From the Publisher
"It was Charles Baudelaire who, in the middle of the nineteenth century, proposed the figure of the dandy—black-clad, elegant, ineffably cool, self-constructed—as the prototypical hero of modern culture. Now, in the twentieth century, Susan Fillin-Yeh and her co-authors build upon this icon to create a wider vision of this marvelous self-creation. For Fillin-Yeh and her cohorts, the dandy may be a woman, may be a non-western figure, may be a transvestite: The point is that dandyism, in the modern world, may take many forms and occur in many places, and this book shows us the rich variety of possibilities that dress, disguise, masquerade, may offer those both in the center and on the margins. Each of these essays is a gem, extending, and enriching the idea-ideal of the dandy in the most interesting and provocative ways imaginable."
-Linda Nochlin,New York University
"A finely wrought ensemble of studies orienting us to a 'hyperaesthetics' of sartorial and bodily fashioning. To see such diverse ways that people have bodily troped and conceptually trumped cultural categorizations of gender, race, colonial and socioeconomic positionality is inspiring and—well—just dandy!"
-Michael Silverstein,University of Chicago
"Should be of great interest to any civilized person—the dandy, a mutation of taste, is not definable. The book offers a group of excellent essays that attempt to pin it down."
-Alex Katz,
"Both lively and scholarly, this is the collection many have been waiting for. At last the dandy emerges from the western European upper class (and male) closet resplendent in a rainbow of cultural, ethnic, sexual, gender and racial colors. Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture is a fascinating investigation into the constructed self, and a major contribution to art and cultural history!"
—, -Whitney Chadwick,author of Women, Art, and Society
