Friday Follies: Five Famous Dandies

Oscar Wilde

Here’s the first post of a new blog feature I'm trying out, Friday Follies, where I have a bit of fun riffing on subjects I’ve covered in past posts.

In my last post, I talked about Beau Brummell. He’s one of the most famous men of the Regency, and one of the things he’s famous for is being a dandy.

According to the 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire, who was himself a dandy, dandies have “no profession other than elegance . . . no other status but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons . . . The dandy must aspire to be sublime without interruption; he must live and sleep before a mirror.”

Pharrell Williams

I don’t know too many people who’d fit that description, but I scoured the Internet to find five famous dandies, past and present, not including Brummell (just because he's been covered so well already). The list I came up with includes three writers and two musicians. All these men have been described as dandies, either by historians or contemporary fashion sources such as GQ Magazine. 

Here they are: 

1. George Gordon, Lord Byron

2. Oscar Wilde

3. Noel Coward

4. Kanye West

5. Pharrell Williams

Can you think of anyone else who should be on the list?

And for a fun, here’s our Prince Regent, a right royal dandy, as portrayed by Hugh Laurie in the BBC comedy series Blackadder the Third:

Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons