Twitter Guy Who Made Male Fashion Boring Dandy
Hey, remember Billy Porter's incredible gown on the Oscars ruddy carpet? My goodness, he looked fantastic. And the article he published in Faddy to explain why he did information technology? Amazing icing on the delicious cake.
But maybe you even so take questions. Perhaps some of your questions are: "Goddammit, but why aren't men allowed to wear clothes like that? How did it get to be this way?"
Gather 'circular, children, and I'll tell y'all a horrible story about why men's way is Kind Of Similar That.
And so, back in Regency England—the menses spanning roughly 1795 to 1837—at that place was this guy chosen Beau Brummell, and he's the reason we can't take nice things.
The Brummell family, middle-form Londoners with loftier aspirations, were desperate to climb that adjacent rung on the social ladder. Their son, Beau, was born in 1778. As a boy, Beau was educated with gentlemen's sons at Eton and, past the age of sixteen when he left Oxford, was already starting to be something of a stylistic buoy for the immature men of his set. His influence only increased during his time in the army, where he befriended the prince—the future Rex George 4—presumably past means of his (very well-documented) scathing wit and irreverence, to put it charitably. In other words, he made a habitual operation of wry cruelty, lifting himself up by putting other people down, and a lot of people, even to this solar day, recall that kind of thing is funny.
Beau Brummell was a dandy. You've probably heard the term earlier, merely I would bet dollars to donuts that you think "dandy" ways bright colors, lots of lace and golden, and a big powdered wig. (That's a fop; they're different things.) A great was the Regency equivalent of that guy who in the '80s and '90s could be found apathetically lounging on doorjambs at parties, smoking a cigarette and doing an splendid and studied performance of cynical abandon. Brummel made an fine art of (every bit Robert Pattinson once so evocatively phrased it) pretentious dishevelment. In fact, it allegedly took him hours to exist then artfully and pretentiously disheveled.
Dandyism was concerned with concrete advent, a façade of leisure and privilege, and the "cult of the self"—and Beau Fucking Brummell was the male monarch of the dandies. He went so hard on his ain artful that he (with some assistance from abstract exterior forces like the Napoleonic Wars) managed to wrench men's fashion away from the bright, ornamented manner of xl or 50 years previous, and steer it into a conservative dreariness that is non unfamiliar to the modernistic eye.
And so men's style pretty much froze for the next 200 years. There were a few secondary influences, but Brummell was at the epicenter of the large tipping signal, at least for middle-to-upper-class Western masculinity. You know, the people who have functionally owned the world for more than three hundred years.
Swain Brummell was the Regency equivalent of the worst kind of Instagram influencer. He disdained and mocked his peers, insulted people when they asked for his stance, and generally went around negging everyone. And information technology totally worked.
He said, "To exist truly elegant one should non exist noticed." In that location is some benefit to this sort of mentality: After all, if there's a set of Rules that demand that anybody wearable a almost identical suit, so there is no possibility for error or embarrassment, as long equally you accommodate. That's worth amputating all opportunities for genuine cocky-expression, isn't it? Information technology's worth repressing everything special or unique about yourself, crushing it down and keeping it there so that you tin fit into the box, right?
Just no one really fits into the box. See, there is merely a very narrow demographic of people who get the luxury of being both elegant and unnoticed. Disabled people don't get that luxury. Fat people don't go it. People of color don't go it. Female person-presenting people, gender nonconforming people, and visibly queer people in general—they don't get it. They are either relegated to being perpetually on phase for the rest of the globe, constantly noticed, judged, and scrutinized, or they are forced to make do however they can, invisibly, because the rest of guild has decided it can't breadbasket the sight of them, and certainly doesn't want to requite them the opportunity to (gasp!) describe positive attention to themselves.
Toxic masculinity enacts passive, insidious violence: It is that tiny box that men are expected (and in some contexts required) to try to cram themselves into. If you fit into it really well, you might not even know the box is at that place.
Merely back to Beau "Bane of My Actual Life" Brummell. Beau Brummell, who was the first of ii hundred years of death for men'due south fashion, and the reason that many (straight, white, heterosexual) men today feel self-conscious about wearing color, or textures, or patterns, or anything else that makes them stand up out from the sea of dull blues and grays. Sure, there accept always been flares of counter-culture (well-nigh all of which relied on styles appropriated from marginalized communities), but the prevailing baseline of "appropriate and presentable" menswear—the things worn by senators, CEOs, lawyers—has not significantly changed in centuries.
Look at so many of those "10 tips for adding style to your wardrobe" articles for men today—the majority of the points are nonetheless trivial things similar, "Effort wearing colorful socks or pocket squares." Nosotros've gotten to a point where many men are so desperate to express their individuality and feel so paralyzed past the constraints of mainstream manner that the only style they can break out is in tiny, underhanded ways—socks, pocket squares, an unusual tie knot. No one says, "Have yous thought well-nigh a brocade waistcoat, earrings, or eyeliner? How nigh nail polish?" No one says, "What would make you experience like a one thousand thousand bucks? What do you wear in your wildest dreams?"
I wrote this big Twitter thread ranting well-nigh Beau "Actual Dickhead" Brummell terminal month. Needless to say, it fabricated a lot of people very angry, specifically many men who, deep in their toxic masculinity, aggressively rejected the idea that they might e'er want to think most sartorial self-expression. (Which ... that's fine. Really. You lot do yous, boys. The whole indicate is that in that location shouldn't exist any rules at all, and that yous should wear exactly whatever you want.) But I got and so many other responses—men who reached out to say that they cried to discover this new thing nearly themselves. Who said they longed to apparel differently but felt like they shouldn't. Who didn't know they were allowed to even want to dress beautifully.
Many men are aching just to be seen. To accept their physical embodiments acknowledged, and to be only a little scrap less anonymous. And even so the thought of that is terrifying, also. When you've been invisible your whole life, the idea of standing out hits you lot similar stage fright: Either you lot're unnoticed, or everyone notices yous. It'due south both paralyzing and, on some level, deeply seductive. (And, because they've never been seen, many men—sweet, well-meaning men!—don't understand why women don't similar to be catcalled. I accept had men say to me, "It would make my whole week to be complimented by a stranger. It'd make my whole year." They're dying of thirst in the desert, and they can't quite empathize why people drowning at ocean have annihilation to mutter about.)
But dorsum, again, to Beau "Why Didn't Anyone Slap Him?" Brummell, the author of all this misery, if indeed it has an writer that can be named. He claimed that he spent five hours a solar day dressing and that he had his shoes polished with champagne. His preferred style was so restrictively tight that one required the aid of a valet to actually get dressed. He also didn't swallow vegetables, and he collection himself and then far into debt for his Artfully Nonchalant fashions that he had to flee the country and ended upward dying of syphilis in an aviary, impoverished. So the story has a happy ending after all, at to the lowest degree for petty bitches like me.
2 hundred years afterwards, we are yet feeling the weight of his influence. But Billy Porter has been breaking my heart with his manner this final year, and he's not the only 1—the men on the ruby carpets recently are giving us something to actually look at besides another bearding tuxedo. Mayhap it'due south get-go to change, and Brummell's legacy is finally starting to fade. Perhaps we're starting to recollect that everyone likes feeling special, that apparel is 1 way to do that, that it'due south non unmanly to similar color and sparkle, that extravagant self-expression is not necessarily a bad thing. That having the desire to be ornamented, to be gorgeous, to exist seen, is not a bad thing.
I have so much promise for the future. Boys, y'all could exist beautiful if you wanted. Yous're allowed.
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