“Everyone in this room is wearing a uniform, and don’t kid yourself.”
The musician Frank Zappa said that at a concert in the 1960s. He was responding to a hippie in the audience who had cried out to attack people in uniforms – namely, police and other authority figures. Zappa righty noted that everyone in the concert hall, from the police to the ticket taker to the hippies on the floor, was wearing a uniform. What we wear has symbolism, even if it’s the symbolism of showing that we don’t care about what we wear.
Zappa’s quote comes to mind when reading Artist/Rebel/Dandy: Men of Fashion, the beautiful book that accompanies a current exhibit of the same name at the Rhode Island School of Design. The exhibit celebrates two hundred years of the dandy.
What is a dandy? The definition has shifted over the years, but it’s basically a man who dresses well, even flamboyantly. In 1833, Thomas Carlyle referred to such a man as a “poet of cloth,” and his type can be seen today in the tailored black tie of Justin Timberlake. If that still sounds vague, exhibit curators Kate Irvin and Laurie Anne Brewer like it that way: “Rather than following strict definitions, we embrace myriad manifestations of the dandy’s style and persona, from the discreet sophistication of the imposing and consummately elegant dandy George Bryan ‘Beau’ Brummell (1778-1840) at the turn of the nineteen century to the notorious swells in the sea of suits of the twentieth century to the connoisseurs, romantics, and revolutionaries who stud the landscape of menswear today”.
The book Artist/Rebel/Dandy is full of glorious photographs of etching, illustrations, and of course photographs of vintage men’s clothing, from nineteen century coats and shirts (why don’t they make these anymore?) to hip-hop fashion guru Fonzworth Bentley showing readers how to tie a bow tie. From Oscar Wilde to Andre 300, they’ve covered it. The writing is smart and insightful, often reiterating Zappa’s point that an anti-uniform is a uniform nonetheless. The book has wonderful sections of dandies “musing” on other dandies: Philip Hoare Muses on John Waters, Merlin Holland on Oscar Wilde, Patti Smith on Charles Baudelaire.
Perhaps more than anything else, Artist/Rebel/Dandy shows that our modern ideas about fashion are almost exactly backwards. We think we have enormous freedom and diversity today in how we dress, when in fact modern life is bogged down in a drab sameness. I was recently making a video about a book set in the early 1960s, and one of the locations was outside of a used book store in Washington, D.C. When I was scouting the shoot and waiting for an actor to show up, I looked through the lens and decided to wait for a nicely dressed man to walk by to just get a sense of what the final shot would look like. I finally had to give up. I was treated to a long parade of hipsters in jeans and t-shirts and guys in dirty athletic gear. Not a hat, tie, or even decent looking shirt in the bunch. Compared to that, what men wore a hundred years ago was an explosion of color and style.
Artist/Rebel/Dandy the exhibit runs through August 18. Here’s a closer look at the exhibit book:
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