Dandyism in the Age of Revolution

Style has political meaning--and, while you can get pegged as a Republican by wearing a tie, or a Democrat by sporting jeans and t-shirt that are too small, there was no time when carrying a political meaning on your sleeve was more fraught than during the French Revolution. The sans-culottes and the liberty caps are well-known markers of political affiliation, but in times of mass hysteria, any article of clothing could be scrutinized for evidence of one’s political affiliation. To wear a waistcoat with seventeen buttons, for example, could signal counterrevolution, referencing Louis XVII. Scholars have considered piecemeal the significance of clothing during the Revolution, and they have also observed that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries looked at menswear in two very different lights. The dominant paradigm of the eighteenth century was that clothing was formative; a gentleman wore gentleman’s clothes in order to learn to be a gentleman. By the nineteenth; clothing was expressive: the clothes you wore showed who you were (this was part of a larger ethos of openness and readability; it parallels the popularity of physiognomy, for example). Elizabeth Amann takes the French Revolution to be the pivot point, and shows that in France, England, and Spain, fancy dress became a way of expressing opposition to social and political upheaval. France is the centerpiece, not just because of the significance of the Revolution but because of the speed with which both political and clothing fashions shifted (and the deadly stakes of both). Dandyism in France represented a rejection of revolutionary extremism, while in England and Spain outrageous style became associated with stances further to the left (illustrating that fashion does not travel by the same channels as politics).