62 The Language of Fashion
subjecting it to an absolute logic. Furthermore, he takes distinction that
bit further: its essence is no longer social for him, but metaphysical; the
dandy stands in opposition not at all to the upper class and the lower
class, but only in absolute terms to the individual and the banal; so
the individual is not a generalized idea for him; it is him alone, purified
of all recourse to comparison, to the extent even that, like narcissus,
it is to himself and him alone that he offers a reading of his clothing.
Furthermore he professes that its essence, like that of the gods, can be
fully present in what is the slightest of elements: the vestimentary ‘detail’
is no longer a concrete object here, no matter how minute; it is a way,
often subtly indirect, of destroying or ‘deforming’ clothing, of removing
it from all sense of value as soon as a value becomes a shared one; it
involves making the valet wear a new outfit, making his gloves wet so
that they fit the shape of the hand perfectly, all forms of behaviour which
bear witness to the profoundly creative, and no longer simply selective,
idea that the effects of a form have to be thought through, that clothing
is not simply an object to be used but is a prepared object.
Dandyism therefore is not only an ethos (on which much has been
written since Baudelaire and Barbey) but also a technique. It is these
two together which make a dandy, and it is obviously the latter which
guarantees the former, as with all ascetic philosophies (of the hindu
type, for example) in which a physical form of behaviour acts as a route
towards the performance of thought; and since this thought consists
here of an absolutely singular vision of self, the dandy is condemned
to invent continually distinctive traits that are ever novel: sometimes he
relies on wealth to distance himself from the poor, other times he wants
his clothes to look worn out to distance himself from the rich—this is
precisely the job of the ‘detail’ which is to allow the dandy to escape the
masses and never to be engulfed by them; his singularity is absolute in
essence, but limited in substance, as he must never fall into eccentricity,
for that is an eminently copyable form.
The ‘detail’ allowed his clothing, in theory, to become indefinitely
‘other’. In fact, the ways of wearing an item of clothing are very limited
and if certain details in manufacture do not intervene, any renewal of
an outfit is quickly exhausted. This is what happened when men’s
clothing was fully industrialized: deprived of any artisanal manufacture,
the dandy had to give up on any absolutely singular form of clothing,
for as soon as a form is standardized, even with luxury clothing, it can