A sad arbiter of elegance

‘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.