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“One must commit acts of the highest treason only when dressed in the most resplendent finery.”
― Grant Morrison, Sebastian O

“Other than involving yourself with ungrateful vegetable matter, colour, vigour and fascination can be imparted into a small outdoor space by several other methods.

In the 18th century, the inclusion of a hermit on one's estate was regarded as the epitome of country house style. There is absolutely no reason why today's dandy should not avail himself of the same privilege. It's a straightforward enough matter to entice a hopelessly drunk vagrant back to your premises using the simple lure of an opened bottle of wine. Once there, dress him in a bed sheet, wreathe his head in foliage and invite him to take up residence in an old barrel with the promise of unlimited alcohol, tobacco and scraps from your table in return for a sterling display of relentless solitude. Such a move not only provides the disadvantaged with ideal employment opportunities, but also enhances your reputation for stylish romanticism. Watch your friends gape in wonderment at the picturesque spectacle as your hermit sporadically peers out the top of the barrel and matters a few enigmatic words of wisdom.”
― Vic Darkwood Gustav Temple, The Chap Almanac : An Esoterick Yearbook for the Decadent Gentleman

“the dandy can only play a part by setting himself up in opposition. He can only be sure of his own existence by finding it in the expression of othersâ€� faces. Other people are his mirror. A mirror that quickly becomes clouded, it is true, since human capacity for attention is limited. It must be ceaselessly stimulated, spurred on by provocation. The dandy, therefore, is always compelled to astonish. Singularity is his vocation, excess his way to perfection. Perpetually incomplete, always on the fringe of things, he compels others to create him, while denying their values. He plays at life because he is unable to live it. He plays at it until he dies, except for the moments when he is alone and without a mirror. For the dandy, to be alone is not to exist. The romantics talked so grandly about solitude only because it was their real horror, the one thing they could not bear.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel

“Dandyism […] is not only an ethos (on which much has been written since Baudelaire and Barbey) but also a technique. It is these two together which make a dandy, and it is obviously the latter which guarantees the former, as with all ascetic philosophies (of the Hindu type, for example) in which a physical form of behaviour acts as a route towards the performance of thought […]”
― Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion

“In this watercolor Gavarni portrays an individual whose father was an industrialist and whose older brother was a distinguished professor. From the looks of him, Hippolyte Beauvisage Thomire had a keen eye for fashion in casual clothing, however.
He represents the new generation of bourgeois consumers that emerged during the July Monarchy. He is the modern young man off the newly invented fashion plates and out of the cast of Balzac’s Human Comedy.

Charles Baudelaire, the great cultural critic of Louis Philippe’s reign in latter years, called the artist Gavarni “the poet of official dandysme." Dandysme, Baudelaire said (in his famous essay “De l’heroisme de la vie moderne� [The heroism of modern life], which appeared in his review of the Salon of 1846), was “a modern thing.� By this he meant that it was a way for bourgeois men to use their clothing as a costume in order to stand out from the respectable, black-coated crowd in an age when aristocratic codes were crumbling and democratic values had not yet fully replaced them.

The dandy was not Baudelaire’s “modern hero,â€� however. “The black suit and the frock coat not only have their political beauty as an expression of general equality,â€� he wrote, “but also their poetic beauty as an expression of the public mentality.â€� That is why Baudelaire worshiped ambitious rebels, men who disguised themselves by dressing like everyone else. “For the heroes of the Iliad cannot hold a candle to you, Vautrin, Rastignac, Birotteau [all three were major characters in Balzac’s novels] . . . who did not dare to confess to the public what you went through under the macabre dress coat that all of us wear, or to you Honore de Balzac, the strangest, most romantic, and most poetic among all the characters created by your imagination,â€� Baudelaire declared.”
― Robert J. Bezucha, The Art of the July Monarchy: France, 1830 to 1848