The Legend of Beau Brummell, an interview with Dr. Chloe Chapin, Part II

Summary

Podcast Summary: "The Legend of Beau Brummell, an Interview with Dr. Chloe Chapin, Part II"

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Podcast Information:

• Title: Dressed: The History of Fashion
• Host/Author: Dressed Media
• Episode: The Legend of Beau Brummell, Part II
• Guest: Dr. Chloe Chapin
• Release Date: June 13, 2025

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Introduction

In Part II of "The Legend of Beau Brummell," hosts Cassie Zachary and April Callahan delve deeper into the life and legacy of Beau Brummell, one of menswear history's most iconic figures. Joined once again by fashion historian Dr. Chloe Chapin, the episode seeks to unravel the myths surrounding Brummell and distinguish them from historical facts.

Recap of Part I

The episode begins with a brief recap of Part I, highlighting Brummell's rise to prominence as the "King of Dandies" in early 19th-century London. Known for his impeccable wit and sartorial excellence, Brummell navigated aristocratic circles, including a close friendship with the Prince of Wales. Despite his common birth, his flamboyant and irreverent style made him a beloved figure in high society for 18 years until financial troubles, particularly gambling and unpaid tailor bills, led to his downfall. [00:31 - 02:20]

Myth Busting: Fact vs. Fiction

Dr. Chloe Chapin introduces the concept of myth busting, aiming to separate legendary tales from verifiable historical records about Brummell. A recurring claim is that Brummell was "famous for being famous." The discussion questions why Brummell garnered such fame and whether his reputation as a dandy was deserved or manufactured. [02:21 - 07:20]

Notable Quote:

"Despite Brummell's lasting renown, we have barely any images of him. How do we know what types of things he was wearing?"
— Dr. Chloe Chapin [04:21]

Visual Representation of Brummell

Cassie and Dr. Chapin explore the limited visual documentation of Brummell, emphasizing that most existing images were either created during his youth or posthumously. The most reliable portrait is a 1805 watercolor by Richard Dighton, which accurately depicts Brummell's attire with light-colored pantaloons, a navy wool coat, a white waistcoat, and a high-starched linen shirt collar with a cravat. This portrait offers a clear view of Brummell's fashion during his prime. [04:36 - 06:36]

Notable Quote:

"The Dighton drawing is the ideal picture to get a sense of who he was as a young man when he was very famous."
— Dr. Chloe Chapin [05:55]

Brummell’s Personal Life and Relationships

The conversation shifts to Brummell's personal relationships, particularly his interaction with his valet, Robinson. Dr. Chapin points out that there is scant evidence of Robinson's existence, suggesting that many stories about him are likely apocryphal. These narratives often portray Robinson as the straight man to Brummell's extravagant persona, highlighting the servant's role in maintaining Brummell's image through tasks like tying cravats and polishing boots. [14:27 - 16:13]

Notable Quote:

"Brummell was notorious for not paying his bills, so he probably didn't pay his valet."
— Dr. Chloe Chapin [16:12]

Dandyism and Satirical Prints

A significant portion of the episode examines the role of satirical prints in shaping contemporary and modern perceptions of dandyism. Dr. Chapin explains that political satire was a dominant genre in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, often targeting cultural figures, including dandies. Surprisingly, Brummell himself was rarely depicted in these satires, raising questions about why such a prominent figure was absent from contemporary critiques. [17:28 - 19:35]

Notable Quote:

"The dandy satires really pick up actually after Brummell leaves England. It's a total mystery why he doesn't show up in any of those satires."
— Dr. Chloe Chapin [19:36]

Racial and Foreign Dimensions in Dandyism Satire

The discussion broadens to include the portrayal of black dandies in satirical prints, particularly in America during the 1830s. Dr. Chapin highlights the racist undertones in these depictions, where fashion is mocked as a sign of social climbing among free black communities. These caricatures often juxtapose fashionable attire with stereotypical, derogatory representations of African Americans, blending race and class critiques. This intersectionality laid the groundwork for later performances like minstrel shows, where black dandies became central characters embodying racial and class tensions. [30:28 - 36:49]

Notable Quote:

"He combines them into these caricatures where it's these fleshy bodies who are dressed in these very fashionable styles, showing the tension between dress and person."
— Dr. Chloe Chapin [35:37]

Impact of Primary Sources and Historical Research

Dr. Chapin emphasizes the scarcity of primary sources on Brummell, noting that most information comes from memoirs and letters rather than physical artifacts like garments. She has compiled a comprehensive database of Brummell-related primary sources, including memoirs from contemporaries like Julia Johnstone and Harriet Wilson. This effort aims to encourage further scholarly research and distinguish between Brummell's factual history and the myths that have persisted for over two centuries. [38:35 - 41:41]

Notable Quote:

"We need to differentiate between fact and fiction and talk about what is it about this persona that people were so drawn to for 200 years."
— Dr. Chloe Chapin [40:24]

Gender and Fashion: The Evolution of Masculine Dress

The episode explores how the era's gender norms influenced dandyism. Dr. Chapin discusses the shift from elaborate, visible body shaping in men's fashion to the more understated, yet still structurally defined, suits that dominated later periods. This transition reflects broader societal expectations of masculinity, where effort in dress became associated with effeminacy and social deviation. The persistence of suits as a symbol of conformity highlights the ongoing tension between individuality and societal norms in men's fashion. [26:13 - 29:28]

Notable Quote:

"The suit won. That's the thing that's so crazy is this, like, plainness ultimately keeps winning over and over again."
— Dr. Chloe Chapin [40:32]

Conclusion and Future Directions

Cassie and April wrap up the episode by acknowledging Dr. Chapin's significant contributions to the study of Beau Brummell and men's fashion history. They encourage listeners to explore her upcoming book and the resources she has made available online. The hosts also highlight the enduring fascination with Brummell's persona and its influence on contemporary menswear, prompting reflections on the balance between individuality and conformity in fashion.

Notable Quote:

"There's a tactile part of life that I think people are really drawn to that is just not possible to explore in the most constrained end of masculine fashion."
— Dr. Chloe Chapin [41:41]

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Key Takeaways:

• Beau Brummell's Legacy: A blend of factual history and enduring myths surrounds Brummell, with his reputation as a dandy being both celebrated and questioned.
• Limited Visual Records: Most depictions of Brummell are either from his youth or created posthumously, limiting our understanding of his true sartorial influence.
• Role of Satire: Satirical prints of the era provide insight into contemporary attitudes towards dandyism, though they often omit prominent figures like Brummell.
• Intersection of Race and Class: In America, satirical portrayals of dandyism intertwined with racial stereotypes, reflecting deeper societal tensions.
• Importance of Primary Sources: Dr. Chapin's work in compiling primary sources is crucial for future scholarly research on Brummell and men's fashion history.
• Gender Norms in Fashion: The evolution of men's fashion from overtly structured to more understated suits mirrors changing societal expectations of masculinity.

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For More Information:

• Dr. Chloe Chapin's Website: ChloeChapinsFashionHistory.com (Note: Replace with actual URL if available)

Upcoming Resources:

• Dr. Chapin's Book on the History of Suits: Expected release next year.
• Superfine Exhibition Catalog: Features detailed analyses of satirical prints and their depiction of dandyism.

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This episode offers a comprehensive exploration of Beau Brummell's life, the myths surrounding him, and his impact on menswear history. Through meticulous research and engaging dialogue, listeners gain a deeper understanding of the cultural and social dynamics that shaped the legacy of one of fashion's most legendary figures.

Transcript

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[Cassie Zachary]

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.

[April Callahan]

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.

[Cassie Zachary]

Hosts Cassie Zachary and April Callahan. Dress listeners, welcome back to Part two of our look into the life and sartorial career of one of menswear history's most prominent figures. In part one of this episode, Dr. Chloe Chapin joined us to speak about Beau Brummell's now legendary reign as the King of Dandies in London at the turn of the 19th century. Famous for his wit and sartorial perfectionism, brilliant bramble ran in aristocratic circles, even counting the Prince of Wales as one of his closest friends. Despite the fact he was of common birth, he was outrageous, irreverent and stylishly snobbish. And for 18 years, Brumble was one of London high society's most favored guests.

[April Callahan]

That is until his debts caught up with him. Especially his gambling debts and more than a few unpaid tailor bills, which was a whole tradition.

[Cassie Zachary]

That's a whole thing.

[April Callahan]

Not unique to him, no, but a problem he had nonetheless. And if you haven't already, dress listeners tuned into part one of this episode, we suggest you do so first, as today we're going to do a bit of myth busting. What has been said of Brummel versus what can actually be proven in the historical record and fashion historian Chloe Chapin's work on Brummell is part of her book on the history of suits, which will be out next year. So exciting and we are so, so happy she's sharing A portion of her research with us a wee bit in advance. So, Chloe, thanks for continuing this conversation.

[Cassie Zachary]

Chloe, welcome back to part two of the Legend of Beau Brummel. Yeah, we basically, in episode one, we set up his life, or legend, as we should say. And what we're going to do here in part two is really get into what do we actually know from versus what has been said. So one of the things that's been said about Beau Brummel is how his friends and acquaintances would write that he was largely famous for being famous. Why and how so? And also what exactly contributed to his fame and reign as the quote, unquote, king of Dandies?

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

Whether or not he was even a dandy was contestable even in his lifetime. This just blows my mind, right? It's not just that this all happened later, but even in his lifetime people were like, but if being a dandy is about being fashionable, does that really apply to Brummell? There are lots of different people who say he was as plainly dressed as anybody else. I don't know why he was called a dandy, but it was again, part of the performance. Right. So even at the time, this distinction between a dandy being well dressed or being sort of performative version of a kind of stylish, aloof, ironic self presentation was really still contested even at the time.

[Cassie Zachary]

Yeah. And one of the things I was super intrigued with in your work is that you say, despite Brummell's lasting renown, we have barely any images of him. How do we know what types of things that he was wearing?

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

Yeah, this just shocks me. So there. One of the things I think is so interesting is the most famous picture of him is a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds that was painted when he was three years old. And that's really the like, posterity that we have when he was a little kid, as Reynolds was friends with his father. The one that's sort of the most well known is a watercolor by Richard Dighton, which was painted in 1805. And some people call this a caricature. And that makes sense because Dighton was a caricaturist. He was well known for his satires of life in London. But this does not read to me as a caricature. It just it looks like what everybody else was wearing at the time. So to me, I would just say that this is the most reliable portrait that we have of him. And what's great is that it's full length so we can see his whole figure. And. And it's in color. So we get a sense of the colors as we talked about last time were so important to this presentation of masculinity in this period. And there are other portraits that are attributed to him, but most of them were painted after he left London or after his death. So really that Dighton1 is the ideal picture to get a sense of who he was as a young man when he was very famous.

[Cassie Zachary]

Yeah. And what was he wearing in the Dighton drawing or painting?

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

The same exact thing that Jesse describes him wearing 30 years later in France. So he's wearing a light colored pantaloons which are tucked into hessian boots which have a little. They're noticeable because they have a little V dip in the front with a little tassel hanging down. He's wearing a navy wool coat that has a high rolled collar. It's double breasted, so they're shiny gold buttons. He's wearing a white waistcoat underneath. They're both cut styles straight across at the waist. And then this very high, very starched white linen shirt collar and a cravat that's tied in a sort of ruffly way. And he's carrying a top hat.

[Cassie Zachary]

Yeah, yeah. And again, not terribly unsimilar to what everybody else was wearing during the same time period that we see in other portraits.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

That's right. In both America and England, the buff and blue, as it was called, was probably the most fashionable color story in menswear.

[Cassie Zachary]

Well, one of the reasons why I entitled these two part episodes the Legend of Beau Brummel is because a lot of your work asserts that many of these stories that are repeated about Brummell again and again are likely apocryphal or the legacy of myth making. How much of what we think we know about Brummell can actually be proven?

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

Very little. I mean, we know the Brummell existed. Right. There was a person whose name was Beau Brummel. We have letters that he wrote. There are these images of him that were painted. People that were contemporaries do talk about him, but there's very little physical evidence. As far as I know, there are no garments that he left behind.

[Cassie Zachary]

Probably sold, I'm guessing.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

Exactly. We mostly have letters. As far as the primary sources written by his hand. The best sources that we have for people who actually knew him are memoirs. So there's a bunch of people that knew him that wrote memoirs later. Two of them were courtesans, Julia Johnstone and Harriet Wilson, who both mention him. And they're both kind of catty and they Both are kind of like, he wasn't that great, but he was sort of fun to be around. They say he wasn't very smart, he wasn't very funny, but he was witty and he had just the sort of air about him. There are other people who knew him. Thomas Raikes is another person who was a friend of his from Eton. So he was very close to him and protective of his legacy. He was definitely one of the people that sent him money when he was in France and tried to, I don't know, protect his image, especially after his fall from grace when he fled to France. Yeah.

[Cassie Zachary]

I love the fact that you brought up courtesans, because this is an assumption on my part and it's rooted in zero evidence.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

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[Cassie Zachary]

I had long assumed that Brummell was gay. What do we know of his intimate relationships and sexual preferences? And why was he hanging out with these courtesans?

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

Yeah, this is a great question. So, I mean, the courtesans were just around, right. They were not his mistresses, but they were just very fashionable. We know when you got associated with a wealthy, especially royal personage, you were invited to all of the fancy clothes. Yeah, exactly. Go to the opera, things like that. So it wasn't unusual that he would have been around them. He never married, and as far as we know, there's no evidence that he ever had any romantic relationships. One of his biographers, Ian Kelly, has discovered that he likely died of syphilis, which is a sexually transmitted disease. So probably he did have some sex in his life, but we have no evidence of whether or not it was with men or women, if it was abundant or just one time. We just don't have evidence to back that up. What's interesting, though, is the fact that you assumed he was gay, which is an assumption that a lot of people make about dandies or just any men who are dressing outside of the sort of norm of masculine style. This is something that was associated with the fops, the coxcombs, the macaronis, like we talked about last time. But at the time, it's not that men didn't have sexual relationships with other men, but being homosexual wasn't an identity, especially for the aristocratic classes. The most important thing that you had to do was to provide an heir.

[Cassie Zachary]

Yeah.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

So regardless of who you preferred to be around. And there are certainly stories of people who never married and their estates passed to a nephew or something like that. And often people assume that they were impotent or. Or homosexual or whatever. So that is definitely a characteristic that is often associated with men who dress in an outlandish fashion. It is associated with effeminacy. It's really interesting how this happens. Right. If men wear clothing that is outside of this constrained palette of what's applicable or appropriate to masculine dressing, Especially starting in this period when that constraint, like, really doubles down, it's seen as being unmanly, but unmanly immediately transfers into effeminate.

[Cassie Zachary]

Yeah.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

If you're not manly, then you must be womanly. And then that is associated with sexual deviance and a lack of sort of social power.

[Cassie Zachary]

Yeah, yeah. And I would argue that if we had to pick one poster child to exemplify what you're talking about, it would be Oscar Wilde.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

Yes, absolutely. Who was gay and was well known to have sexual relationships with other men. Not necessarily the smartest ones, because it was still illegal at the time and got called out for it.

[Cassie Zachary]

He was arrested. He was on trial.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

Yeah, yeah. Sodomy was illegal, so you could be jailed for the offense. But yeah, we. We just don't have any evidence about brumal.

[Cassie Zachary]

That whole jailed for this particular offense carries through. Actually, just a few nights ago, I watched a documentary on Lord Montesquieu, who in the 1940s, 1950s, I believe, had two friends, two male friends who were in a relationship with each other. And the British government came after him because they happened to kind of figure out that some of those liaisons between his two friends happened at his estate and they actually prosecuted him for just that association, which is really wild. Anyway, maybe I'll put that in our link in our show notes. Tangent, dress listeners, did you know that this summer you can get your shopping done online and save money at the same time? Introducing Rakuten. Rakuten is the smartest way to save money when you shop.

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[Cassie Zachary]

One of the relationships that was important to him, sartorially, at least when he was in London at the heyday of his fashionability, was his relationship with his valet, Robinson. What do we know about him?

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

So there is again, no real evidence that Robinson existed. We know that he had a valid, but we don't know whether or not his name was Robinson. Jesse mentions Robinson. It's probably the first mention of him, but nothing in the period accounts. And by this point, all of his ballots had left him. He had been abandoned by everyone because he. He wasn't very good at paying them. But this character of Robinson shows up in a lot of these stories about tying cravats and polishing his boots with champagne. And he's the foil to Brummell's excess. There's a story about someone coming over who's just this, like, very boring person talking about his trip to the Lake District. And Brummel finds it very tedious. And so he says to his valet, Robinson, sir, which of the lakes do I admire? Windermere, sir. Ah, yes, Windermere. So it is Windermere. Like, this is his attitude. It's just. It's not funny, but it's just so outrageous. Yeah, it's hilarious. Right? So anyway, so Robinson becomes this sort of straight man to. His performance of excess comes up in all of these different stories. Maybe. One other thing I'll say about Robinson is that Brummell was notorious for not paying his bills, so he probably didn't pay his valet. There's a story in France that Jesse tells where his valet steals something from him because he hasn't gotten paid. He notoriously ran up huge laundry bills. So he didn't pay his laundry.

[Cassie Zachary]

Just country washing.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

Exactly right. And just think about that story of those cravats. Think about the labor hours that Poor Robinson put into washing, starching and ironing all of those cravats every single morning, just so that Brummell could do this performance in front of all these other people. So I think that's something that social history is more interested in now than it was 100 years ago. Is like, what is the relationship of the servant class to this performance of aristocratic self presentation? What is the labor that actually went into that performance? So one of the reasons why Brummell's relationship to Robinson is just interesting to me personally and is because. So I used to be a costume designer.

[Cassie Zachary]

Yes.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

But before I was a costume designer, I worked as a dresser. So I actually have this like real embodied understanding of what it's like to iron the same shirts literally every single day over and over again. I wasn't unpaid, which is different. I was not a servant. But it's the closest you can get to being a ladies maid without being a ladies maid was working in that kind of theatrical context. So that really has helped me get an understanding of what it would have been like to do that material work and have that relationship of helping someone get dressed every day.

[Cassie Zachary]

That leads me into what I wanted to ask you about next. And the connecting thread here is the theater of dandyism. A lot of what we know about social attitudes towards dandies of this time are from satirical prints. And you know that we both share a love of fashion satire. I keep waiting for somebody to write a really truly comprehensive tome on this subject, because there is 250 years of history of satirical fashion imagery. It's out there. And the late 18th and early 19th century dandy, even the fops and the macaronis, they were not safe at all from frequent comedic scurrying. So what do we know about this genre of prints? And in terms of dandyism, what fashions were the satirist really poking the dandies about?

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

Yeah. So I would say the most important thing to know first is that political satire was a huge industry. So satirists weren't just focused on fashion, they were focused on culture broadly. So when you look at cartoons from this period, they're almost incomprehensible because they're all about, like, local politics. Like none of the jokes land. They're impossible to translate unless you like, really know that history really well. But also they were full of real life people. So you often see the Prince of Wales, all of his paramours, all of his political enemies, Charles James Fox, both of whom also dressed very similarly to Brummell. In that buff and blue style. What's interesting is the dandy satires really pick up actually after Brummell leaves England. And this is something that I find completely incomprehensible. If Brummell was So famous for 15 years in London during the height of this cartooning world, and two of the people that he was the most well connected with, the Prince of Wales and Charles James Fox, were just in every single political cartoon. Why did Rummel never show up?

[Cassie Zachary]

Ah, interesting.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

It's just a total mystery. Is it because he was like protected by the press Prince? I mean, they weren't protecting the Prince from ridicule. Did these papers have some sort of allegiance to the region where they didn't want to poke fun at his friend? But then they fell out of favor and there was that period of two or three years when Brummel was still in England after he had gotten dissed by the Prince. Why weren't they going after him? It's just crazy to me that he doesn't show up in any of those satires. But what's interesting is this genre of dandy satire really starts to pick up right around 1810, 1815. The Cruikshanks, George Cruikshank and Isaac Robert Cruikshanks, whose father was also a very well known political satirist, they were two of the most prolific. And they're making fun of a couple of different things, one of which is really fashion extremes, right? So partially they're making fun of the clothes and partially they're making fun of the people wearing the clothes. So the things that they're making fun of in the clothes is these crazy high collars that we were talking about, skin tight pantaloons, really super wide trousers that come into popularity around 1814 in London. All sorts of padding and shaping of the body. So some of them wearing corsets, they have calf padding strapped to their calves, they have pads on their thighs and on their hips. And we know there's some evidence that actually happened. There are some extent stockings that have the calf pads. Exactly.

[Cassie Zachary]

Do you know the story about the kids?

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

Oh, tell me.

[Cassie Zachary]

Oh, so I have read some anecdotal stuff. I think this is in my fashion plate book from many years ago. But I read some anecdotal things about how kids used to love to hide under the dining room tables during parties. And they would take little pins, like stick pins, and they would go about and poke the. The calves of the men from underneath the table to see who was wearing Calf pads and whose calves were real. Because at this time, having a quote, unquote, well turned calf, if you were wearing the shorter breeches, this was very alluring.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

This is one of the things, again, that's so interesting about having to unthink our ideas about gender today. Right. Because today it's much more acceptable for women to wear short skirts and show their legs, like in a professional context. But you would never see men wearing shorts like in a boardroom. Yeah, right. But at this time, it was the absolute opposite. Women had covered their legs in these, like, enormous skirts for literally a thousand years, whereas men had been showcasing their calves and their thighs in hose and breeches and stockings.

[Cassie Zachary]

Diamond buckles at the bottom of your breeches to draw attention to that area of the body.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

And one of the things that I find useful in thinking about the showcasing of the calves is ballet was invented about 100 years earlier. And you can look at that in relationship to the court of Versailles and Louis the Sun King, Louis xiv. And the positions in ballet really showcase the calves. Right. And oftentimes we think of ballet more related to women, but it was really a men's dance first and foremost. And that whole culture of the courtier showing your leg and then bowing over it really emphasized the masculine body in a way that was a little bit hard, I think, for us to even fathom. And there were all sorts of stories about the lady of the house running off with the footmen. Footmen were often hired to be very tall and have a well turned calf. As you said, that was really what the ladies were looking for. So the other thing that the satirists were doing was making fun of the people wearing these crazy outfits. Yeah, Right. So they're surrounded by hairdressers and dressers, you know, like cinching their corsets and combing their hair and things like that. So it was really this performance of dressing different than the way that Brummells was, where people would flock to him and just watch him dress. This was more like the men were all doing it together. So there's all these dandy caricatures where it's these groups of men all getting dressed together, they're mincing through the park, they're fainting at the opera because their corsets are too tight. But what's cool about it, about those caricatures is that it's really like it's a communal activity. It's really different than the sort of aristocratic lord on high making fun of everybody under him in these later satires. It's really. They're clearly friends, Right. They're like all coming together to get dressed. Sort of like you would imagine. Like girls getting ready for prom.

[Cassie Zachary]

Exactly. Some of these dandy satires, there's like dozens of people in these rooms, right.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

They're walking in the park, right. It's this real like catwalk almost where they're showing off their new fashions and how they're wearing them. And I just think it's very. It's a sort of under told story of dandyism, this homosocial space where men got to be vulnerable with each other and care about their clothes and hang out and think about these like tactile material things that are the kinds of things that Flugel was talking about, really got lost for men in this shift from peacocks to penguins.

[Cassie Zachary]

Yeah.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

Is that they lost this sort of tactile language, a language of beauty. But you really see them exploring this part of themselves in those caricatures, which I just think is delightful.

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[Cassie Zachary]

Social to refresh your summer with TikTok. Well, you've also mentioned men wearing corsets a couple times now, and I do want to point out that at this time this was a real fact. Now, maybe the practice wasn't necessarily particularly widespread and a lot of times they're not necessarily called corsets per se in advertisements, but we have actual advertisements for them. A lot of times they're called bands, B A N D S. But it's essentially male shapewear.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

And even before that you can see in breeches that sometimes breeches laced up the back so you could get kind of a cinch. And some of them are quite high in the back and sometimes they have boning or extra kind of support there. And so they seem like you could really cinch them quite tight. So you could think about it the way that high waisted jeans work, like a little mini Spanx. So you don't necessarily have to have this X extra garment. And that's one of the things I think is really interesting in the way that tailoring helps to change. Maybe this is a little bit after Brummell, but one of the things I've been looking at is the way that tailors are adding padding between the exterior wool and the interior lining. So that includes shoulder pads but also a lot of chest padding and padding like all around the side body to give this really sculpted shape. But it's really different than women wearing corsets because it's invisible. You can't really point to it and say like, oh, you're so ridiculous in how you're shaping the body. It wasn't that men didn't shape the body, it's just that they did it in a way that was less visible. So it was seen as being more natural. Which I just think is so interesting in terms of the way that the adoption of the suit really changed the relationship between fashion and gender.

[Cassie Zachary]

This leads to a broader question. How did the era's concepts of gender play out in the practice of dandyism at this time?

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So one of the things that happens with the masculine adoption of suits is that there's a real shift in how men are talked about in relationship to fashion. This is something that Brett Shannon talks about in his book the Cut of His Coat. He looks at Victorian literature. He talks about the words that novelists are using about men in their clothing. And what's so interesting is the clothing itself is almost never mentioned. But the words that are mentioned are things like neat, clean. It's a renunciation. Right. Of dress. That a man is supposed to look perfect but also not care about his clothes at all. It's supposed to be just like effortless and accidental and natural. But the effort is the thing that's associated with dandyism and that's the thing that is seen as being effeminate or deviant.

[Cassie Zachary]

Yeah, because that switch, that code switching of fashion, being feminine, therefore frivolous, that flip has already been switched.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

Although one of the things that's interesting and how that plays out in this period is, and Brummell sits right on the cusp of this, that in the late 18th, early 19th century, these caricatures of dandies or fops, they are associated with the upper class, but also with the French. And that was really important. Given the tenuous relationship between England and France at this period. So because dandyism was associated with Frenchness, it was unmanly because it was foreign. It was suspicious, but it wasn't yet about sexual deviancy in the way that it developed over the course of the 19th century. And that was something that was different in terms of the satires that were adopted by American caricaturists, because there really wasn't a France to compare themselves with. So they. They found other ways of finding ways of making fun of dandyism.

[Cassie Zachary]

Well, foreignness isn't the only form of otherness that we often see in some of these satirical prints. There is this whole other complete offshoot of satirical prints featuring black dandies as well, and there are a few examples of them in the Superfine exhibition. Would you tell us a little bit about this? Because I happen to know that this is another offshoot of research that you're working on as well.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

Yeah. So I came across these caricatures in my own research on suits. And this is a little post Brummell. This is happening in the 1830s. And so there are these pretty racist cartoons that show. They're called Life in Philadelphia. These are the early ones by Edward Williams Clay, and they show free people in Philadelphia. So Philadelphia at this period had a large free black community. And he was depicting them as being. You used the word social climbers earlier. And that's essentially what he's accusing them of. Right. They're wearing these very fancy outfits. And then there's this dialogue that accompanies it. That's this very sort of crude, unrefined dialect. And it's the tension between these things that was the point of the satire, which is, you know, a sort of trope that other satires have been using for a long time, that they shouldn't be dressed so fancy because clearly they were very lower class. You can tell that because of their speech. So this is another one of the parts of this performance of self presentation that's so important is. Is how you sound. What I find interesting is when historians have looked at these prints, one of the problematic things they find in it is the fashions are they're overdressed, they're too fashionable. But I was like, wait a minute. Have you ever seen a fashion plate from the 1830s? This is one of those periods.

[Cassie Zachary]

They're unhinged. They're literally unhinged.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

Absolutely unhinged. I call it the Dr. Seuss period. Yeah, they just have the most ridiculous hats and the most ridiculous skirts and the hairstyles are insane. They're just. But the thing about them is that even for a fashion historian, I would say. Now, April, you tell me what you think. But even for a fashion historian, I would say that the 1830s is the least well known of all fashion time periods.

[Cassie Zachary]

Yeah. And that was one of the very interesting things that I thought we've talked about. Gentleman Jack, the television show which is based on the diaries of Ann Lister, is that was one of the very few depictions of the 1830s in terms of fashion that I have ever seen in media like video or television movies. Yeah, definitely. Least known. Completely wild. Some of the fashion magazines from these time periods, we're talking about the crazy hairstyles. They have these loops and braids. Some of the fashion advice columns say, take your bracelets, like, as in your forms of jewelry, and stack them as hair ornaments, and then push your hair up and.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

Oh, my gosh, I've never heard that.

[Cassie Zachary]

Yeah. Yeah.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

The only two things I can think of that are, like, movies that people would know about, besides the Gentleman Jack that you mentioned are there's a BBC movie of. I think it's Little Dorrit. And because it's the BBC, the clothes are impeccable. I think it came out in the 80s, maybe. And then there's a movie about Turner, and the early years take place in the 1830s. But other than that, there's just like, you know, we don't have a Jane Austen of the 1830s for. There to have been plays and movies and TV offshoots and things like that. So it's this very unknown period for both women's wear and for menswear. And even for me, you know, I taught fashion history at FIT for 10 years, and I still was very unfamiliar with that silhouette. But when I started looking into it and looking at contemporary fashion plates at the time, I was like, he's literally taking the fashion plates and dressing them on these people that he's looking at. Yeah. So in the Life in Philadelphia plates that Edward Williams Clay is doing, he's actually looking at fashion plates. And I even saw at an auction his scrapbooks were sold, and you can see he has fashion plates in them. So he was just copying them. And not only that, but he was literally copying exact satires from the English satirists. So we know he goes to England at the end of the 1820s. He's clearly looking at all of the cartooning world that's happening over there. And so he brings it back to America. But what's super interesting is he brings back two different tropes in cartooning, one of which is making fun of people who are overdressing, whether that's because they're foreign or they're middle class aping their betters or whatever. And then the other is this trope of depicting what to the English would be like savage Africans in the jungle. And they are. They're often drawn as naked, animalistic heathens. And so what Clay does is he blends these two tropes together. Together.

[Cassie Zachary]

And they meet at the point of fashion.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

That's right, they do. So that he combines them into these caricatures where it's these, like, fleshy bodies who are dressed in these very fashionable styles. And I just find that to be really interesting that it shows that under certain circumstances, we read the dress and the person as like a. You can judge a book by its cover. But then there are other times when people perceive a difference, a tension between the dress and the body and say, like, no, no, you should not be wearing that type of thing. There is a misalignment that I am reading in this system here. So I just think that is a very fascinating phenomenon and very related to the beginning of the minstrel show. Because so many of the early caricatures or early characters in the minstrel shows were black dandies.

[Cassie Zachary]

Yeah. And I don't know if people really realize how truly popular minstrel shows were at the time. They were widespread. They had Boy Scout troops putting on these shows. Children.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

I did not know that. Yeah. They were just really the. And they started off as kind of skits in a more vaudeville tradition. And then they were developed into longer plays that would run on their own. But in the early years, in the 1830s, it was just like, one character would come out and they were all musicals. They would play a song and do a dance and have a little kind of skit. But all those first characters, Zip Coon, My Long Tail, Blue Jim Crow, they were all dandies. And that was one of the reasons, I think, for their popularity. So the whole idea of dandyism in America, I think, was very much influenced by the minstrel tradition that it was easy to make fun of black men for being dandies because it was combining a race difference and a class difference together in a way that didn't exist in the whole discourse of dandyism in England.

[Cassie Zachary]

We are going to read a lot more about this in your upcoming book, which will be out next year.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

That's right.

[Cassie Zachary]

Yeah. And I do believe that they go into this in the Superfine exhibition catalog in more detail as well. So you can read about that now if you like. But one of the other things that I would like to point out to our listeners is that if some of you are scholars out there, Chloe, you have done something that is quite remarkable and very rarely done, I must say. You have amassed a sizable amount of your primary source resources on Bramble and you have either linked or listed them on your website. So you have done this so other people can continue to build upon your work. What kind of things might people find on your website if they're interested in terms of Brummell resources?

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

Yeah, great question. So this was something that I discovered as I was looking into Brummell of like how hard it was to prove anything. Right. It's one thing to talk on a podcast, but it's another if you're trying to write an article and you're looking to cite your sources. And even as I was going and reading some of these early books about Brumal, they would say all these crazy things and then never cite their source.

[Cassie Zachary]

Right.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

So I just was like, where? How do I get to the bottom of this? Where is the evidence? And so that was when I really started compiling this database of primary source material that was related to Brummell. And so we've talked about images, we've talked about memoirs, we've talked about manuscript material like the letters of his. So those are the kinds of things that. That I've put together. And I just think that we're really ready for new scholarship on menswear in particular. And we can't do that if we don't have the real story. And I would say that it's not that I think we should cancel Brummell because he was just imaginary. I actually think that the myth is really interesting, but that we need to differentiate between fact and fiction and talk about what is it about this Persona that people were so drawn to for 200 years? Yeah, that's a long time to be famous. And if you look at the menswear fashion blogs like Brummell is all over those. What is it about this person, this personality that still draws a particular kind of man in particular? And we could talk about female dandyism another time maybe. But in particular, I'm very interested in. In how he just becomes this touchpoint for. I think there's kind of an allowance, like it's okay to care about clothes as a man because there's this person that came before me and did it and became fashionable and famous.

[Cassie Zachary]

It's almost like a shorthand of sorts. Right, For a lasting cultural phenomenon of men who are interested in fashion.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

Yeah, absolutely. Again, it goes back to. I think that there are reasons to critique Flugel's idea of the great masculine renunciation, because men have always been creative in their dress, and there has always been people that push boundaries. But the suit won. That's the thing that's so crazy is this, like, plainness ultimately keeps winning over and over again. Why does that happen? What is the power that this conformity has over our culture? And what kind of loss? Again, I just am really fascinated by Flugel's interest in the psychological masculine self. How has that constrained men and masculine people who are interested in the sartorial side of themselves being colorful and beautiful, but also having the attitude that goes along with it. Right. Like wearing fingernail polish and wearing eyeliner and really just strutting your stuff kind of. There's a. A tactile part of life that I think people are really drawn to that is just not possible to explore in that the most constrained end of masculine fashion.

[Cassie Zachary]

Yeah. Chloe, thank you so much. I'm sure this will not be your last appearance on Dressed. Please do let us know, of course, when your book comes out. We'll give you a shout out. Maybe you can come back and chat about some other things that are going to be in your book that we did not discuss today. But reigning menswear expert. Thank you.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

Thanks so much for having me, April. It was great chatting with you, Chloe.

[April Callahan]

Thank you so much for joining us all this week for our conversation on the history of dandyism and one of its most associated personages, Beau Brummel. Dress listeners, some of you have already noted that we joined a new podcast network a couple months ago. Airwave. And, April, maybe we should share the kind of fun anecdote about how entrenched the legend of Beau Brummel remains in the popular imagination still to this day.

[Cassie Zachary]

Yeah, and this still cracks me up that this. This coincidence. We were in an online meeting with the head of the network, Ben, who was also a listener before we joined the network. And so this is pertinent to the story. He said to us, have you ever done an episode on Beau Brummel? I don't think that you have, because he's, like, listened to so many of the episodes. Of course he was right. But what he did not know that day is that I already had a meeting set up with Chloe later that afternoon to discuss these two Brummell episodes that we have aired this week. So, Ben, ask and you shall receive not one but two Beau Brummel episodes.

[April Callahan]

Yes, and as if if memory serves me correctly, he asked because he used to own. I don't think he does anymore, but he used to own some of Beau's personal artifacts, like one of his letters or something.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Cassie Zachary]

So this is very, very specific.

[April Callahan]

Okay, dress listeners, I think it does it for us this week. If you want to follow the social media content connected to this week's episodes, check out the hashtag dressed548 and dressed549. Until next time, we hope you have enjoyed our menswear content the last couple of weeks and hope you consider incorporating a little bit of dandyism, regardless of your gender, into your ensemble. Next time you get dressed.

[Cassie Zachary]

Please head over to Dressed Underscore podcast on Instagram or on Facebook to check out the visual content associated with each week's episodes.

[April Callahan]

Remember, we love hearing from you dressed listeners, so if you'd like to write to us, you can do [e-mail] DressedHistory.com is also our website where you can sign up for our monthly newsletter, our in person and tours and online fashion history courses. And there you can also check out whatever else we have up our finely tailored sleeves.

[Cassie Zachary]

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 our favorite fashion history titles.

[April Callahan]

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 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.

[Cassie Zachary]

Thank you as always for tuning in and more dressed coming your way soon. The History of Fashion is a production of Dressed Media.

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