Luxury and Restraintromantic yearning for something more, not less.’^7 In Jil Sander’s view the
worst thing is to be judged déclassé, to expose any trace of lowly status, any
slip into bad taste.
This ideal has a series of noble precedents that illuminate the attitudes
that have built up around this manner of dressing. The dandies of the early
nineteenth century allowed for no indulgence in decorative detail or unneces-
sary elements in a design. Beau Brummell, who personified the minimal style
of the first dandies in London, viewed dressing as a ritual of washing and
preparing the body and then clothing it in the most exquisitely restrained
examples of each garment: austerely cut dark cloth coat, perfect pale
pantaloons, plain waistcoat and shirt and simple accessories, yellow leather
gloves, hessian boots and a neat hat. The only area left for any sartorial
expression was the white cravat, which was to be dexterously tied in the
most modishly elaborate manner.
The dandy was obsessed with self-adornment, even though the end result
was so simple in its appearance that it was viewed with deep suspicion by
the popular press at the time. This can be seen in a French caricature of the
1820s, when dandyism crossed the channel to Paris. The caption ‘Egotism
personified’ reinforces the cartoon’s satirical view of the dandy as a self-
absorbed narcissist. The dandyish young man seated at the centre of the
image seems so concerned with collecting the chairs in the room together to
support his elaborately graceful pose that he has rudely allowed the women
to stand. He appears oblivious to the fact that his spurs have ripped one
unfortunate woman’s gown and that his walking cane is poking another in
the eye. This lack of attention to anything other than his own appearance
was an affront to the nineteenth-century ideal of active manhood, prompting
the historian and writer Thomas Carlyle to ask ‘And now for all this perennial
Martyrdom, and Poesy, and even Prophecy, what is it that the Dandy asks in
return? Solely, we may say, that you would recognize his existence; would
admit him to be a living object; or failing this, a visual object, or thing that
will reflect rays of light.’^8
It is ironic therefore that such sobriety was to become a defining feature
of much nineteenth-century menswear, coming to be seen as the mark of the
respectable bourgeois male. Heaven forbid though that men should seem
too preoccupied with achieving this sober ideal, masculine attire was to appear
effortless, demonstrating the gentleman’s ease with his status. Brummell’s
close attention to detail and fanatical allegiance to the puritanically austere
was a lesson in control and restraint that Coco Chanel later transferred to
- Colacello, B. October 1994. ‘The Queen of Less is More’,Vanity Fair, p. 165.
- Carlyle, T., Sartor Resartus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 207.