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Dressed: The History of Fashion
The Legend of Beau Brummell, an interview with Dr. Chloe Chapin, Part I
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- [00:01]
Cassie Zachary
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- [00:31]
April Callahan
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- [01:00]
Chloe Chapin
Dress the History of Fashion is a production of dress media with over 8 billion people in the world, we all have one thing in common. Every day we all get dressed.
- [01:15]
Narrator
Welcome to Dressed the History of Fashion, a podcast that explores the who, what, when of why we wear. We are friends, fashion historians and your.
- [01:24]
Chloe Chapin
Hosts Cassie Zachary and April Callahan. Dandies, dandies, Dandies is how a recent email to me from today's guest began very recently and this week we are pleased to continue our conversation on dandyism with a discussion of the life and legend of arguably the world's most famous dandy Beau Brummel.
- [01:48]
Narrator
And we are perhaps stressed listeners a bit remiss and not covering Brummell until season eight of the podcast. We know he has been long promised to you and that is because within menswear history, his figure looms quite large. He is the subject of books, plays, songs and poems, satirical and otherwise, and even a bronze sculpture by Irina Sedleca put in place in 2022 in London's Mayfair neighborhood, which was home to not only brummell in the 19th century, but also remains one of the global epicenters of fine tailoring. And of course I'm talking about Saville Row.
- [02:24]
Chloe Chapin
This week's two part episode will examine the myriad of anecdotes of Brummell's sartorial adventures and esteemed place in London High society during the early 19th century. And just when we wrap up his rather stylish biography, we're actually going to put it all in question. That's right, dress listeners, you know that we love myth busting, Undressed and part two, which is coming your way. On Friday, we'll look at what has been said of Brummell versus what can be proven.
- [02:54]
Narrator
For instance, did he really once state that he employed three tradesmen to make his gloves quote, one for the hand, a second for the fingers, and a third for the thumb? And so many stories of Brummell's wit and sartorial snobbery abound that this week we are going to attempt to separate the man from the myth. And to do so, we are so excited to welcome back fashion historian Dr. Chloe Chapin, who specializes in the history of menswear. Chloe, welcome back to Dressed.
- [03:23]
Chloe Chapin
Well, Chloe, as our reigning menswear expert, welcome back to Dressed.
- [03:29]
Guest Expert
Thanks so much for having me, April.
- [03:30]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah, so many of our listeners have already heard our coverage of the Met Gala last month and surely seen the slew of images from the blue carpet. Some of you may have actually even seen the exhibition that was associated with the Met Gala, which is of course, super fine tailoring black style. And that is an exploration of black dandyism. But how many of you tuning in with us today are perhaps a little bit unclear as to what dandyism is or even its broader history within menswear? And that is exactly what we're going to delve into today with our discussion of the man who has been called the king of dandies, the legendary Beau Brummell. All right, before we get to Brummell himself, Chloe, how would you like to define dandyism for our purposes today?
- [04:22]
Guest Expert
That's a great question. I think that dandyism as a term kind of changes over time and. And different people have different associations with it. But I would say that there's sort of two things that are really important about it, one of which is a man who spends a lot of attention to his dress, and the other is who dresses outside of his time. Those are two different ways that people have used it. But I would say that the kind of dandyism that we're going to talk about today with Beau Brummel, it's about being refined, meticulous, immaculate. It's like there's a restraint to it, but it's still very costly. It's like the perfect combination between 18th century ancient regime fanciness and the more like stayed boring, solid Victorian ness. So it was all about understatement. But the other thing that's so interesting about dandyism is that it's really about like a presentation of self. It's a performance. There's like a wittiness, an aloofness, kind of. It's like this idea that living itself is an elegant act. It's this very self conscious self presentation.
- [05:30]
Chloe Chapin
And dress is just. But a part of that bigger presentation.
- [05:33]
Guest Expert
That's right, yes. It's as much about attitude as appearance.
- [05:35]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah, yeah, I love that. I love that. So when do we see this term dandyism first begin to appear? And I'm asking this because as an archetype, we actually see historic precedents for kind of what we're referring to as dandyism in the form of the fop or the macaroni. And how do these three terms, dandyism, fop and macaroni, differ, if at all?
- [06:02]
Guest Expert
Yeah, that's a great question. So in the 18th century, there's a bunch of different terms. You're right, fop is maybe the older one. And a fop was overdressed. But related to being foolish, like showy, superficial. There's again a real sort of caricature of fashionability. Macaronis were a little bit more particular. They were actually called themselves macaronis. Those were men in England in the 1760s, 1770s, 70s, who went on the ground tour. And that's. They brought this word macaroni back because pasta was Italian and they thought it was foreign and fancy and funny and whatever. So they called themselves the macaronis.
- [06:42]
Chloe Chapin
And just for any of our listeners who might not be familiar, the Grand Tour was essentially something that young men, particularly young men of means, would do when they were in their early 20s. They would do this whole tour of Europe. They would see all the sites and get. Get their life experience in kind of type thing. Did I sum that up properly?
- [07:02]
Guest Expert
So they're wild oath. And they, you know, would come back to London and hang out at the men's clubs and because they were upper class, they were gentlemen, which at that time meant like they didn't work, so they were hanging out in the clubs and fashion was a big part of their lifestyle. Coxcomb is another word that was used.
- [07:22]
Chloe Chapin
Interesting.
- [07:23]
Guest Expert
The bucks also. Oh, yeah. So some of them are a little bit more pejorative than others. But the term dandy, the first known use of it is in a Scottish song and I think 1780, but it came into more popular use around the turn of the century and was really used more like in the 18 teens.
- [07:43]
Chloe Chapin
Well, this period, the late 18th century and the early 19th century, like the 18 teens. And is this incredibly pivotal point in the history of fashion at large. But in menswear, especially, because it underwent what we term the, quote, great renunciation. And for anyone who might not already be familiar with this term, which we have talked about many times on the show now, what are we speaking of when we say this great renunciation in terms of menswear?
- [08:14]
Guest Expert
Yeah. So basically, there's two things to know. One is what happened and one is what people have said about it.
- [08:21]
Chloe Chapin
We love myth busting here.
- [08:23]
Guest Expert
All about the myth busting. Okay, so the thing that happened was that between 1775 and 1850, men went from wearing colorful, varied, luxurious, fancy clothes to primarily dressing in plain, dark, uniform suits. So that was the change that happened. I call it the change from peacocks to penguins. Yes, it's a good way to remember it, but it didn't happen overnight. It happened gradually over time. And we can talk about why it happened if you want, but people have talked about this, and sort of probably the most famous person that talked about this is this British psychologist George Carl Flugel, who wrote this book in 1930 called the Psychology of Clothes. And he talks about. He calls it the great masculine renunciation. And he says that man abandoned beauty and frivolity and dress and ornamentation and, like, henceforth, were only useful after that point. And it really bothered him. He was a psychologist, and so he was really worried about, like, men's mental health, we would say today. And he really saw it as a loss for men that he saw that there were these. He called them exhibitionist tendencies. He was very into Freud, which, by.
- [09:35]
Chloe Chapin
The way, Valerie Steele is curating an exhibition, Fashion and Freud, that's going to open up this fall.
- [09:40]
Guest Expert
I can't wait.
- [09:41]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah.
- [09:41]
Guest Expert
So Freud had this idea that exhibitionism was like an innate human quality. And Flugel was like, okay, if we. If men can't experience this exhibition tendencies through their frivolous, fancy, luxurious dress, where does that tendency go? How can they live under these conditions? He really. I think he personally experienced that loss, but he was really interested in how it affected other men as well.
- [10:09]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah. And also, too, if you really think about it, some of these bigger, broader narratives that we're having right now in contemporary culture are not so far off from some of those thoughts in terms of the very definition and idea of masculinity needing to fit squarely within this culturally constructed box.
- [10:30]
Guest Expert
Right. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm working on the same issue right now with the book that I'm working on, which comes out next year. Maybe you'll have me back. And so I sort of build on flow. I wouldn't say that he's wrong. People have criticized this idea, like Christopher Breward is one, because what he's saying is like, well, not all men gave up fancy clothes or colorful suits or whatever. Men were still consumers. They still dressed in a variety of ways, which is definitely true. But overall there was a shift. And so what I'm trying to do is I look at the bigger picture. I call it the sartorial revolution. And so I'm looking at it as a whole system. Not just that men change their outfits, but that in doing so they stopped defining themselves as being a part of the system of fashion. The whole system of fashion totally changed.
- [11:19]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah.
- [11:19]
Guest Expert
That it used to be that fashion really defined the rich and the poor. Like that was the main thing that you could see in clothing. And it all had to do with this idea of, I would call it practicality. Right. If you are wearing ruffly cuffs or a corset or a long skirt or high heels or a lacy cravat, you're not like picking potatoes or doing the heavy lifting. Other people are clearly doing that for you. So it used to be that was how you could tell the upper classes was by their aristocratic dress. But when men adopted suits, that whole system changed. So then that kind of idea of impracticality was just associated with women and femininity. So there was this big shift in terms of both what fashion was and who took part in it, but also the way that systems of class and gender were shown in a kind of material way.
- [12:13]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah. And that that period following the French Revolution and as we move into the 19th century with the rise of the middle classes, all part and parcel to all of this.
- [12:25]
Guest Expert
And what I look at in my book is that it's not just because of the French Revolution, it's also because of the American Revolution, which is a part of the story that often gets left out.
- [12:35]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. We covered a lot there. That was great. But let's talk a little bit about the process of how men obtained their wardrobes at this time. I think this is really interesting. Of course, many of us already know that clothing was made to measure for each individual. So how are they obtaining their wardrobes? And also to our point about dandyism, how are they paying? Paying for their wardrobes?
- [13:02]
Guest Expert
Yeah. So technically you could buy pre made clothing, but there wasn't very much of it. You could buy used clothing. There's always been a used clothing business, but that was not for the upper classes. The upper classes would donate their old clothes to their servants. That was like one of the perks of being a servant or sell it or whatever. There's always a used clothing business. There were also pre made clothing. They were often called slops and they were associated with sailors because that's why tailors would make them. They would, in a downtime they would make like generic sizes and that was useful. They would, especially in port cities like London, because sailors were only in town for a really short period of time. So they didn't have time to wait for a suit to be tailored to them, so they could just come in and grab it off the rack, as it were. And so that system developed much more of the course of the 19th century. But until that happened, and I would say that being able to purchase pre made clothing was happening by the 1840s, 1850s, kind of like mid century. So in this period before that, if you wanted a suit, you would go to a tailor and essentially what you would do is you would. There are images of tailor shops and there's no clothes in them, they're just tables full of bolts of cloth. So that's what you would do at a tailor is you would just go find the bolt of cloth that you like the best and be like that. Make me a suit out of that. And a little bit later on there were these posters that Taylor's magazines would send out to the people who subscribed to their journals that had like maybe a dozen figures on them and the tailors would hang them on their walls. So you could pick and choose. I want one of those and one of those and one of those. So fashion plates were a part of this business too, that you might say select something that you wanted and then your tailor would make it up and fit it to you.
- [14:48]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah, and also too, I just want to make a very finicky distinction that there are menswear fashion plates, but then there are also menswear trade plates. And those trade plates typically are ones that are way oversize and they're to that very purpose of display within the shop. They're not necessarily meant to come into your home as part of a magazine. And they're really fascinating. Of course, you and I have spent a lot of time together looking at these.
- [15:15]
Guest Expert
Yeah, that's right. And you might look, look at too. This is really interesting in terms of early tailoring construction because that Shift happens. I would say right around the 1830s, that it used to be that. That fashion publications were for consumers. So regular men and women would purchase fashion plates and fashion periodicals, and they would have, like, poetry and updates on what the rich people were doing and news updates. It wasn't just fashion, like a fashion today, but then around this period in tailoring, not so much in women's fashion, but in tailoring, they started getting marketed more and more to the makers of clothing rather than the consumers of clothing. So all of a sudden, now you start to see, like, detailed information about how to fit a shoulder or the height of the waist seam or how to get the roll of the collar right. And then really, it starts to come just become engineering. So by the 1850s, it's almost impossible to read a tailoring magazine if you're not a tailor. It's all math. Right. It's like angles and ratios and stuff like that.
- [16:24]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah.
- [16:24]
Guest Expert
So one of the reasons why this happened is because the tape measure was invented in 1799, which is interesting in relation to the life of Beau Brummel. And so that really changed the way that people measured bodies, and it really influenced tailoring construction.
- [16:42]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah. And before that, it's really interesting because sometimes we have primary source accounts in the 18th century of dressmakers and tailors having lengths of string for individual clients that they kept and were labeled, and that's how they knew what their client's measurements were.
- [16:59]
Guest Expert
Yeah. You could have a knotted cord, and each of the knots would be a particular length or a paper tape with notches cut out of it. And so the way I think about it is that the way that Taylor thought about lengths is they wanted something to be this long, and to them, this long was more important than seven and a half inches.
- [17:22]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah.
- [17:23]
Guest Expert
And so it's, like, impossible for us in the modern world to, like, erase the idea of numbers out of our minds. But it's really interesting to think back. What would it have been like to not think in that kind of series of numbers and just think, I just need it to be this long.
- [17:38]
Chloe Chapin
We've been conditioned.
- [17:40]
Guest Expert
Yeah, exactly.
- [17:41]
Chloe Chapin
We've also gone off on a bit of a tangent. So let's get back to what was happening within the tailoring shop. A man goes in, he picks his fabric, maybe he has seen a particular style rendered on the wall that he would like to have this made up in in this fabric. What was next?
- [18:01]
Guest Expert
So he would make his choices, the tailor would cut the pattern, fit it up, and then he would come back and have A fitting with it where it would be fit even more precisely to his body. And this is one of the things that Beau Brummel had influence on is this demand for perfect fit. Now, this is really interesting that it's happening at this period, because you wouldn't have had anyone care this much about perfect fit in the 18th century, because this is part of this whole great masculine renunciation shift. So in the 18th century, the focus was really on luxurious fabrics draped on the body. And because there were very few pattern pieces to those garments, it was like front, back, that was it. And then sleeves, so there weren't that many seams. And so the fit of it is all in the arm size and the fitting in the shoulders. So as long as it fits you here, basically it fits you. But when coats transitioned from being made out of silk to being made out of wool, which had basically already happened by the time Beau Brummel came into his fame and fortune, you can do a lot of things with wool that you can't do with silk. So all of a sudden they are stretching it and heating it and adding more seams to things, and so you can get a much closer fit in that way. So they would come back and have these clothes fit, etc. Etc. And there are stories of dandies going back for more and more fits just to be like super precise about things.
- [19:32]
Chloe Chapin
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- [19:43]
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- [19:59]
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- [20:31]
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- [21:00]
Chloe Chapin
Without question. And you have. We have already mentioned him, of course. In the popular imagination, there is no figure that looms larger as a key player in the great renunciation and the dandyism that is associated in that time period than Beau Brummel. Who was Beau Brummel?
- [21:20]
Guest Expert
Beau Brummell is this super iconic figure in menswear history. He is known as being the father of suits, of fancy dressing, of impeccable dress, personal grooming. He was known for his wit, his style, his attitude. He was a friend of the Prince of Wales. He was just like, everybody wanted him to come to their parties.
- [21:40]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah, he was the it dude of the era.
- [21:42]
Guest Expert
100% was. Yeah.
- [21:44]
Chloe Chapin
And I use that term dude intentionally because a little bit later on the term dude is actually another term for dandyism in a slightly different incarnation.
- [21:54]
Guest Expert
Yeah, yeah. No, the thing that's really interesting about the term dude is that was an Americanism that came in around the 1880s.
- [22:01]
Chloe Chapin
We have actually already done an episode on Dudes.
- [22:04]
Guest Expert
I'll just tell you one thing that one of his biographers said about Brummell, which is that during the fashionable period in London, he said that there was no route, no fashionable gathering in London at which the presence of the great dandy was not regarded as a triumph and his absence as a catastrophe.
- [22:20]
Chloe Chapin
That's.
- [22:21]
Guest Expert
That kind of melodramatic language is very much associated with dandyism and especially with Brummell. There's this like lofty, iconic, ironic attitude that goes along with his fashionable sense of self.
- [22:36]
Chloe Chapin
And also countless stories that have been recounted about Brummell and his now legendary sartorial habits. Could you share some of these with our listeners?
- [22:49]
Guest Expert
So probably the most famous is his morning toilette, his sort of ritual of bathing and grooming. It was said that he bathed every morning, which was unusual for this time period. There he would. He hated perfumes, but he was obsessed with cleanliness. So he said, no perfumes, but very fine linen, plenty of it, and country washing. And that was his mantra, that it was all about cleanliness and personal hygiene. He would tie his cravat as this again, other sort of performance. Young men would come to his dressing room and watch him tie his cravat. He would have many options and as the story goes, if one of them got a tiny little crease or wrinkle in it as he was tying it, it would be discarded. And one of the stories was someone coming into the house, saw his valet, whose name was Robinson, with an armful of ruined cravats. And he asked, what are those? And Robinson and said, these are our failures. So it was his mission was to have a perfectly tied cravat and it could take 20 times to get it tied into just like the perfect degree of je ne sais quoi. Yeah.
- [24:04]
Chloe Chapin
And also we should mention that it wasn't. There wasn't just one particular way of tying your cravat, that there was a whole sartorial language of different styles and like, when they might be appropriate, in what occasion. It was a whole thing. It was a whole thing.
- [24:20]
Guest Expert
Yeah.
- [24:22]
Chloe Chapin
Okay, so let's detail this look of menswear in this time period that we're talking about in the very, very early 19th century. Can you describe what a typical look might be for Bremmel and what were some of the essential elements of menswear at this time?
- [24:39]
Guest Expert
Yeah, so this is also a super interesting period in menswear in terms of just what the garments were, because there were more of them than in any other period, if that makes sense. But not the. Just in terms of the different options. So breeches had been worn. The suit up until this period was a collection of garments that consisted of a coat, waistcoat, and breeches. So you would wear breeches, which are knee length pants worn with stockings and either tall boots or like dress shoes with a buckle. So those had been fashionable for 100 years. What's interesting in this period is that they're much more visible because the coats have started to get cut away. So by the time Brummell was fashionable, the tailcoats are getting cut straight across at the waist, whereas before they would fall to the knee in the front, so you couldn't see the breeches at all. So now suddenly breeches are visible in a way that they weren't before. Also around this period, pantaloons become fashionable around the 1790s. And those are long. They're basically like breeches that go to the ankle. They're longer, and they either again, tuck into boots or are worn with low shoes. But you, they. They cling to the leg. They're like jeggings of the century. And then trousers come into popularity a little bit later. But that's not something that is really associated with Brummell. What's interesting is that there was this very narrow color palette that was popular at this time. One of his early biographers, Captain Jesse, describes what his outfit was. This is later in his life, but it's also exactly what he's wearing in the one portrait that we have of him. So he describes it as Hessians and pantaloons. And Hessians are low boot that have a kind of dip in the front or top boots and buckskins. And top boots are those like knee high riding boots. And buckskins would be breeches made out of leather. And then he wears those. So that's usually like tan colored pants, either breeches or pants alone. And then a blue coat. And that was the fashionable coat color at this time. There were other colors. They were usually dark, not so much black quite yet, but navy, plum, bottle green, those kind of dark colors. So a blue coat and a light or buff colored waistcoat fit to perfection, of course. And then of course a high shirt collar which you would see sticking out above this, very precisely tied and very heavily starched. There's a lot of maintenance that goes into these things.
- [27:11]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah, yeah. And when Chloe says high collar, we're talking like it would feel constrictive to us now today that.
- [27:19]
Guest Expert
Yeah. Sometimes it reached up to the ears in some cases. And especially in the cartoons, you can see there's like really exaggerated versions.
- [27:28]
Chloe Chapin
Yes, yes.
- [27:29]
Guest Expert
So one of the things that Jesse says is that Brummell's dress was similar to that of every other gentleman, which is surprising because wait a minute, isn't he a dandy? Doesn't it mean he's like inventing new fashions? This is really different. Like this is, I think, the key to understanding the particular type of dandyism that Beau Brummel inhibited, which is he didn't actually wear anything outside of the normal. This was what everyone else was wearing and had been wearing for a decade at least. So he didn't actually invent any like new looks in particular. They might have been little micro fashions, but they weren't like big changes. The great masculine renunciation did not have anything to do with Brummell. It was already happening. Part of the zeitgeist. He was really perfecting like the nuance and the kind of performance of it. So when we talk about fashion like a man of fashion, what's really interesting in this period is that word fashion is just actually changing. In the 18th century, fashion wasn't about clothes, it was about the life of rich people. Like when you're talking about a man of fashion in the 18th century. This is a wealthy, upper class, probably nobleman, which Grummel was not. But he had that air of elegance and he was very friendly with a lot of aristocratic people. But right after this, fashion becomes more associated with more specifically clothing.
- [28:56]
Chloe Chapin
It was more about how he wore it. How he wore it exactly, not what he was wearing.
- [29:01]
Guest Expert
That's right.
- [29:02]
Chloe Chapin
Well, you noted that he was friends with some extremely notable people, one of which he falls in with at Eton. That plays a very big part in our story. Can you tell us about him?
- [29:14]
Guest Expert
Yeah. So Rommel goes to Eton. He was not by all accounts a particularly good student, but he at some point saw the Prince of Wales and his regiment when he was a student there. And then a little bit later, he went to Oxford for only a year and then dropped out. When he was 16, he joined the 10th Light Hussars, the Prince of Wales's regiment, which was very famous for being the most fashionable regiments. They had the best uniforms. So we purchased a corn and sea to join this. And that was how he became close to the Prince of Wales. And later, when he resigned his commission, they maintained a friendship.
- [29:53]
Chloe Chapin
And would you define that term, Cornetcy? Because I actually was unfamiliar with this. I got the gist of it when I read over it in something that you had written. But what is. What exactly was that practice?
- [30:03]
Guest Expert
It's just a military position. But what's important about the officer ranks in this period in England is that you had to purchase. Was expensive, and you had to purchase all of your uniforms, which were very expensive, especially in the most fashionable regiments. So it was a very expensive practice. And one of the famous stories of Brummell, for why he got out of the army was they were stationed in Brighton, which is this very fashionable seaside resort, and the regiment was ordered to march to Manchester, which is way up in the north of the country. And so apparently, as the story goes, he goes to the Prince of Wales the next morning and he says, I've heard we are ordered to Manchester. You must be aware how disagreeable this would be for me. I really could not go. Thank you, Highness. Manchester, like he was such a snobby.
- [31:00]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah.
- [31:01]
Guest Expert
And so this story was repeated about why he left the regiment. It's also possible that he wanted his commission back, which is that you had to purchase it. So he would sell it and get the money from it.
- [31:15]
Chloe Chapin
Oh, interesting.
- [31:16]
Guest Expert
Right. Because he had an income, but he didn't have the kind of income that his noble friends would have had. And that was the dance that he played was how to maintain a friendship with all of the rich and famous without having the same kind of income that they do. And he really worked it for as.
- [31:36]
Chloe Chapin
Long as he did, especially in the context of the Prince of Wales. They became quite close.
- [31:42]
Guest Expert
Yeah.
- [31:42]
Chloe Chapin
Would you tell us about their relationship and a little bit about why their friendship was thought of at this time as a bit unusual?
- [31:51]
Guest Expert
Yeah. So there's tons of biographies of Brummell and they're all obsessed with this relationship. It's a Cinderella story. Ultimately, it's always referred to as the grandson of a valet who befriended a prince. A servant would never even be in the same room as someone a member of the royal family. Right. So the fact that in just two generations from a servant to. His father was secretary to Lord north and then got into local politics because he invested well and bought property. And so he was able to send his sons to both Eton and Oxford. So he was really rubbing shoulders with. With people who were very wealthy and important. But you could think of him like being the scholarship kid.
- [32:40]
Chloe Chapin
Right.
- [32:41]
Guest Expert
Like he didn't. He had access to those people, but he did not have the same kind of noble status or income that really would have put him into a class of those. And so people were just obsessed with this story because again, like Cinderella's story, like you too could be friend of prince. Right.
- [33:01]
Chloe Chapin
Again, it goes back to that sort of rise of the middle class. Really. Truly. So there were a lot of anxieties around this class stratification and people who were kind of what we would term social climbers. And there's a particular incident that happens with the prince and Brummell involving a belle. And I think this is a really good example of the dynamics of their relationship. Would you tell us that story?
- [33:29]
Guest Expert
Yeah. So the story goes that the Brummell is hanging out with the prince and there's other people in the room and someone wants to leave and so they need to call his carriage. And so Brummell says to the Prince Wales, ring the bell. Meaning summon a servant to call the coach so that this, our friend, can leave. So people were horrified by this because this demanding of His Royal Highness to do something so mundane. Now, even at the time, Brummell insisted that this never happened. This is one of the things that's so weird once you get into the actual story is that a lot of the stories about him turn out to be more sort of myths than fact. And this is one of them, even in his lifetime. This is the thing that's so crazy. So he insisted that he was on such intimate terms with the Prince that if it had been the two of them in the room, he could have said something like that. But with a third person in the room he would never have said anything because it would have been so offensive, not just to the prints, but the fact that there was an audience and he knew that the Regent would just never have gone for it.
- [34:48]
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- [35:17]
Guest Expert
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- [35:19]
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- [35:22]
Guest Expert
I think you're on mute.
- [35:23]
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- [35:50]
Chloe Chapin
We are going to get into more myth busting here in a second, but I want to keep setting him up in terms of what has been said, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Brummell receives his inheritance from his father when he turns 21 and he moves to London in 1799 after he gets out of the military. Can you tell us a little bit about this world that he would have stepped into in London? And what role would Fashion have played in establishing himself?
- [36:21]
Guest Expert
1799. What a crazy year, right? So it's not quite the Regency period yet. So King George III is still on the throne. The Regency period doesn't start until 1811. It's the very beginning of the Napoleonic Wars. The Reign of Terror had been in 1793. 1799 was the fall of the Directory, and that was when Napoleon was elected first consul. He crowns himself emperor in 1804 and then abdicates in 1814. So this period is, it's just like a crazy political mess in France, in England, in the United States. George Washington dies in 1799, which is really the end of an era in America. So Thomas Jefferson is the president and this is the time of the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Things are changing so radically and dramatically in this period. There's the Haitian Revolution, there's revolutions all over Latin America. It's also the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution and that's relevant to our story. Also there's all these mechanical inventions that have already taken place. The flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, the spinning mule, the power loam, all of those have been invented by now, but it hasn't quite taken over yet. Yes, there are manufactured cloth, but it hasn't quite gotten. It hasn't moved over to America yet. In America, Samuel Slater starts his mill in 1793, which is the same year that Eli Whitney invents the cotton gin. So there's all sorts of things that are about to start happening. The Americans really introduced the factory system. That's real, their contribution to the Industrial Revolution. But there's just so many massive changes. And Jane Austen is often talked about in terms of this period. Her books start getting published in 1811. Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, those come out in 1811, 1813, 1814. But she's writing about an earlier period. So no one is reading Jane Austen in this period. The books take place like, basically between 1790 and 1810. So this is what that world feels like kind of a little bit pre.
- [38:30]
Chloe Chapin
Bridgerton, which in and of itself is an entire encapsulated anachronism.
- [38:35]
Guest Expert
Exactly.
- [38:36]
Chloe Chapin
So in terms of menswear and particularly in the context of these men's clubs, which you referenced earlier, what role would fashion have played for him coming into these men's clubs in particular, in terms of establishing identity?
- [38:55]
Guest Expert
Yeah. So this was all part of the performance of being upper class. Right. Is paying attention to your person and being well dressed. And one of the ways that Brummell did this was by affecting this personality of being superior to everyone, even though he couldn't afford it. But it was an act, right? And this is the thing that he was such a genius at. So just as an example, one of the, again, like frequently mentioned stories about him is the Duke of Bedford gets a new coat and he runs into Brummell on the street or at one of the clubs and he shows it off to Brummell. And Brummell is like, turn around. And he sort of feels it between his, like, finger and his thumb and he goes, bedford, do you call this thing a coat? Like, it's just. It's so dismissive. But he, I think he really. I just. Don't you wish you could have been a fly on the wall in these? Because he was playing with fire, right? These people have cut him at any minute. And by cut, I Don't mean, like physically harm, socially cutting. He could have been absolutely, like, blackballed out of these clubs in an instant. But he just had this air about him that was so charming that it didn't matter. And they just loved how insulting he was. But he did it in such a way that it meant that they all wanted to be around him.
- [40:17]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah. It's really funny because you and I were chatting before we started recording and I mentioned that this week's episodes, and this will now be in the past, because we're pre recording your episodes, was on Leigh Bowery, the artist, fashion designer, performance artist. And he had a whole bunch of these same qualities as well, in terms of, like, some of his friends were like, he could be a monster, but we loved him for it, essentially. Yeah.
- [40:42]
Guest Expert
What's interesting, I think, is the other people who were famous dandies around this period. Lord Byron, Balzac, Baudelaire, Montesquieu, Cantorce, Oscar Wilde, they're all writers and artists, so they're. But it's their job to create worlds. A lot of the other sort of famous dandies were actually characters in the novels and plays they were writing. So it was like they wrote a character and then stepped into it.
- [41:08]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah, for sure. There was a lot of wordsmithing happening.
- [41:12]
Guest Expert
Absolutely.
- [41:12]
Chloe Chapin
There was a high value on wordsmithery.
- [41:15]
Guest Expert
I guess I would say Oscar Wilde is the perfect example. Like the Bon Motts that he is so famous for. That's essentially what Brummell was famous for, too. There were all these plays that were written about him where he's the main character and they just look like someone strung together all these quotes that he's famous for and then wrote a play in order to perform those. Like the grammars. They're bits of the time. Exactly.
- [41:43]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah. Yeah. So let's round out our discussion in terms of establishing his biography. Oftentimes, discourses on dandyism have a sort of moralizing or censoring tone to them. And in general, the dandy is often positioned as a tragic figure as his youth fades. And the very real life of Brummell is often cited as the prime example of this. Can you tell us about the latter portion of his life which he spent in France? And also why did he eventually leave London?
- [42:20]
Guest Expert
Yeah, this is like Act 2 of the play. Essentially. He's occupying this very fashionable world in London at these men's clubs. And the thing that was important to do at this time, if you were a young gentleman, was gamble. And this is a time of this Just like outrageous, extravagant betting culture. They would bet on small sports races. They would bet on votes in the House of Parliament. They bet on the weather. They bet on marriages. They would bet on whether or not Lord's son would be a. Or a child would be a boy or a girl. There's one story where two men at a club bet whose raindrop on the window would win. And they would be betting like $20,000. Like they would be betting huge amounts of money on these, like, totally ridiculous things. There was one about whether or not a turkey would walk passed before noon. Just completely insane things. But you had to be so rich to part to play those games, which of course was why they were fashionable. Right. There was a real barrier of entry to the participation in these clubs. So Brummell racked up a bunch of gambling debts. And sometimes these were called bets of honor. Like gambling debts were not debts that you held off on. That's to your tailors. Absolutely. You would could like bring up a whole string of debts and never pay them off. It was like a real crapshoot being a tailor, trying to get your clients to actually pay you. There's funny stories about that too. But anyway, Rummel racked up all these gambling debts and was testing the patience of a bunch of his friends, many of whom supported him financially. So that was another one of the things that happened in this world is that if you had less money than your friends who had a shit ton of money, they could help support you or by. Especially by helping you pay off your debts. And the relationship between Brummell and the Prince of Wales was fraught, probably because of this outrageous personality that Brummell had invented for himself. And there's lots of different versions of this story. It takes place at a ball, it takes place on the street, it takes place in the park. But the story goes that the Prince of Wales is walking with their good friend Lord Alvinlea, and the Prince cuts him in public, which is to say he does not acknowledge him, which was a big diss at the time. Now Brommel should have just ignored it, right? And then they would have made up later and gotten along. This is common for their relationship. But he instead turns to their mutual friend and says, alvin Lee, who's your fat friend? The Prince of Wales was notorious for being overweight and very sensitive about it. There were lots of stories of him wearing corsets and stiff neck gaiters to hide his double chins. And this was again the genius of Brummellis. He knew exactly what Buttons to push. But that was the wrong button to push.
- [45:19]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah, it was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back. Obviously something else had already happened, probably many times over.
- [45:26]
Guest Expert
That's right. And it wasn't an immediate thing. Right. That happened in 1814, 1813 or 1814, depending on which stories you read. And he didn't actually leave London until 1816. So he managed to string his life along for another two or three years in London. But his gambling debts had gotten too outrageous, I think probably because people knew that he had lost the friendship of the prince, that they just weren't supporting him as much as they had been before. So he just didn't have the same kind of social capital that he used to. And that was his bread and butter was his social capital.
- [45:59]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah.
- [45:59]
Guest Expert
So he pretends to go to the opera one evening, packs up all his snuff boxes, which he had a huge collection of, which some of which were very expensive. And then I think he shows up at the opera and then sneaks out and sneaks into his chariot and has them drive him to the coast. And then he flees to France in the middle of the night, which is not unusual at this time. That's the other thing. Going to live in the Continent was very typical for even nobility at this time, many of whom lost their whole estates through gambling. Gambling is just insane in this period. And so it was common that you could, like, retrench, get more of your allowance, find more ways to make money, try to stop your gambling habits on the continent, hope that your creditors would forgive your debts back home before you could go back. So this was common practice. And probably nobody thought that he would be gone forever. Certainly not him. He was just waiting for help to come. So he arrives in Calais. He's living off of money sent to him by his friends, many of whom are still noblemen and friends with the prince and still living at the absolute height of luxury, not cutting any corners, even though he doesn't have any income at this point in 1830. So this is 25 years later, he moves to Cannes. He got this consulate position, which is this minor governmental position, which had an income thanks to some old connections. So he's living in Cannes, and he's not there for very long before he writes a letter back and is like, you know, this place isn't great. Maybe you shouldn't even have a consulate here anymore. And he's really trying to get a nicer position somewhere else. And the response is, you're probably right. And they just canceled the Consulate. Ooh.
- [47:53]
Chloe Chapin
He canceled himself.
- [47:55]
Guest Expert
He totally canceled himself. It was the worst move he could have played because they cut off his income and everybody knew it. Like, he was still living off of this social capital because he was so famous, so still very well dressed, still had that sort of attitude that everyone just wanted to be around. But he also had a lot of capital because of this income and his connections with the nobility, and those were gone. And so he ended up dying in poverty in 1840.
- [48:25]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah. And tell me if this little bit that I have read somewhere, because again, we're going to get into the myth busting in episode two. But he was still so well known that young aspirational dandies would come to visit him. Right. To learn from him.
- [48:41]
Guest Expert
Yeah. And that's actually one of the ways that we know what we know about him is through one of those biographies. So Captain Jesse was in the army and traveled to Cannes in 1836, I think, and met Brummell, who was an old man at this point point, but still impactfully dressed. And he was a super Stan of Brummell. So he wrote a number of books about Brummell, but more importantly, he collected everything he could find about Brummell. So he collected Brummell's letters, and he wrote letters to everyone he could think of who would have known Brummell when he was a child. So he wrote to his old friends, he wrote to people he knew at Eton, and they would write his letters back. So those letters still exist. There's a whole album that Jesse put together of all of these letters to and from Brummell or about Brummell that are in the collection of the Beinecke at Yale.
- [49:37]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah. And this is exactly the type of primary source that we love.
- [49:42]
Guest Expert
Although I have to say, the primary sources related to Brummell are so infuriating for a couple of reasons. So I've looked at them at Yale, at the British Library. Those are the two that sort of have the most. And they're usually just these short little letters. And Brummell has terrible handwriting.
- [50:00]
Chloe Chapin
Oh, no.
- [50:01]
Guest Expert
So it takes so long to just transcribe what it is that he's saying. And then usually it's just like something about a horse there or he's. All of the letters. The thing that's frustrating about all those letters that Jesse collected is that it's almost all from his life and France.
- [50:19]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah.
- [50:19]
Guest Expert
So almost every letter is him writing back to thank his friends for sending money and presents or to beg them for money. So it's really sad those letters.
- [50:31]
Narrator
Chloe, thank you so much for regaling us with the very fashionable tales or tales swirling around Beau Brummel. Love a good pun. One of the things that is so interesting to scholars of Brummel is how so very few images of him exist, which is fascinating and in fact the ones that do overwhelmingly were produced after he left London or posthumously after his death. So we delve into this further with Chloe on Friday to speak about the man versus the myth and even question if Brummell was a dandy at all. So you won't want to miss that hot take, trust me.
- [51:06]
Chloe Chapin
Yeah, definitely a hot take, right? I think that does it for us today. Dress listeners, may you consider if you would polish your booths with champagne as Brummel supposedly did next time you get dressed. If you would like to find the Instagram and social media content for this week's episodes, you can search the hashtags dressed548 and hashtag dressed549. Please head over to Dressed Underscore podcast on Instagram or on Facebook to check out the visual content associated with each week's episodes.
- [51:43]
Narrator
Remember, we love hearing from you dress listeners, so if you'd like to write to us, you can do so@helloresshistory.com Dresshistory.com is also our website where you can sign up for our monthly newsletter, our in person tours and online fashion history courses. And there you can also check out whatever else we have up our finely tailored sleeves.
- [52:02]
Chloe Chapin
We get so many questions from you all about our recommendations for fashion history books, so if you're interested you can always find a link in our show notes to our bookshop.org bookshelf so that address is bookshop.org shop dressed and there you will find over 150 of our favorite fashion history titles.
- [52:23]
Narrator
Do you love Dressed but want to skip the ads? We are so excited to now be a part of the Airwave Network and their premium ad free History subscription Airwave History plus plus and this is available on Apple Podcasts and the subscription brings you our podcast as well as 27 other popular history podcasts. Ad free for $5.99 per month. More information is available at the link in our bio.
- [52:48]
Chloe Chapin
Thank you as always for tuning in and more Dressed coming your way soon. Dressed the History of Fashion is a production of dressed media.
- [52:59]
JJ Virgin
Hey JJ Virgin here on my podcast well beyond 40, we ditch the idea of aging gracefully and go all in on aging powerfully. Every week I host powerful experts who can give you powerful insights on building muscle, boosting your energy and feeling amazing. No matter what your age, this is your one life and trust me, being smarter and stronger are super powerful powers that can turn lifespan into strength span. Listen to well beyond 40 wherever you get your podcasts.