Dear Editor,
This practice, known as Black dandyism, has roots in the post-Emancipation period, gaining popularity during the Harlem Renaissance. Indeed, one of slavery’s first acts of debasement was to strip the enslaved of their own clothes, and dress them in standard-issue clothing. This intentional action by the enslavers was a conduit of dehumanization but of course this was met with opposition in rather subtle ways.
The modification of these standard issue clothing was seen as a way by the marginalized and often voiceless to reclaim their voices and identity. Dandyism is oppositional and a act of defiance. This calculated action by slave owners was also done to break the spirit of those who were enslaved. Of course, all these efforts were futile. In fact, dandyism has become a reference point of resistance and black pride.
The Origins of Black Dandyism
The preeminent early dandy is Beau Brummell, the Regency-era (1795 to 1837) white Englishman who dressed so well that he managed to influence the British monarchy. In its early stages, Black dandyism served as a form of assimilation. Former slaves and Black servants used their finely tailored clothes to mirror the dress of high-society European whites. For Black men specifically, the meaning of these garments takes on a much more loaded message, as they used dandyism to assert what had long been denied to them: individuality and freedom.
A dandy is a flamboyantly dressed male figure who is concerned not only with looking good but with making a statement about his identity and individuality. Black dandyism is a defiant declaration against confinement, a celebration of black identity, and a movement based around resistance, pride and history.
Enslaved Africans, writes Monica L Miller in Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (2009) “arrived in America physically and metaphorically naked” upon which the fashion of the whites was imposed. Dandyism was a critical response to this, and was born out of a desire to self-define and envisage new social and political possibilities in a context where the very concept of “blackness” was created by non-black oppressors.
The Caribbean Connection
The Caribbean served as a crucial geographic and cultural crossroads in the development of Black dandyism. Julius Soubise himself was Afro-Caribbean, representing how the style traveled through colonial networks. Islands like Jamaica, Barbados, and Haiti became important sites where European fashion conventions met African aesthetic traditions.
Julius Soubise was perhaps the world’s first and most well-known Black dandy, as noted by scholar Monica Miller. The companion of the Duchess of Queensbury, Soubise was a popular enslaved Afro-Caribbean man known for entertaining, flirting, sporting, and dressing up.
Fashion As A Conduit of Resistance
Fashion has always had a political undertone. In arriving at a modern black identity and reclaiming one’s voice against lynchings, riots and persistent inequity, dressing up again played a vital role. In 1917, around 10,000 African Americans took part in the Silent Protest Parade down New York’s Fifth Avenue, the men in black tailored suits, the women and children dressed in white.
The suit, explains Miller, is “a historical throughline” in the exhibition, which includes everything “from livery garments… to tailcoats and different versions of it… to even track suiting”. One of the most dandified examples is the zoot suit, which debuted in Harlem’s dance halls in the 1930s before spreading across the country. Donned by performers such as Dizzy Gillespie and Cab Calloway, as well as the activist Malcolm X, it featured oversized shoulder pads, wide lapels and ballooning trousers cuffed at the ankle, and was often accessorized with a pocket watch on a long chain and a brimmed hat. Iké Udé’s statement is very much instructive in a discourse surrounding black dandyism.
Whereas the self can be devoured by public scrutiny, it can be saved by private self-objectification – Iké Udé. In this statement, the Nigerian born American photographer explores the duality of self-perception. He suggests that the constant scrutiny and judgment from the outside world can be harmful to one’s self-image, likely leading to the self being “devoured.” On the other hand, Iké Udé also posits that by engaging in private self-objectification, one can find a way to reclaim and potentially even strengthen one’s sense of self. Black dandyism has a strong historical significance for descendants of those who were enslaved given it serve as a reference point for resistance, as well as asserting one’s humanity and serving as an agency regarding the styling of self.
In the words of Monica Miller, when the dandy is Black, we get to see the dandy as a figure that really encapsulates a kind of matrix of identity, race, gender, class, sexuality and sometimes nation.
Yours truly,
Wayne Campbell
