Philip Hoare
The
Dandy Espirit de Corps
Officer of the Guards to his servant: 'Let me have
the last boots which Hoby made me, not the Wellingtons nor
the iron-heeled ones but the last ones with copper heels; and
be sure to use the blacking which has marasquina in it and
oil of lavender…and see my regimental jacket is well
padded on the breast and well stuffed on the shoulders, and
put two handkerchiefs in my regimental jacket, one of cambric
and one of my Barcelonas and perfume them well…and my
gold snuff-box…and I'll wear the twenty-guinea gold
chain round my neck with the quizzing glass, and bring down
my silk nightgown and Turkish embroidered slippers…and I
must have a cambric chemise with the collar highly starched
for dressing time, one of those that look like winkers, and
my musical snuff-box for dinner and bring my light morocco
boots for dinner with soles as thin as a wafer'.
From The Hermit in London, 1819 1
In July 1927, Cecil Beaton photographed the Honourable Stephen
Tennant on the occasion of his twenty-first birthday. Posed in
his bedroom at his family's Westminster home, which Tennant had
papered in silver foil - an effect to be reprised forty years
later in Andy Warhol's Factory - the young aristocrat arrayed
himself before Beaton's lens, wearing a wasp-waisted pinstripe
suit, long-collared striped shirt, and silk tie with a jewelled
stick-pin.
The effect was of a particularly well-dressed man about town
with a good tailor - in Stephen's case, probably Anderson and
Shepherd of Savile Row. But then Tennant threw over his shoulders
what looked like a shiny mackintosh. It was, in fact, a leather
coat, copied from his older brother's aviator jacket, a style
sported by First World War flying aces and already invested,
therefore, with a certain romance. On the frail frame of this
Shelleyan aesthete, however, the garment took on a new
significance. As a tribute to a post-war age of avowed decadence,
Tennant had added a chincilla fur collar to the coat. Turned up
at the back, the exotic fur framed his gold-dusted and
marcelled-waved hair like a modern Renaissance ruff. The effect
was made altogether more striking by the patina of face powder
and slick of vaseline on his eyelids. It was as if someone had
taken a Burberry trench coat - developed for Army officers to cut
a dash in the mud and mire of the Western Front - and draped it
over a twentieth-century Dorian Gray.
This image, so wreathed in Jazz Age glamour, thus acquired a
subtext of martial subversion - underlined, for those who knew
it, by the fact that Stephen's partner of the time was the war
poet, Siegfried Sassoon, who had survived the trenches and war
neurosis to become literary editor of the left-wing Daily
Herald. Tellingly, Sassoon himself was a link with the
Decadence, through his friendship with Robbie Ross, Wilde's first
male lover and whose protest against the war - which Ronald
Firbank called 'that awful persecution' - was to paint his
Piccadilly rooms gold.2
The resonance of Tennant's image - its alien androgyny somehow
surreal in the environs of Smith Square - reached far beyond its
years. Three generations later, it would lead me to the manor
house where, in 1986, the reclusive aristocrat, now in his
eightieth year, languished in bed, having survived the incipient
tuberculosis of his youth. His long hair was henna'd and his
features as gaunt as Bill Brandt's portrait of Edith Sitwell. I
arrived with a copy of the Beaton photograph, and in the lowering
gloom of his bedroom, lit by one bare light bulb even as the
curtains were drawn against the weak afternoon light of a
Wiltshire autumn, Stephen almost squeaked with joy as he
instructed me to take it to the window, all the better to enjoy
its beauty.
Like Dorian's portrait, Stephen's photograph haunted him, as
it did me. It still speaks over the decades, invisibly describing
a leyline of dandyism and soldiery: an esoteric, non-genealogical
lineage of influence and attraction, a paradoxical tension
between the aesthetic and the martial, the fey and the drilled,
the frankly decadent and the patriotically utilitarian. Stephen's
customised aviator's coat sums up a century of dressing-up and
military appropriation, conflating Firbank and Wilde with Sassoon
and Wilfred Owen; as if, caught in the muddy vortex of Armageddon
which had finally put paid to ranks of glorious scarlet-coated
troops, these heirs of the fin-de-siecle sought to
recharge their uniforms with a deathly irony in a poetic
assumption of khaki, a doomed youth replacing romantic
consumption with a German bullet, the mauve opium poppy of
Chelsea becoming the blood-red poppy of Flanders.
Indeed, Owen's own uniform, with its exquisitely-knotted tie,
reflected the fact that as war broke out he was in France,
dallying with a poet of the Decadence, Laurent Taillharde, even
as the Repulic's officers marched off to the Front dressed as if
for a particularly glamorous ball, considering it 'chic to die in
white gloves'.3 It was,
perhaps, a genteel echo of the more uproarious scenes recorded by
Magnus Hirschfeld, the Berlin sexologist, whose index of
'sex-life in the Great War' would record that transvestites sent
to the trenches carried ballgowns in their backpacks.4
In the post-war years, the virulent violence of the recent
past was still working itself out, even on the generation of the
ironic, infantalist Bright Young Things. They may not have
endured the Somme, but their age suffered, collectively, from its
trauma. The mixed emotions of heroic patriotism were deeply uncut
by Owen's bitter inversion of the slogan, dulce et decorum est
pro patria mori, a message a new generation took fitfully to
its inconstant heart. It was a dynamic mirrored by the cracks in
the imperial façade; the looking-glass in which those
narcissists discerned their own image, and lamented the passing
of the age of the last dandy. Osbert Sitwell was to write of the
immediately pre-war period, 'As for suits, shirts, shoes, ties,
hats, London was acknowledged, throughout the world, by all
races, of all colours, to set the fashion for men. And these
years, 1913 and '14, were the last when there was a successor to
the long line of fops, macaronis, dandies, beaux, dudes, bucks,
blades, bloods, swells and mashers, who for so many centuries has
given life to the London world of pleasure. To these was added
the nut, or more jocularly, the k-nut…'
In a pre-echo of the conflict to come, the nut was
'personified by a young actor, Mr Basil Hallam', known in a
popular song as 'the Colonel of Nuts'. Dressed in 'grey tall-hat
and a morning-coat', Hallam 'gave a rather languid rendering of
this song…every night in The Passing Show', a revue
which ran throughout 1914, leading up to and into the war. 'It
was no unusual greeting for a young man, wearing a new suit, to
be told, "What a k-nut you look!"' noted Sitwell. 'The
nut must be thin, clean-shaven except for a small, cut moustache,
and have an air of conclave and fatigued elegance… On the
other hand, he had to dance with vigour and ease, in the new
style…' In that new world, the nut's accessory was 'the fast
open motor of those days…so modern and of its time, [which]
induced in the young man a sense of being heir of all the
ages…' But he was driving too fast. In Sitwell's memoirs,
which paint a portrait of pre-war decadence and orchidaceous
ballrooms echoing to the sound of 'nigger bands', this languid
figure was the war's first fashion victim: '…The nut died
fighting in the trenches of 1914, and Mr Basil Hallam, his
amiable exemplifier, was killed two years later, in August 1916'.5 The nut's literary
chronicler, the writer H.H. Munro, better known as 'Saki', was
another casualty, a volunteer officer blown up on the Western
Front.
Saki, whose own dandified young men made such pronouncements
as 'His socks compelled one's attention without losing one's
respect', was a direct influence on another figure of the 1920s.6 Even as Tennant was fixing his
clear blue eyes on Beaton's lens, the young actor and playwright,
Noel Coward, was exhibiting a certain military fetish. Arch
chronicler of the post-war generation and product of the London
suburbs, Coward himself had met Sassoon in Ross's golden rooms in
1918, shortly after his vaguely dishonourable discharge from the
Army (having got no further than the military hospital in
Camberwell after a nervous breakdown). Now he had become obsessed
with Stewart Forster, an officer in the Coldstream Guards and son
of a woman with a predeliction for young men - a scenario on
which Coward drew in his Freudian success de scandale of
toy boys and cocaine addiction, The Vortex. But it was
Forster's outfit which seemed to excite Coward. Reflecting that
'uniform was undoubtedly very becoming to an Englishman', he
fetishized the close-fitting scarlet tunic drawn in by belts and
straps, embellished with brass and chrome and leather so highly
polished as to resemble obsidian; accoutrements which marked out
an officer of the most aristocratic of regiments, costumed by
Pall Mall tailors and bootmakers rather than Woolwich
quartermasters and cobblers.7
This was dandyism informed by geography and architecture as
much as by the demands of a sergeant-major. The locus for
Coward's object of desire (and for all those who fancied 'a bit
of scarlet') was monumental London, largely a Victorian and
Edwardian construction of wide streets and parade grounds and
parks, overloomed by Italianate buildings of Portland stone and
Gothic terracotta, magnificent backdrops for this masculine
theatre.8 Their personal
finery both counterpointed and complimented the age; a decorative
last post, the soundtrack to an imperial Indian summer
perpetually overshadowed by war.
Yet even as the Empire faced its disintegration, there was the
attraction of other uniforms in rival empires. If the
relationship between the French and the English dandy was
predicated on a certain exclusive symbiosis, the potent appeal of
the Teutonic ought not to be underestimated. In Berlin, the
American artist Marsden Hartley was creating a
cubist/expressionist paean to his German officer lover. In his
diaries for 1914-15, Hartley rhapsodizes,
the Parisier Platz was packed jammed to the stoops and
windows with those huge cuirassers of the Kaiser's special
guard - all in white - white leather breeches skin tight -
high plain enamel boots - those gleaming blinding medieval
breast plates of silver and brass - making the eye go black
when the sun glanced like a spear as the bodies moved. There
were the inspiring helmets with the imperial eagle and the
white manes hanging down - there was six foot of youth under
all this garniture - everyone on a horse - and every horse
white - that is how I got it - and it went into an abstract
picture of soldiers riding into the sun, a fact to take place
not so long after - for all of these went out into the sun
and never came back.9
In his description, Hartley's vision becomes a kind of
futurist mirage, a homoerotic blur of memorial and ceremonial,
longing and loss. His 'Portrait of a German Officer' (1914), was
a posthumous eulogy to Karl von Freyburg, a young cavalry officer
who had recently been killed in action. Hartley's painting
included Freyburg's initials, his age (24) and his regiment
number (4) in the composition, along with the Iron Cross, German
flag, a calvary pennants; potent emblems of an Aryan aristocratic
appeal (which also extended to the half-Jewish Sassoon, whose
lover before Tennant was Prince Philipp of Hesse, nephew to the
Kaiser). Hartley - who would subsequently decamp for Cape Cod's
bohemian enclave of Provincetown - had objectified the appeal of
Teutonic militarism in a manner which augured the coming of the
Third Reich.
Meanwhile, London had reacted to modern war by inventing a
new, industrial-age dandy; characterised, in an eruption of
neo-fascistic fashion, in the persona of Noel Pemberton Billing:
an Edwardian Lothario, inventor of the sea-plane, and a man who
had a ledge of flesh inserted in his cheek in order to keep his
monocle in place. Like the pre-war 'nut', this dandy autofact's
accessory was the car: Billing drove a lemon yellow Rolls Royce
and other, futuristic motors of his own invention; commentators
noted that he dressed in 'unusual clothes', especially long
collared shirts worn 'without the usual accompaniment of a
necktie'.10 Billing's
appearance was an essential aspect of his conspiratorial 'Black
Book' campaign, which alleged that no less than 47,000 members of
the British establishment - from the army to the royal family -
were sexual perverts in thrall to the cult of Wilde, led by the
lesbian Salome dancer, Maud Allan (herself a potent figure of
female dandyism in the tradition of Sarah Bernhardt and Loie
Fuller).
These decadents were, Billing claimed, being blackmailed by
the German Secret Service in the person of a Bavarian prince
(perhaps a relative of Hartley's or Sassoon's inamorata)
who kept their names in the eponymous black book, locked away in
a secret cabinet. Billing's allegation was assisted by modern
images of German 'blond beast urnings' - a kind of transgenic
cross between Nietzchean supermen and a Piccadilly rent boys -
ready to seduce brave English officers.11
Having won the libel case which Maud Allan brought against
him, Billing sent his Society of Vigilantes into the East End,
inaugurating the first British fascist riot in Whitecross Street,
where the stresses of its multi-cultural population created a
natural constituency for the extreme right, as Billing's
political heir, Oswald Mosley, would demonstrate twenty years
later.
The unreal between-the-wars period of 'peace' prompted a new,
politically-aligned dandyism. While Mosley, a dashing aristocrat
and cuckold (his wife was the achingly beautiful Aryan goddess,
Diana Mitford, pledged, like her sister Unity, to the fascist
cause), paraded his British Union of Fascist 'troops' in
neo-military black polo necks, trousers and leather belts as a
tribute to their Teutonic brethren across the North Sea, the
'Pylon Boys' generation of Spender, Isherwood and Auden, struck
an opposing martial pose during the Spanish Civil War, sporting
berets which, depending on which side of the head they were
turned down, displayed one's political allegiances. But the
tweedy, vaguely rustic look of the left - for all its heroic
constructivist gestures towards Mayokosky and the revolutionary
comrades of the USSR - could not compete with the deadly dandyism
of the Nazis. It was, in a way, Hitler's great secret weapon: an
insiduous, dangerous appeal which took military homoeroticism to
its logical conclusion.
In the flickering torchlight of the Nuremberg rallies, Himmler
led his black-clad SS, their silver Death's Head badges a kind of
dandified memento mori, almost archly ironic and complicit
in their dark genocidal ornament; while the endomorphic commander
of the Luftwaffe, Herman Goering, was so fond of Ruritanian
uniforms of his own invention that his fondness for sky blue and
silver braid resembled nothing so much as some fantastical hussar
out of Ludwig II's most perfervid imaginings - or perhaps a
particularly obese Beatle circa Sergeant Pepper. Goering
amply outdressed his leader (whom Coward's later friend, Jeffrey
Amherst - also an officer in the Coldstream Guards - described to
me with evident distaste for Hitler's declasse style as
looking like a taxi driver in his cheap black leather coat). The
Air Marshall posed in colour cine film on his Furher's
Berchtesgarten terrace, clad in brilliant white tunic and
flapping trousers. But at the Gotterdammerung, when the
young Nazi wolves dangled from lamp posts on the same streets on
which Marsden Hartley had watched their fathers parade, Goering
was arrested for trial at Nuremburg. He was found to be wearing
nail varnish. On being strip-searched, it was discovered that his
toenails were lacquered, too.
It would be thirty years before the world dared to
acknowledged the erotic appeal of the Nazi uniform, in The
Damned, a film made by an Italian dandy and scion of an
aristocratic family. Luchino Visconti, born in 1906, the same
year as Stephen Tennant, was fascinated by the politics of
uniform and power from an early age. As a youth, the young
Luchino, Count di Modrone, was photographed in a foppish cadet's
uniform which both referenced the Futurists (embodied in Britain,
on one hand, by Noel Pemberton Billing, and on the other by the
centre-parted Wyndham Lewis, author of Blast, a
martially-propagated Vorticist samizdat) and the fascism
with which they both flirted.
¤ ¤ ¤
In the Second World War, English dandies reacted to conflict
in an altogether more diffident manner. Unconstrained by the
life-denying requirements of totalitarianism, often flippantly
apolitical or languidly anti-fascist (in the camp manner of a
figure such as Brian Howard, model for Waugh's 'Anthony Blanche'
in Brideshead Revisited, and a man once thrown out of the
Ritz Bar in London for spreading subversion among American
officers), theirs was a much more fey performance, full of wit
and narcissistic camp. Hardy Amies, later the Queen's dressmaker,
was then serving as an Intelligence officer in Brussels and
brought 'his popinjay taste into the militia [by insisting] on
cutting his own uniform using Loden rather than khaki - "so
much chic-er, that green rather than beige, don't you
agree?"'12 His friend
and rival, Neil 'Bunny' Roger - who would later drive round
London in a baroque-encrusted black cab - went into battle with a
copy of Vogue in his backpack, a faint echo of
Hirschfeld's trench transvestites.
Later in the Forties, the likes of Amies, Roger, Cecil Beaton
and Richard Buckle, the ballet critic and himself a former Scots
Guard, adopted a new vogue current among young officers. Looking
back to a more leisured era - a purposefully extreme contrast to
a socially-levelled wartime world (in which their other ranks
would frequent Soho pubs as pick-up points), the New Edwardians,
as they became known, evoked the same golden age in which
Tennant, Beaton and Visconti had grown up, the era of the last
dandies, of Saki and of Sitwell's eloquent memoirs (which would
themselves appear in 1948). Where the Waffen SS wore silver
skulls on their lapels, they sported coats with black velvet
collars - originally a macabre tribute to the aristocrat victims
of the guillotine during the French Revolution (and thus a
kinship with the avant garde incroyables and marveilleuses
dandies of the Directoire). With their narrow calvary twill
trousers, and - the real mark of a bounder - suede shoes, theirs
was a statement against the utilitarian restrictions of wartime,
its utility suits and ubiquitous khaki. It was the same
subversive gesture evinced by Christian Dior's New Look, an
almost decadent refutation of a rationed age. Indeed, one friend
of Dior, a well-dressed officer, would later claim that it was
his own greatcoat, cut full in the skirt to his specifications,
which actually inspired the designer's famous fashion statement.
Ever since the evolution of the dandy in the nineteenth
century, Europe, and particularly France, had looked to England
for its tailoring. In an industrial age, the effort and elegance
of hand-made clothes militated against mass production; and the
finest expression of dandyism was to be found in the precision
tailoring of military uniforms, which required stitching as
regulated as paradeground drill, patterns as sharp as their
officer's swords. The great appeal of the Guards and Household
Cavalry to the dandy was that such regiments not only allowed
obsession with personal appearance, they actually demanded
them. Their anachronistic tunics, covered in gilt buttons and
gold braid, their patent leather thigh-high boots and white
buckskin breeches, the almost sado-masochistic straps around
chests, waists and chins bespoke a perennial, imperial hauteur in
which the dandy officer could revel. It was, in its way, both a
threnody for a passing empire, and a tailored sigh of regret for
the age of rank and privilege.
Osbert Sitwell, who joined the Brigade of Guards in the First
World War, described in detail the fitting of his tunic of
scarlet Melton cloth, the all-important 'smoothness of shoulders
and waist', and accoutrements requiring 'esoteric' perfection.13 Such display was a hangover of a
time when the corseted Lord Cardigan had lead the Charge of the
Light Brigade, and Lord Raglan had referred to the red-breech'd
Royal Horse Artillery as his 'cherry bums'; an age in which the
last truly dandy war, the Crimean, managed to dub no less than
three items of apparel: the Balaclava helmet, the Raglan sleeve
and of course, Cardigan's woolly legacy (themselves echoes of an
earlier general's contribution to the wardrobe: the Wellington
boot). In an ornamental reflection of the chivalric past, when
ornate armour itself expressed an offensive/defensive dandyism,
modern military couture was reduced to gilt emblems and the names
of knitted garments, as if the hard shell of war had been
undermined by that feminine attachment to style.
In an exponential correlation to the decline of Britain as a
world power, its remaining symbols on the shoulders and chests of
those royal regiments were conversely more charged with meaning
than ever before. The other ranks of the Guards regiments also
sported such extravagant and avowedly sexualised advertisments of
their manhood, appealing to themselves, and to others. In the
1920s, Charles Dalmon, a decadent relic of the 1890s and Pimlico
neighbour of Coward's, had declared, 'My dear, my ambition
is to be crushed to death between the thighs of a
guardsman!', thereby conflating constraint, sex, death and
uniform.14 Now, in the
mid-twentieth century, through Soho pubs and the less frequented
byways of Hyde Park, a stylistic baton was passed from the New
Edwardians of Pall Mall and Belgravia, back to the East End and
South London, where the fashion was street-abbreviated and
mediated as the Teddy Boys, an urban battalion armed with
switchknives instead of sabres, and with razor blades hidden in
those black velvet collars.15
A wartime photograph of Beaton and Buckle's friend (and lover
of the Russian spy, Guy Burgess), James Pope-Hennessy, displays
this notable evolution: the nascent quiff, the marriage of
military uniform and dandified tailoring; the sense of a
stylistic breakpoint in the modern world, a change mediated by
war and commodified and emblemised by the dandy. If the figure of
the dandy is an eternal tabala rasa, blank and laconic
(from Beau Brummell via Andy Warhol to David Beckham, whose role
as England captain is the nearest we have to a martial hero),
then he is also a mirror held up to our own values, a
fashion-plate freeze-framing a particular moment in time,
reflecting our own obsessions, desires, and aspirations.
¤ ¤ ¤
During the 'Phoney War' of 1939-40, the young Chelsea art
student, would-be actor, and future Visconti star, Dirk Bogarde,
met Lt Anthony Forwood, an officer of the Royal Artillery, 'tall,
blond, in full regalia', and the man who would be his lifelong
companion. Bogarde described Forwood as 'booted, breeched,
tunc'd, buttons and badges glittering brightly in the meagre
light of the dim auditorium, his hair shining like a halo.'16 It was the same kind of vision,
faintly perverse, which Bogarde would bring to his own roles in The
Damned and John Schlesinger's The Night Porter. As if
in augury of those appearances, Bogarde himself was photographed
in 1940 wearing his father's First World War calvary tunic,
breeches and boots, a fancy-dress, war poet pose for the
mid-century which both reflected his theatrical ambitions and his
then obsession with the war in which his father had been
shell-shocked. Later, as Bogarde became a star, Forwood would
snap him in bombed-out Berlin with the Brandenburg Gate as a
theatrical backdrop, his hair quiffed, clad in a martial-looking
pea jacket as an endorsement of Bogarde's wartime status as dandy
officer-aesthete, and an acknowledgement of his post-war role as
a posh, well-spoken version of the Teddy Boy, a teen idol for a
new generation.
In the early 1960s, when the collective memory of two world
wars had acquired an ironic edge, Bogarde's portrayal of a First
World War officer in Joseph Losey's King and Country
(1963) saw the actor picking his way through the trenches in the
film's opening scenes, fastidiously polished and tailored in
contrast to the death and destruction about him. Throughout the
film Bogarde maintains what would become his key trait: a sense
of icy distance that overlies a deep empathy combined with ennui;
the repressed emotion of his own stiff upper lip, an Englishness
undercut by his European background, a rictus of handsomeness and
suavity betrayed by a veiled sexuality and a sense of implied
threat. It is the classic, remote pose of a dandy, but now, in a
Freudian age, fatally invested with neurosis. It is a paradox in
which his uniform plays an almost sentient part - a
transchronological guise of power and sex, psychological turmoil
and narcissism in which Bogarde becomes a kind of talismanic
connexion: from heterosexual focus of bobby-soxers to the very
embodiment of decadent, homoerotic transgression; from Doctor
in the House to Death in Venice.
While the young Dirk was parading about in his father's
uniform, another young writer was frequenting the alcoholic nexus
of Soho's Bohemia. Julian Maclaren-Ross had spent his teens on
the Riviera. His father had known Wilde, an influence his son
inherited, assuming 'a self-consciously anachronistic costume', a
mixture of Scott Fitzgerald, Ronald Firbank, and a Hollywood
gangster. 'Usually sporting an orchid or carnation in his
buttonhole, he swanned around in a white mess-jacket, worn in
combination with a matching crepe-de-chine shirt, linen trousers
and, if he was feeling really extravagant, two-tone shoes and a
crimson sash in lieu of a belt. His debonair outfit was
embellished by a cane and a silver snuff-box, as well as a long
cigarette-holder, through which he smoked pack after pack of
gold-tipped Turkish cigarettes'. He had become, in the
words of one Sohoite, 'a dangerous dandy…an army of one,
with a regimental tradition that went back to Beau Brummell'.17
Even when Maclaren-Ross was reduced to doing gardening work in
the suburbs of Littlehampton, he resoluted remained clad in his
cream suits as he mowed front lawns, to an audience of wondering
crowds. In Soho, Maclaren-Ross patrolled the streets in his
'teddy-bear coat' - a voluminously long camel overcoat, an update
of Tennant's aviator mac - his eyes narcissistically concealed by
mirror shades; a Teddy Boy Dorian Gray. At a time when his peers
were being pressed into uniform, his bohemianism was a direct
riposte to authoritarian regulation. Then came his call-up
papers; and when his fellow conscripts, a farting, blaspheming
bunch, caught sight of Julian's coat hung over his bed, they
huddled in a group around it, telling their 'mates to take a
butcher's' and speculating on 'what kind of pansy would have the
neck to go round in such a get-up'.18
War had blurred the interface of effeminacy and manliness. Now
Noel Coward finally got his chance to wear a uniform, playing his
friend and naval hero, Louis Mountbatten, in the propagandic In
Which We Serve (1942), a film whose dialogue is seeming taken
straight from the balcony scene in Private Lives, as
'Captain Kinross' and a junior officer watch a dramatic sunset
from the ship's bridge:
'Someone sent me a calendar like that last Christmas, sir'
'Did it have a squadron of Dorniers in the upper
right-hand corner?'
No, sir'
'That's where Art parts company with Reality'
'I believe you're right, sir. Cigarette?'
Yet Coward's portrayal in the film was so convincing that,
when visiting a hospital, he was actually taken for a commanding
officer by wounded sailors. At the same time, he was upbraided by
British tabloids for strolling about in a naval-like blazer
which, it seemed to them, appeared to be a kind of adoptive of
military dress by one remove, in much the same manner as Bogarde.
Meanwhile, Coward's great confidante, Marlene Dietrich - the very
essence of Weimar chic in Der Blaue Angel, and perhaps the
mid-century's most notable female dandy - rejected her home city
of Berlin and its Nazism for the tight-fitting uniform of a US
army officer, its bodice-embracing tailoring gloriously
contrasting with her von Sternberg halo of blonde hair.
The Second World War had evolved new ways in which a dandy
could display himself in wartime, whatever his class. Quentin
Crisp mimicked Dietrich and the other screen queens whom the
servicemen idolized and whom he in turn serviced. His was an
ambivalent mimesis, a conflation of the masculine and feminine
which reached back to Tennant and perhaps even Swinburne:
nipped-waisted suits - often women's tailored jackets - henna'd
and combed-out hair, nail varnish and sandals or bare feet.
Crisp's was a visible act of subversion, an extreme reaction to
war. Specifically, his was the feminine dandy interface with the
new American uniforms which appeared on British streets:
over-sexed, over-dressed, and over here. Where the native
servicemen had to make do with rough, itchy khaki, their allies
were clothed in the glamour of well-cut and well-filled uniforms
which all but came with the glow of Hollywood about them.
A more aristocratic exemplar of the transgenerational link
between the fin-de-siecle dandy officers of the Great
War's Armageddon, the age of the Holocaust and the era of the
Atom Bomb was provided by the colourful figure of Bobbie Shaw,
ne'er-do-well son of the politician Nancy Astor, who had served
as a calvary officer, only to be forced to leave his regiment
after a homosexual act with a fellow officer, and was later
sentenced to gaol in Wormwood Scrubs for importuning a guardsman.
Shaw would spend the Second World War waiting and cleaning tables
in a service canteen in St Martin's-in-the-Fields, quipping to a
friend, 'In the First World War I was an officer in the Horse
Guards, riding down Whitehall on a charger. The second world war
I'm a charlady'.19 By 1960,
he presented a resonant figure to the young James Fox, author of White
Mischief, who met him at tea with his mother, Nancy Astor, in
Eaton Square:
Podgy and creased-looking, he was dressed in
a sub-Teddy-boy mix: a long jacket, thick crepe suede shoes,
narrow trousers, his hair slicked back and dyed jet-back, his
fingers covered in rings, a Cartier watch on his wrist. He
smoked Woodbines, the cheapest cigarette you could obtain,
which he kept in a Faberge cigarette case. He made everybody
laugh a great deal…and was startingly rude to his
mother, able to say, apparently with impunity, in what
sounded like a cockney accent, 'Oh mother do shut up.'
He had been an officer in the Blues - the Royal Horse Guards
- and a famous steeplechase rider.20
In the years immediately after the Second World War, when
National Service called up cosh boys and would-be dandies alike,
they responded by sculpting their hair into quiffs as their short
back and sides had grown out, an image of the post-war, pop
cultural age incarnate. Now, with a new conscription levied - at
least across the Atlantic - and the Vietnam War underway,
militaria was once more ironically revisited: from the mods'
parkas to the hippies' adoption of army surplus - a direct result
of military overproduction during the mid-century's wars, but
also, via Carnaby Street's mania for guardsmen's coats, a new
subversion of the now rapidly deconstructing Empire, and of the
fanciful appeal of ceremonial uniform.
This proto-post-modern take teased out a number of tantalizing
notions. It drew on a flamboyance which was made allowable by the
masculinity of battle and war yet was essentially undermined by
the kind of Edwardian gold braid and silver lace which would not
have looked out of place on a chorus girl. It also drew attention
to the fact that military dandyism was fantastically
anachronistic (yet timeless at the same time); and that it not
only expressed imperial power, but was deeply predicated on
class. Indeed, the military uniform, with its ranks and badges,
was the most extreme, visible paradigm of the British class
system: another mirror, as exquisitely reflective and restrictive
as those buttons, belts and boots, held up to Britain's
hierachies, even as the hurled paves of Paris in '68
carried a violent protest against every kind of class structure.
Perhaps this is the key to the appeal of militaria to the
dandy. The military uniform, and its dandified appropriation,
referenced a kind of fashion fundamentalism, built on bi-polar
love and hate, attraction and repulsion, master and servant. The
uniform not only underlines all those structures, but by
subverting it, you subvert them, too. It was a lesson well
learned. If clothes create the first impression, then the very
image of Britannia itself (tellingly, a mannish woman in military
drag) continued to be the front which Englishness presented to
the world - from John Entwhistle's Union Jack jacket to Jordan as
Britannia in Derek Jarman's Jubilee, to Cool Britannia,
when everyone from Morrissey to Oasis draped themselves in the
martial symbol of the Union flag.
The truly post-modern age would deconstruct the dandy,
spooling nostalgically backwards even as it fast-forwarded to the
future, even as the century accelerated towards its end. In the
Seventies, the 1940s revivalists of Essex's Canvey Island danced
in GI uniforms to Glen Miller, while glam rock's most exquisite
expression, in the shape of Roxy Music, became, in Michael
Bracewell/Brian Eno's metaphor, time-travellers moving through a
compendium of style, culminating, in 1975, with Anthony Price's
GI uniforms, another stratum of military glamour as Ferry's
tucked-in tie and flat-fronted ducks asserted high chic and a
certain self-referential pop art camp; not least in the
similarly-uniformed backing singers, Seventies versions of the
wartime Dietrich or the Andrews Sisters.
As the decade tipped into a sense of social unease -
approaching its own apocalypse of three-day weeks, power cuts and
general industrial collapse - punk's army surplus and Nazi chic
redressed dandyism as eschatology. The Bowie and Roxy-influenced
Bromley Contingent picked up where Dicky Buckle and Dirk Bogarde
left off, reseeding London's outer suburbs with a S&M riff on
twentieth-century militarism at its most egregious, subverted and
employed in a deliberately offensive manner via Bob Fosse's Cabaret,
The Night Porter, and The Damned. If the hippies of
Carnaby Street in their Guardsmen's tunics had been all about
peace and love, then Siouxsie Sioux (a female dandy in the fin-de-siecle
tradition) and her cohorts were all about hate and war.
In the early Eighties, the Goths and the New Romantics, also
delved in the martial dressing-up box and came up with their own
fantasy versions - not least in the pseudo-uniforms of designers
such as Willy Brown's shop in Shoreditch, Modern Classics (which
decked out Spandau Ballet in army khaki) and Covent Garden's PX,
favoured by Steve Strange and other habituees of the Blitz and Le
Kilt - clubs which themselves seemed to reference a martial
fantasy. It was a sensibilty which had a strange apogee in
post-communist Mittel Europe, where, after the Velvet
Revolution, Vaclav Havel's sentries at Prague Castle wore
uniforms designed by the same costumier who had worked on Amadeus,
filmed by Milos Forman in the Czech capital.
England's post-industrial response to such fantasy was the pop
cultural fatigues of Manchester's A Certain Ratio, who took to
the stage dressed as a regimental amalgam of Rommel's Afrika
Korps and Montgomery's Desert Rats, complete with fake tans,
regulation short-back-and-sides, and baggy shorts acquired from
Laurence Corner. Together with their Factory Records label mates,
Joy Division (named after the prostitute facilities provided in
Nazi concentration camps) they sent out a new generation clad in
army surplus trenchcoats, conflating military chic with a
prophylactic against Manchunian rain (itself a connexion with the
clothing industry, as the artist Linder Sterling notes: it was
the North-West's damp climate which made its satannic mills so
suitable for the spinning and weaving of cotton.)
In the early twentieth-first century, our own reaction to war
is both less certain and more mediated. Hedi Lemane's military
tailoring for Dior Homme, in which the designer obsessively
sources heavyweight fabrics to replicate the look of Napoleonic
uniforms, is its own way the same gesture as the New Edwardians
and the gentleman-officer who claimed to have launched Dior's New
Look.
Philip Hoare is the author of Serious Pleasures: The Life
of Stephen Tennant (1990); Noel Coward: A Biography
(1995); Oscar Wilde's Last Stand (1997); and Spike
Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital (2001).
SOURCE NOTES
- Quoted Colin McDowell, The Literary Companion to
Fashion, Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 1995
- Osbert Sitwell, introduction, Ronald Firbank Five
Novels, Duckworth, London, 1949
- BBC 1 The Great War, television documentary series
- See Magnus Hirschfeld (ed) The Sexual History of the
World War, Panurge Press, New York, 1934
- Osbert Sitwell Great Morning Macmillan 1948, 232
- McDowell, op cit, 114, quoting from Saki, Ministers
of Grace
- Noel Coward Present Indicative, Heinemann, London,
1937, 127
- Michael Davidson The World, the Flesh and Myself,
Gay Men's Press, London 1983, 134; see also Philip Hoare Wilde's
Last Stand, Duckworth, London 1997, 29
- Marsden Hartley Somehow a Past: The Autobiography of
Marsden Hartley, (ed Susan Elizabeth Ryan), MIT
Press, Massachusetts, 1997, 90
- Wilde's Last Stand, op cit., 51, quoting from
Rupert Croft-Cooke, Bosie: The Story of Lord Alfred
Douglas, his friends and enemies, W.H. Allen, London,
1989, 285
- ibid., 56, quoting from Arnold White, 'Efficiency and
Vice', The Imperialist, October 1917
- Hardy Amies obit, Jane Mulvagh, The Independent, 6
March 2003
- Sitwell, op cit., 11
- Davidson, op cit., 134
- The New Edwardians are discussed in Nils Stevenson and
Ray Stevenson, Vacant: A Diary of the Punk Years
1976-79, Thames & Hudson, London, 1999, 11
- Dirk Bogarde A Postillion Struck by Lightning,
Chatto & Windus, London, 1977, 231
- Paul Willetts Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia: The
Bizarre Life of Julian Maclaren-Ross, Dewi Lewis,
Stockport, 2003, 36-7
- ibid., 88
- James Fox The Langhorne Sisters, Granta, London
1998, 515
- ibid., 19
www.PhilipHoare.co.uk