‘Do you call that thing a coat?’ Brummell sneered when the Duke of Bedford asked for an opinion on a new purchase. The dominance that Brummell held over the fashionable was absolute; his small house in Chesterfield Street was thronged with gentlemen, often including the Prince of Wales, eager to witness the dressing ritual of the Beau. His mastery of putting on his clothes, his sharp tongue and his coterie of aristocratic toadies meant that ‘he could decide the fate of a young man just launched into the world with a single word’.
George Bryan Brummell became a symbol of urbane style, masculinity and cosmopolitan poise, revered by Balzac, Pushkin, Wilde, Woolf and Beerbohm. He set the model for a literary type, beginning with the ‘silver fork’ novels of the 1820s, and his influence persisted as a prototype for the self-created man-about-town. And aside from all this he was a well-dressed Englishman — an alarming enough concept for most of his compatriots then and now; the French have always been more appreciative of Brummell. I am not so sure, however, that I agree with Ian Kelly that he was a founding father of modern male fashion in the sense that we must thank him for our suits and formal wear. Certainly he became the proponent of a practical and manly style; but it was already emerging and gaining root, and would have done so regardless of the Beau. Kelly does not say what we would be wearing had it not been for Brummell’s fiat.
Brummell was a Whig, in a social sense, and he followed their spartan style. Charles James Fox entered society as a macaroni, a follower of the monstrous fashion which included make-up, flowing silks, coloured wigs and red high-heeled shoes. During the American Revolution and his emergence as an opponent of the Crown, Fox abandoned the effeminacy of young aristocratic costume and adopted the buff waistcoat and blue coat of George Washington’s armies. The pared-down style was closely related to the revolutionary era and the Foxites’ anti-court stance. Fox took the political decision to be slovenly; he resembled, it was said, a dishevelled sea captain on half pay — a true man of the people. Brummell took up the essentials of this costume but he had a ‘violent desire to be perfectly correct’.
The wars do not intrude much into Kelly’s narrative, nor did they into the daily life of the dandies. Yet this book is pregnant with martial language; the high society promenade in Hyde Park had ‘the rigour of a military inspection’. Brummell resigned his commission in the 10th Dragoons before he could see active service and adopted a different kind of uniform. Like many who remained in London, Brummell craved what was known as ‘singularity’. Britain’s mastery of the sea and the continental blockade brought an influx of foreign luxuries and extraordinary wealth. Whilst many sought glory at sea or on the battlefield, a generation of bored rich young men competed to distinguish themselves. Some dressed up as stage-coachmen and paraded in front of the London mob; others took vast wagers to compete in walking races. They were the heroes of the home front.
‘Damn the fellows,’ one Guardsman said of the dandies, ‘they’re upstarts, fit only for the society of tailors.’ Brummell owed his pre-eminence to his mastery of the details of the Whig costume: the best-cut coat, the shiniest boots, the perfectly tied cravat. Minute details mattered; inspiration and originality were crimes against the goddess fashion. Brummell was like an eagle-eyed drill sergeant whose contemptuous ‘cut’ could destroy a pretender to the status of a ‘fashionable’, howsoever high his rank in society, if there was the slightest deviation from the rule. This strictness fitted in with upper- class trends, when elliptical regulations and mysterious codes were designed to exclude arrivistes: Union peers, nabobs, plantation owners and those who were benefiting from the wartime boom. There is much that is unattractive about Brummell’s fastidiousness. As one contemporary lamented, uniformity was making the crowd in the streets ‘such a mass of dittos — such an accumulation of facsimiles — such a civil regiment’.
Ian Kelly captures the sadness and frustration that lay beneath the glamour; his book is elegant and scrupulously researched, with an admirable feeling for the age. Most impressively, he undermines the myth that Brum- mell reserved his passions solely for his wardrobe. If much of the demolition of this assumption of asexuality necessarily relies on speculation and circumstantial detail, it is a reasoned investigation into the perilous world that adventurers like Brummell shared with courtesans and prostitutes. Brummell’s lonely exile, rejected by the society that had once fawned at his feet, and the long and painful decline from syphilis, sensitively narrated by Kelly, confirms the opinion of the Beau’s first biographer that this was ‘the gilded not the golden age’.
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