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- ISSN: 2635-1609
- E-ISSN: 2635-1617
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Where did a dandy of the 1890s sleep at night?
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By
Oliver Bradbury1
- Source: Luxury Studies: The In Pursuit of Luxury Journal, Volume 3, Issue 1, Mar 2024, p. 35 - 55
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- 01 Dec 2023
- 20 Jan 2024
- 05 Jun 2024
Abstract
Although there is quite the promise of the proto-1890s dandy in James Tissot’s portrait of a reclining Colonel Frederick Burnaby (1842–85) of 1870, the particular qualities of the 1890s make it a very much self-contained decade and one that is often viewed as anomalous to the rigidly conformist other decades of Queen Victoria’s long reign. It introduced personal freedoms that defied strict convention and in this sense is anticipatory of those decades of comparable freedom and self-expression: the 1920s, then the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s. Crucial to the 1890s is a discovery of realism in literature and painting and therefore a decisive break with mid-Victorian sentimentality and the withdrawing-room potboiler. A decade evoked by the colours black and mauve, the aim of this article is to understand how rarefied dandies and aesthetes lived their lives during the 1890s in terms of architecture they inhabited; decoration within; how they dressed, ate and perfumed set to a backdrop of gas-lit nightlife, sumptuous Proustian interiors, evening dress canes, smoking jackets and gin palaces. The dandy by his very nature would be drawn to the most refined luxuries of the period, procuring or deriving the very best from the above lifestyle categories. Although the antecedents of today’s luxury consumption can be found in eighteenth-century retail, specialism in the above areas would have been much more developed by the 1890s with highly specialized retail outlets and also the immediate model for twentieth-century mega-hotels (as in by 1897 The Waldorf-Astoria, New York had 1000 rooms, large by even today’s standards). The dandy probably never had it so good post-the 1890s. This was their decade.
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