the worker from their true self—a vocabulary that echoes the Augustinian view that interiority is the only path to truth. This critique of sensible appearances as alienating disparages the sensible and visible realm of aesthetic self-presentation as a mere surface obstruction to “true” social and political forms. The political significance of aestheticized repertoires has traditionally been dismissed as a superficial “spectacle.” The concept that organized this suspicion, at least since the 1970s, was that of “aestheticization.” For German critics such as Wolfgang Welsch and Rüdiger Bubner, aestheticization describes the process through which previously non-aesthetic spheres, such as the lifeworld or politics, become unduly aestheticized through categories such as style, taste, and expression.35 Bubner, for example, follows the Kantian disjunction between aesthetic experience and the realm of purpose and use to argue for the separation between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic. The aesthetic not only is but should remain the realm of “purposelessness”: it is an escape from the world of necessity, a safeguard against a human experience totally subsumed by the imperative of use or purpose.36 Critics of sensible appearances are concerned, in one way or another, with the hypervalorization of what they deem as a superficial aspect of values and principles, or with the capitulation of the political to a merely aesthetic model of everyday life, which would erase its material and economic aspects. These critiques have their merits in pointing out, for example, the appropriation of human creative forces by capitalist production of value.37 However, I believe that critical views of the incorporation of aesthetic values and expressive practices into politics tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater by seeking to maintain a stark separation between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic. This position loses sight of the fact that there are forms of aesthetic expression that are overtly political, even at the micro level. When we decide what to wear before leaving the house, or when we employ rhetorical figures of speech, for instance, elements of aesthetic expression are present that, at the same time, can respond to political issues. If part of our social behavior is oriented by how we expect to be perceived by our interlocutors, as argued by the micro-sociology of everyday life, then fundamentally aesthetic categories such as style and self-presentation easily acquire a social element.38 If it is possible to associate this social element with a claim or demand, its political nature becomes evident. Dandyism is not an aesthetic rather than a political practice. It is political precisely in its aesthetic form. In this sense, it is probably no coincidence that the self-making implicated in the class-bound structure of dandyism is made through aesthetic expression. There is something about the aesthetic life—the life of leisure and free time—that developed historically as the counterpoint to the practical realm of use and economy. The homo aestheticus emerged as the opposite of the homo economicus. The notion that the realms of leisure and aesthetics stand opposed to those of necessity and utility goes back to ancient Greek thought, as Hannah Arendt highlighted in contrasting the political freedom of the polis with the constrained labor of the oikos.39 This division between domains of enjoyment and practical work was further solidified and explicitly theorized as the uncoupling of the spheres of utility and pleasure began in the Florentine Renaissance of the fifteenth century, when a new type of non-votive art entered the domestic sphere to be appreciated for reasons dissociated from use. Art broke from strictly religious, representational, or documentary purposes. This process reached its apotheosis in the eighteenth century, when the domains of use and its improvement on one side, and uselessness and its refinement on the other, crystallized into the disciplines of economics and aesthetics respectively. The former was practically oriented and concerned with the optimal employment of resources toward desired ends (Smith’s The Wealth of Nations); the latter, reflexively oriented and focused on purifying perception and judgment from the dross of practical ends or interests (Baumgarten’s Aesthetica). With this analytically and practically consequential distinction between the realms of use and uselessness, it became possible to speak of objects of aesthetic value versus objects of use value distinctively. The aesthetic no longer needed to be useful, the useful no longer needed to be aesthetic. In this predicament, the aesthetic realm appeared as a refuge from the imperatives of commerce and wage labor. For the bourgeoisie, this was naturally problematic. Excluded, by definition, from the artistic pursuits of the aristocratic court, their art was confined to the city. But if the aristocracy had a birthright to a theater seat, this was not true for the bourgeoisie, who had to work in order to purchase them. The economic realm of use appeared inescapable for a bourgeois whose sense of life and status hinged on ceaseless economic self-production through trade. At the same time, the aesthetic realm of uselessness seemed both desirable, as a reprieve from draconian demands of use, and unattainable, since its chief prerequisite of free time required relentlessly producing its material conditions. The aesthetic sphere, therefore, was consolidated under this fundamental contradiction. It was the realm of freedom, the sphere of disinterested, uncommitted appreciation decoupled from the market and the demands of civil society. Yet, its conditions of possibility were scarce—unquestionably available only to an aristocracy formed by birthright access to purposeless leisure. For those members of the bourgeoisie more inclined to aesthetic endeavors, the options were limited: first, working from within the bourgeois constraints; second, becoming a bohème or running away with the theater troupe (the Wilhelm Meister strategy); finally, the dandy option of pursuing a direct ascension into the aristocratic realm of aesthetic fruition. In each case, the aesthetic realm represented a refuge from the brutalities of the economy—a utopian space of human freedom and sensory plenitude. The view that maintains a rigid separation between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic, or, more specifically, between the aesthetic and the political, should be rejected for two reasons. Firstly, because sensible appearance is the form through which reality first presents itself to us. We know the social world through its aesthetic appearance. Secondly, because modes of discursive political articulation are often “blocked” or inaccessible, in which cases aesthetic expression ends up being used for political ends. Aesthetic appearances, therefore, are not superfluous veneers obscuring some truer essence, but rather the very conduits through which we gain knowledge of the social world.40 * * * As I have attempted to show, dandyism can be seen as the ambition to the modes and style of the upper classes that stems from a feeling of discomfort with one’s own class background. This ambition takes on a particularly sensible form: it exists as self-stylization rather than articulated discourse. As it does not explicitly rise to the reflective, discursive level, one might ask in what sense it is political. The political character of dandyism, I argue, is in its expressive conveyance of a properly political claim—a claim to what I call the aesthetic—that, not coincidentally, unfolds through an aesthetic form. Ultimately, instead of dismissing the dandy’s desire to fashion himself into someone he is not as vanity, false consciousness, or a deviation from truth and authenticity, we must seriously consider what this desire represents or symbolizes. As we have seen, dandyism harbors an oblique yet decipherable political claim. Its aesthetic performances, though not overtly articulated as discursive claims, contain unarticulated class experiences and condemnations of perceived maldistribution of the access to the aesthetic. The dandy’s self-presentations indicate an aspirational will—a longing for the aesthetic freedoms of leisure, self-cultivation, and release from necessity that have been the exclusive privileges of the ruling classes. In this light, dandyism shows itself as a proper vehicle for political expression. Its repertoires of self-fashioning allow suppressed grievances to be gesturally conveyed aesthetically when more direct channels of claim-making are systematically obstructed or individualized. In doing so, it forces us to reconsider the proper form of appearance of the political and appreciate not only its discursive but also its aesthetic forms of expression. Seen not as mere vanity but as proper form of politics, the self-contradictions of dandyism demand to be interpreted as elements typical of a class society. Published on August 17, 2025 * Italo Alves * 1. Phyllis M. Martin, Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 188.↩ 2. Didier Gondola, “La Sape Exposed! High Fashion among Lower-Class Congolese Youth: From Colonial Modernity to Global Cosmopolitanism,” in Contemporary African Fashion, ed. Edith Suzanne Gott and Kristyne Loughran (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 157–74.↩ 3. Frederico Pernambucano de Mello, Estrelas de couro: A estética do cangaço (São Paulo: Escrituras, 2010).↩ 4. Ibid.↩ 5. Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Of Dandyism and of George Brummell (London: J.M. Dent, 1897), 59, 60, 63–64. In the grandiose style particular to dandyism, Barbey writes that “Dandyism is almost as difficult a thing to describe as to define. Those who see things only from a narrow point of view have imagined it to be especially the art of dress, a bold and felicitous dictatorship in the matter of clothes and exterior elegance. That it most certainly is, but much more besides. Dandyism is a complete theory of life” (ibid., 17–18.).↩ 6. Domna C. Stanton, The Aristocrat as Art: A Study of the Honnête Homme and the Dandy in Seventeenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 1–2.↩ 7. Another example of the international network in which dandyism emerged were the Grand Tours. In late eighteenth-century England, the young sons of the aristocracy would travel throughout Europe, particularly to Italy, to explore the cultural heritage of the Renaissance, see works of art and architecture, and listen to music. Some of these young men returned to England with a special affection for Italian customs and a particular fondness for its cuisine. Back home, having adopted Italian modes and styles, they would be known as “Macaronis,” proto-dandies named after their newfound love of pasta (Ellen Moers, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm, 1st edition [Secker & Warburg, 1960]).↩ 8. While dandyism is typically associated with the bourgeoisie, there are exceptions to this rule. Dandyism has also been used to describe the effete refinement of aristocrats, both in literature (such as the character of Des Esseintes in Huysman’s novel À Rebours) and in historical figures (like the Comte d’Orsay). However, Barbey argues that an aristocrat stripped of their dandyism still remains an aristocrat. In contrast, a true dandy like Beau Brummell, without their dandyism, is essentially left with nothing (see Barbey d’Aurevilly, Of Dandyism and of George Brummell, chap. 2).↩ 9. Barbey d’Aurevilly, Of Dandyism and of George Brummell; for an account of the cultural role of physiognomies in nineteenth-century Paris, see Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael William Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).↩ 10. Stanton, The Aristocrat as Art.↩ 11. In the context of European colonization, the forms of presentation associated with the elites acquired normative force and entered into a process of negotiation with traditional forms of self-presentation of colonies in the Americas and Africa. As such, dandyism also served as an operative category in colonial settings, where, according to Monica L. Miller, it should be viewed not as “mere imitation of European or white high style” but rather “on a continuum between complete subversion or transcendence of that authoritative aesthetic and capitulation to it.” Miller refers to “black dandyism”—the appropriation of European dandyism by colonized or enslaved persons in Africa and the Afro-Atlantic slave trade—as a type of “weapon of the weak,” in reference to the concept by James Scott. See Monica L. Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 12–15; see also James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).↩ 12. The concept of “mass dandyism” is inspired by Susan Sontag’s claim that camp is a form of “dandyism in the age of mass culture” (“Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays [New York: Picador, 2001]). I do not, however, want to suggest that dandyism—in its bourgeois or mass forms—necessarily involves ironic detachment. Irony can be present, but is not, in my view, constitutive of dandyism, as the examples show.↩ 13. Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 2–5.↩ 14. Ibid., 40–45.↩ 15. Elizabeth R. Escobedo, From Coveralls to Zoot Suits: The Lives of Mexican American Women on the World War II Home Front (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 24–28.↩ 16. Eduardo Obregón Pagán, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003).↩ 17. In one example, tailors that made zoot suits were fined in $10,000 by the War Production Board for neglecting cloth and material restrictions (Sarah Elizabeth Howard, “Zoot to Boot: The Zoot Suit as Both Costume and Symbol,” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 28:1 [2010]: 112–131.↩ 18. Catherine S. Ramírez, “Crimes of Fashion: The Pachuca and Chicana Style Politics,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 2:2 (2002): 1–35.↩ 19. Sarah Elizabeth Howard, “Zoot to Boot.”↩ 20. “If the forms of provided commercial popular culture are not purely manipulative,” Hall argues, “then it is because, alongside the false appeals, the foreshortenings, the trivialization and shortcircuits, there are also elements of recognition and identification, something approaching a recreation of recognizable experiences and attitudes, to which people are responding.” (Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981], 233).↩ 21. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1972), 221. More recent research shows that this approach is still prevalent, with lower class individuals viewing higher education, for instance, in terms of moral “salvation” (see Jennifer M. Silva and Kaisa Snellman, “Salvation or Safety Net? Meanings of ‘College’ among Working- and Middle-Class Young Adults in Narratives of the Future,” Social Forces 97:2 [2018]: 559–82).↩ 22. For Goffman, “passing” is the “management of undisclosed discrediting information about self.” It involves “managing information about [one’s] failing [to be someone]. To display or not to display; to tell or not to tell; to let on or not to let on; to lie or not to lie; and in each case, to whom, how, when, and where” (Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986], 42).↩ 23. Max Weber, Economy and Society, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), 99.↩ 24. Ibid., 79.↩ 25. Ibid., 100.↩ 26. Ibid., 101.↩ 27. The opposite of the dandy, in this sense, is the hipster (see Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” Dissent 1957. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-white-negro-fall-1957/.↩ 28. Axel Honneth, “Moral Consciousness and Class Domination: Some Problems in the Analysis of Hidden Morality,” PRAXIS International 2:1 (1982): 18. Examples of these processes have been articulated in Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000); Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (London: Simon & Schuster, 2001); and Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri, Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019).↩ 29. Honneth, “Moral Consciousness and Class Domination,” 23.↩ 30. Ibid., 21.↩ 31. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (Phaidon Press, 1995), 28.↩ 32. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (New York: The New Press, 1997), 311.↩ 33. Ibid. Simmel also picks up the self-creative demand of modernity in his “The Philosophy of Fashion,” in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, Theory, Culture & Society (London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage Publications, 1997), 187–206.↩ 34. For a complexified and nationally-differentiated account of those archetypes, see Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (London: Verso, 2010).↩ 35. Wolfgang Welsch, “Aestheticization Processes: Phenomena, Distinctions and Prospects,” Theory, Culture & Society 13:1 (1996): 1–24.↩ 36. Rüdiger Bubner, “Ästhetisierung der Lebenswelt,” in Ästhetische Erfahrung (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1989), 143–56.↩ 37. See, for example, Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy, L’esthétisation du monde: Vivre à l’âge du capitalisme artiste (Paris: Gallimard, 2016).↩ 38. See especially the work of Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1st ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1956), and Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986).↩ 39. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).↩ 40. For a full articulation of this argument, see Barbara Carnevali, Social Appearances: A Philosophy of Display and Prestige, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). On the truth of “surface-level phenomena,” see Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 75–86.↩ |
