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Chapter 4
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4 from dandy to masher to consumer Competing Masculinities and Class Aspirations Dandyism is, after all, one of the decorative arts. —Max Beerbohm, “Dandies and Dandies” The old saying to the contrary withstanding, external appearances do not always afford the least satisfactory evidences of a man’s character. As for the “cad.”You have him in an instant. He betrays himself offhand. He tries to affect the gentleman, but in externals only.You have him on the hip directly he opens his mouth. —Best Dressed Man (1892) The gent possessed three important attributes: flamboyant and self-conscious dress, rakishness, and counterfeit status. —Judith R.Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight espite radical changes in men’s consumer habits and a new mainstream openness regarding sartorial display between 1860 and 1914, many voices within British popular discourse continued to criticize and condemn men who participated in shopping, fashion, and the public exhibition of purchased goods as “bad,”even potentially dangerous, consumers. On those occasions when male dress was explicitly acknowledged, discussed, or described at length, the popular press (conduct literature, novels, magazine commentary) was still far more prone to address incorrect forms of men’s costume. Overt, visible male consumption was typically caricatured—and demonized—among the middle classes through the figure of the dandy, and the majority of the contemporary historical and critical literature on men’s fashions has concentrated on this type.1 Since at least the eighteenth century, middle-class writers had most frequently depicted the dandy as a dangerous and unattractive upper-class gentleman: vain, ostentatious , idle, and sexually predatory.The dandy was a prominent inhabitant of British society and fiction throughout the first half of the nineteenth century and 128 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. distinguished himself from normative forms of masculinity by his emphasis on outer appearance and conspicuous consumption. As the satirical symbols of improper, transgressive masculinity, dandies became contested figures, markers of class tensions whose function as class critique was wrestled over by the bourgeoisie and the elite. The dandy was important to theVictorians as a symbol on which to pin increasingly contested notions of both class and gender. However, he was never a static figure with a single, fixed identity. Beginning around midcentury, the negative qualities attributed to the upper-class dandy—particularly his preoccupation with clothing and his conscious selfdisplay —were gradually shifted to the middle (and working) classes, where they were partly appropriated and transformed into acceptable, mainstream masculine consumer behaviors. Certainly, the growing popularity of more fitted, bodyhugging , ornamented men’s clothing as well as the (covert) use of cosmetics and body-shaping clothing by men, which I discuss in chapter 2, suggest a middleclass mainstreaming of dandyism’s affectations. As the working and middle classes caught up with upper-class consumption and status markers were blurred, many among the elite (as well as conservative members of the middle classes) attacked the growing fashionable consumption and public display of the nonelite through the figure of the fast, flashy, and crudely flamboyant “masher.”Through the masher, the dandy was co-opted and transformed in some popular discourses from an upper-class to a middle-class caricature as a means of discrediting the middleclass male’s expanding socioeconomic power. Further, the masher’s costume evoked new class anxieties as it came to represent blurrings of sartorial and social borders . Many among the working and middle classes developed sartorial and consumer tastes that mimicked those of the elite, thereby causing class confusion and conflict. The Nineteenth-Century Dandy Thomas Carlyle famously defined the early-nineteenth-century dandy2 as “a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse, and person is heroically consecrated to the wearing of Clothes wisely and well: so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress” (197).While often lacking claims to high birth, the English dandy nevertheless enjoyed—oftentimes on borrowed money—the upper class’s education, aristocratic privileges, and social circle. He led the life of a gentleman From Dandy to Masher to Consumer 129 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal...