Show Ponies and Centaurs: The Male Dandy Revisited

Abstract

The dandy, as an historic figure and literary symbol of male narcissism has played a central role in our understanding of men’s engagement with fashion. As a social, intellectual and visual construct dandyism has been attributed to a diverse range of masculine identities and fashionable styles through its Regency, Aesthete and neo- Edwardian formations. Throughout the 19th century the austerely tailored gentleman featured as an heroic figure of power in painted portraits, while quite paradoxically, the luxuriously attired fop was seen as a figure of ridicule in popular culture caricatures. Despite these inconsistencies, the overarching similarity between varying modes of dandyism and its representation is the link between sartorial self-construction and artistic self-invention. This chapter will examine the social identity of the twenty-first century dandy as portrayed in contemporary fashion and art. Alexander McQueen’s Fall 2009 menswear collection can be understood to critique the dandy image through immaculately tailored finery that hints at the artifice of aristocracy. McQueen’s contemporary dandy is significant in that he is provocatively underpinned by darker, more sinister elements that reflect unease with the glorification of the self. This chapter argues that dandyism, as represented by McQueen, is a construct of consumer culture that not only promotes flamboyance, narcissism and surface identity, but also highlights the artificiality of constructions of masculinity. The posturing and double-edged character of the dandy is even more pronounced in recent paintings by Michael Zavros. The artist evokes the contemporary dandy through his images of fashionably clad centaurs that contrast natural beauty with the contrived fashion figure. These images consider a modern dandy who is simultaneously a show pony of conspicuous consumption and a mythical being whose strength is only reinforced by the artifice of his performative gestures and elegant attire. In considering representations of the contemporary male dandy in fashion and art this chapter underlines the relevance of such cross-disciplinary formations to questions of gender, performance and masculine identity.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.