Olga Vainshtein: Visual games and the strategies of representation in dandyism
Senior researcher and Ph.D.
Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow
Recent critical books and publications about dandyism tend to concentrate on dandies as precursors of modernity, camp style, the heroes of urban consumerism and self-fashioning. The focus of this paper is the strategies of visualisation in the culture of European dandyism of the XIX century.
Visual games were part of social codes and fashion introduced by the British dandies. The Regency dandies were the first to invent the fundamental and essentially modern principle of the vestimentary behavior: "conspicuous inconspicuousness". It meant the imperative of dressing elegantly, yet unobtrusively, without attracting undesirable attention. The suggested discourse of representation worked to a considerable extent through rhetorical figures of intended blindness and selective insight, regulating one's visibility in appropriate contexts.
This principle also implied the blurring of class distinctions, since the new tactics erased the aristocratic pretensions to demonstrate wealth and noble origin through clothes. It did, nevertheless, signal an absolute dominance of the dandies, these self-proclaimed arbiters of elegance. The fashion leaders of the XIX century exercised their power by naming and categorizing, thus establishing the new order of things. They appropriated the privilege of culturally informed vision, reserving the right to recognize or ignore the existence of a certain person or inappropriate clothes.
Dandies' sartorial experiments did not immediately catch on during the Regency period, and yet they mark some important tendencies. For instance, dandies tried to make their coats as thin as possible to reach a perfect clinging fit. For this purpose they used a sharp fragment of broken glass, scraping the inside of the coat so as to make it almost semi-transparent. Some of them ended up making holes in their coats, thus achieving a rather modern look of conspicuous outrage, which could remind us, for instance, of the contemporary fashion for ragged or stonewashed jeans.
But in the context of the early XIX century culture these persistent efforts to refine the fabric point to the romantic preoccupation with the ideal of transparency, their permanent efforts to transcend the material things and play with the effects of translucent layers. The dandies’ passion for lorgnons, monocles and opera-glasses correlate to these visual games.
Images of transparent things - thin veils, glass, shadows and mirror-reflections - can be found practically in every important romantic literary text. The stories of E.T.A. Hoffman provided a rich variety of such motifs, as crystals, microscopes and magnifying lenses. People were fascinated with penetrating vision - the capacity to expand human vision beyond its natural confines. This specific interest in visual effects was further supported by the production of such mechanical toys, as stereoscopes, phantascopes, zootropes and kaleidoscopes, the installations of large dioramas in Paris and London. Disrobing, unmasking, laying bare was a fixation the dandified fashion shared with uncanny fantasies of romantic authors.
The dandies explored the possibilities offered by the new paradigm of vision, being profoundly mapped into a network of visual relations characteristic of urban modernity. The transgressive vision functioned as correlate to the transgressive fashionable behavior. The visual strategies of dandyism contained the germs of oppositional style both in clothes and in the models of social self-representation, a new valuation of visual experience.