Brummell and HR 5055
The BeauFlorence King has a delightfully educational look at Beau Brummell - one of the major innovators in men's fashion history, as she reviews Ian Kelly's biography of the Beau.
Beau met a poor end
The British Consul in Calais arranged for him to be placed in an insane asylum in Caen. Large tumors formed on his scrotum. He became incontinent and fouled his room so often that the staff, unable to bear touching him, hosed him down from a distance. And at the end, "the brain itself shrank away from the insides of the skull and granulated."
That the perfection of manly grace could come to this makes a superbly entertaining book one with a moral as well. - Florence King
Early in the piece, Florence correctly identifies Beau as a dandy and then misguidedly makes the dandy analogous with the modern metrosexual. (A word that is thankfully disappearing from our vocabulary as quickly as it entered). I do hope my friends, the cheerful guardians of taste at Dandyism.net respond to this indignity.
What I find most intriguing about the Beau is that he was often one of the only people in on his own joke.
PS: Join Poetic and Chic in opposing the absurd fashion legislation HR 5055.[H]e saw through his host of acolytes and sycophants and dismissed them with genial contempt. "It is folly that is the making of me," he told the Duchess of York, one of the few people he really liked. "If the world is so silly as to admire my absurdities, you and I may know better, but what does that signify?"
H.R. 5055 proposes a creative antithesis to the fashion industry by making it illegal for designers (professional & amateur alike,) to borrow and adapt ideas from each other. The bill is sponsored by Representative Goodlatte of Virginia, and while I’m sure he is a kind-hearted soul trying to do his best for his constituency, I honestly have a hard time believing that any of his constituents are fashion designers. -Annie Wilson
Michael Brendan Dougherty
in Culture, Fashion
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Source: True in His FashionBrummell was the first "dandy" -- today he would be called a "metrosexual" -- a type memorably defined by the historian Thomas Carlyle: "Others dress to live, he lives to dress." An orphan but a rich one, he persuaded his trustee to buy him a commission in the 10th Light Dragoons, a cavalry regiment known as "the Prince of Wales's Own" because it had been created to satisfy the military daydreams of the obese "Prinny" (later George IV). The Prince was its Colonel-in-Chief, but since there could
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