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The dilettante was the feckless aristocrat repackaged for a new era, but the dandy is harder to pin down. Although they came mostly from the middle classes, the original dandies were superlative snobs, even by British standards. Nevertheless, they rejected gross aristocratic finery for bourgeois simplicity, A Zen-like confluence of opposites, the dandy was both reactionary and revolutionary, simultaneously borrowing from and thwarting both aristocratic and bourgeois standards.

If the dilettante was a “professional” generalist, the dandy was a professional idler. Like the aristocrat, the dandy had no trade but was occupied solely with what for others was leisure. Yet the dandy did not accept the aristocrat’s slovenly amateurism. Brummell worked enormously hard, easily spending six hours a day dressing, then staying out far into the night to make his social rounds. But the dandy’s labor defied common sense notions of work. In fact, the dandy employed a denatured middle class work ethic, stripped of its social utility. Devoted entirely to self-centered, fleeting, and costly effects, the dandy’s Promethian efforts were an utter waste and a deep affront to bourgeois values.

The dandy embraced the anonymous bourgeois wardrobe as a more heroic venue for his labors. Aikido-like, he turned his

enemies’ weapons back upon themselves by refining their austere, utilitarian dress to a degree of perfection that only the utterly obsessed and completely idle could attain. In doing so, he interjected cavalier excess in the heart of bourgeois sobriety.
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