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We are beBook

dandies

BY MARCO INFELISE

EDITORS: GESTALTEN
RELEASE
DATE: NOVEMBER 2016
CREDITS: PHOTOGRAPHS
BY ROSE CALLAHAN,
TEXTS BY NATHANIEL
ADAMS
FORMAT: 22.5 × 29 CM
FEATURES: FULL COLOR,
HARDCOVER, 304 PAGES
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

A dandy is term historically used to describe a tremes that novelist George Meredith, himself no
man who places particular importance upon phy- dandy, once defined cynicism as “intellectual dan-
sical appearance, refined language, and leisurely dyism.” Some took a more benign view; Thomas
hobbies, pursued with the appearance of noncha- Carlyle wrote in Sartor Resartus that a dandy was
lance in a cult of self. A dandy could be a self-ma- no more than “a clothes-wearing man”. Honoré de
de who strove to imitate an aristocratic lifestyle Balzac introduced the perfectly worldly and un-
despite coming from a middle-class background, moved Henri de Marsay in La fille aux yeux d’or
especially in late 18th- and early 19th-century Bri- (1835), a part of La Comédie Humaine, who ful-
tain. Previous manifestations of the petit-maître fils at first the model of a perfect dandy, until an
(French for small master) and the Muscadin have obsessive love-pursuit unravels him in passionate
been noted by John C. Prevost, but the modern and murderous jealousy. Charles Baudelaire defi-
practice of dandyism first appeared in the revo- ned the dandy, in the later “metaphysical” phase
lutionary 1790s, both in London and in Paris. The of dandyism, as one who elevates æsthetics to a
dandy cultivated cynical reserve, yet to such ex- living religion, ]that the dandy’s mere existence

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