Dandyism

by J. Barbey d'Aurevilly

What is a dandy? Carlyle said he was a man whose "existence consists in the wearing of clothes." Isak Dinesen worshipped the freedom of the aesthete as a special Satan. But even these definitions are not enough to contain the dazzling originalities of Lord Chesterfield, Oscar Wilde, George Sand, Max Beerbohm, Baudelaire, Jean Cocteau--all of them dandies. Jules Barbey D'Aurevilly's jewel-like writing on the sensibility of dandyism has never been equaled as the study of life lived as style. His Dandyism, with a new preface by Quentin Crisp, is now back in print in America after an absence of nearly a century. The implication for today's obsession with fashion and personality make this 1845 study of the cult of the self as timely and thoughtful as ever. In the spectacles of contemporary society, the body easily becomes a cultural text. Barbey d'Aurevilly looks behind the mask of English society in the Regency period to show how life can be lived as ironic performance. In his own magnific