Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity by Monica L. Miller (review)

Black dandyism, as here described, is a self-conscious strategy of performance designed to draw attention to the social, cultural, political and occasionally legal structures that determine how people identify themselves and recognize others. In Slaves to Fashion, Monica L. Miller outlines the phenomenon from its origins on the eighteenth-century London stage when a blackface character, Mungo Macaroni, introduced to audiences a smartly dressed, “sassy, back-talking, physically comic slave” (28). Miller traces the black dandy across the Atlantic, where he appeared in nineteenth-century slave festivals and on the minstrel stage, then was transformed on the pages of black American literature in novels by Charles Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Wallace Thurman. In a fifth and final chapter we leap in time to find the black dandy back in Britain. There, starting in the late 1980s, visual artists – Isaac Julien, Lyle Ashton Harris, Iké Udé, and Yinka Shonibare – have taken the legacy of black dandyism as their subject and revived it into a kind of “Afro-cosmopolitanism.”

By tracking black dandyism over three and a half centuries, Miller “hope[s] to demonstrate that the vicissitudes of black style result less from fashion or the simple turn from one consumption-fueled trend to another than from the constant dialectic between both black and white efforts at black representation and intraracial or intrablack conversations about self and racial identity and representation” (25). The book in fact gives greater weight to the former, with an emphasis on black dandyism as a social or political practice that is subject to and structured by the white gaze (a point that the visual artists in the final chapter treat explicitly in their work, drawing on the insights of Frantz Fanon). Thus the chosen texts from the Harlem Renaissance, for instance, are concerned with passing and with international struggle over the “color line.” Miller concludes, in the case of Du Bois, that his use of the black dandy figure in Dark Princess (1928) “looks back or looks black to the earliest moments of anxiety about black presence and mobility in global economic and political networks” (175).

Miller leaps over most of the twentieth century, and therefore omits the zoot suiters, dandies of the 1960s and 1970s, and hip hop performers. Her rationale for this decision is that the collision of dandyism and mass consumer culture diminished the black dandy’s ability to signify successfully on structures that shaped identity, especially those of gender, sexuality, and class (17, 222). This is a pity, I think, because such a discussion would have done much to illuminate some of the same structures that determined the “liberatory” potential of the black dandy, which was always, as Miller argues, circumscribed by circumstance.

Having gestured toward the demise of the dandy after the Harlem Renaissance, Miller uses her fifth chapter as something of a seventy-page epilogue, which contemplates a group of visual artists whose fascinating work plays with the very limits of dandyism in a capitalist world. Although that chapter begins with a brief survey of the contents of the book thus far, Slaves to Fashion would benefit from a proper conclusion drawing out the significance of this broad survey. As it is, the reader works hard to trace the argument over the long time period and to assess the continuities and changes in the styling of black diasporic identity. That work done, however, the book provides a provocative account of some truly memorable individuals and of a phenomenon that provides a wide, clear window onto the history of black style.