Deco Dandy

Designing masculinity in 1920s Paris

John Potvin, Christopher Breward, James Ryan

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526134813
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

Deco dandy contests the supposedly exclusive feminine aspect of the style moderne (art deco) by exploring how alternative, parallel and overlapping experiences of decorative modernism, nationalism, gender and sexuality in the years surrounding World War I converge in the protean figure of the 'deco dandy'. The book suggests a broader view of art deco by claiming a greater place for the male body, masculinity and the dandy in this history than has been given to date. Important and productive moments in the history of the cultural life of Paris presented in the book provide insights into the changing role performed by consumerism, masculinity, design history and national identity.

1

Art deco, the ensemble and Einfühlung

Art has done many strange things in Paris, but at the present moment it is indulging in a fantasy stranger than usual. The Salons, of worldwide interest for so many generations, have ceased to please, and the vernissage, once crowded to suffocation, is no longer fashionable, for painters and sculptors have turned their talents into the new channels of decoration and the mysterious art of personal adornment. (Vogue, 15 June 1914)¹

Thus began an article on the so-called Beau Brummells of Parisian art less than two weeks before the assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand that would precipitate World War I. In the anonymously penned article the author describes a list of young artists, dubbed the ‘Beau Brummels [sic] of art’, who set out to move beyond the traditional confines of salon art into the mysterious world of interior design, furniture and fashion. The impressive list of men that included Bernard Boutet de Monvel, Pierre Brissaud, Georges Lepape, George Barbier and Jean Besnard, A. E. Marty, Charles Martin, Paul Iribe and Lucien Vogel represented the ‘modern exponents of elegance and refinement’. For Vogue, however, the significant difference between these men and their eighteenth-century namesake ‘is that while they are thoroughly imbued with the same love of elegance and luxury, they are also hard and vigorous workers’.² Terms like ‘hard’ and ‘vigorous’ at once legitimised their labour and work ethic while securing their virility and masculinity, lest there be any suspicion or doubt. This cadre of specialists in the arts of elegance and refinement were made notable through their employment with Vogel when he launched the prestigious beacon of women’s art deco fashion, Gazette du Bon Ton, in 1912. The luxury periodical helped to establish the contours and aesthetics of art deco style, elegance and glamour.

As the leading acolytes of art deco, or style moderne (or the shorthand moderne) as it was referred to at the time in France,³ these artists expanded the acceptable parameters of consumer culture by seamlessly wedding high art with consumer-ready design. ‘These young men of birth and Beaux Arts training have wrought in the affairs of fashion, in the manufacture of materials, in home decorations, and in all sorts of trivial things used every day, a revolution which is sweeping the civilized world’.⁴ Most remarkable about this brief four-page article is that although it is clear these artists were providing the so-called ‘trivial’ material for quotidian fashion and interior design, as key progenitors of art deco style they were also identified as dandies from the outset. What we witness in Vogue (notably a leading women’s fashion periodical) is how, on the eve of World War I, a clear and definitive association between art deco and the figure of the dandy begins to take form. The article establishes what I identify as the deco dandy, that hybrid, ambivalent and ambiguous creature that only existed for a brief time in Paris following the war. The figure was also exploited for the short- and long-term reconstruction of France’s alleged cultural supremacy. Already under duress, France’s exports, namely its luxury industries, came under threat from foreign competitors.⁵ Menswear and its satellite design fields were targeted, the book suggests, to alter the course of action, to expand the terrain of sorts, to compete in a field France was not yet well known for. The figure of the dandy was reoriented to lead the charge.

With its intimate arcades, shop windows, department stores, independent galleries, palaces of entertainment, dance halls, salon exhibitions, lavish periodicals and, of course, its chic citizens, Paris has long boasted a pre-eminent position as a, if not the, uncontested capital of modern art, interior design, fashion and luxury. If the city represented all things fashionable and modern, then it was also personified in an idealised image of the parisienne, advertised and perpetuated to countless consumers both at home and abroad. Whitney Chadwick and Tirza Latimer define the ‘modern woman’ as the ‘trope for the perceived, if illusory, “freedoms” and hedonism of a generation of young women in Paris and elsewhere in the 1920s’.⁶ They observe how between 1917 and 1927 ‘France found itself moving from a war economy to a mass consumer society, [in which] to place alongside the economic burden of war reparations, a social policy that linked motherhood to national security, the right-wing ideologies of the “call to order”, and the growth of a powerful leftist labour movement’.⁷ Additionally, ‘[n]ot only does woman remain the archetypal consumer, but an overt anxiety comes to the fore that men are in turn being feminized by the castrating effects of an ever more pervasive commodification’.⁸ Rita Felski argues that ‘[o]ften depicted as an object in the domain of heterosexual relations, woman, it seemed, could only attain the status of an active subject in relation to the other objects. The circuit of desire thus flowed from man to woman, from woman to the commodity.’⁹ Here I follow on from Christopher Breward’s important challenge that bears witness to the ‘large proportion of the consuming population [that has] been written out of a history of modernity and urban life. To put it another way, the fact that manufacturers, advertisers, retailers and commentators on clothing directed much of their energy towards engaging the attention of women does not imply in itself that men were excluded from the experience of fashion.’¹⁰ The book also sets out to propose ‘another view of the developing relationship between gender, consumption and its publicity’. While Breward focuses his attention on British tailoring from the 1860s to World War I, enabled by the material of my particular context I would nudge his assertion further to claim that advertisers, tailors, journalists, critics, designers, artists, government officials and consumers were indeed very much engaged with concerns of and possessed an interest in men’s fashion and design directed at men. To date, scholarship has favoured analysing and portraying 1920s Paris as a space and period of woman’s emancipation. I would assert, however, that an examination of masculinity during the same period does not deny or preclude women’s work, contributions or representations. Rather, I suggest, it serves to amplify the gendered landscape and complicated dynamics at play in a city and during a time of tangled gender relations, pretensions and national ambitions that permeated all aspects of cultural production.

The extant impression of the style moderne is one of languid, exotic feminine beauties, fashionable emancipated garçonnes and gloriously assertive sporty Amazons. Beyond its ancient mythological origins and competing agendas, by the 1920s Paris was a woman. The book productively contests the supposedly exclusive feminine character of the moderne by exploring how alternative, parallel and overlapping experiences, expressions and registers of decorative modernism, nationalism, gender and sexuality in the heady years surrounding World War I converge in the protean figure of the deco dandy. As such, the book significantly departs from and corrects the assumptions and biases that continue to dominate scholarship on and popular perceptions of the period that focus either on Left Bank Sapphic modernism, female same-sex avant-garde cultures and the New Woman¹¹ on the one hand or, on the other, the female body (represented as either nude or as fashion maven) as a passive object of the male creative genius, subjected to a heterosexual desiring gaze as reified in countless traditionalist histories of modern art, design and fashion. A heteronormative approach to understanding the circuit of desire limits and forestalls the broad scope of experiences, desires, pleasures and identity formations that occurred, both in the open and in private, through a complicated engagement with spaces, designed objects and fashionable consumer goods.

We must also take into consideration how ‘patriarchy is maintained through limiting the ways in which masculinity is represented in cultural forms’.¹² I suggest that the fashions of masculinity and the male body must be included in the intellectual scrutiny and social inquiry of 1920s Paris and its cultural output. The book is motivated by the ambition to work against those mechanisms by which patriarchal structures and systems of exclusion limit and fix the scope of masculinity as homogenous, rigid and uncomplicated. It is a rather tricky endeavour to explore, question and even honour men in various professional and cultural milieus without reaffirming male dominance over women.¹³ Clearly that is not the ambition here nor is it to appropriate the moderne as exclusively masculine or male. Rather, it is to unearth and investigate a parallel and intersecting history. For, as Robert A. Nye argues, ‘[s]ince the sexes were culturally defined in terms of one another, changes in one sex provoked adjustments in the other, producing moments of crisis and negotiation of great analytical interest’.¹⁴ The book shows how designed products and representations of and for the dandy both existed within and outside of normative expectations of gender and sexuality, complicating men’s relationship to consumer culture more broadly and the moderne more specifically.

Maurizia Boscagli has underscored the importance of the ‘New Man’ that emerged in Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century, marking a significant shift in the definition of masculinity and its coeval in the male body. Unlike the modern woman, the modern man continued to enjoy his places, spaces and positions of privilege. This so-called New Man – a largely bourgeois construction – did not have to worry about being escorted about town, could benefit from ownership and property, had access to gainful employment and he certainly did not need to worry about maintaining his honour through chastity. Boscagli argues that ‘[a]t the historical moment in which the “grotesque” corporeality of dissident social groups (women, homosexuals, “other” identified as a danger to the bourgeois polity) was being shrilly presented by eugenists and imperialists as a metaphor of subversion capable of compromising a whole culture, power had to argue in favour of the body in order to make it its prop’.¹⁵ This redefinition was a result of the ‘crisis’ in ‘bourgeois models of masculine subjectivity and male authority’. The new protean male body was now based on a superman ideal and, ironically, focused ocular attention on that body, now to be at once emulated and consumed (all too often legitimised through physique culture and exposed muscles). Men’s ostensible new virility was also seen as a means to ward off fears of social decay and racial degeneration and produced a mythology of a new virile, strong, athletic male aggressively and communally engaged in ‘mass sports, personal hygiene and practices that could fortify the body of the nation’.¹⁶

For his part, the dandy was largely ‘dismissed as exhibitionistic’.¹⁷ Yet, in the years leading up to and following World War I, the strongmen desired and emulated by so many as specimens of true, vigorous manhood were themselves given legitimacy through the specularisation and objectification of the very product which secured their manhood: their overly cared-for displayed bodies. As such, dandies and strongmen shared similar characteristics as they cohabitated within a spectrum of masculine typologies. These men became at once sites of desire and emulation whose boundary of respectability was precariously difficult to delineate.¹⁸ Moreover, as Carlton Hayes describes,

Frenchmen have borne all these shocks with fortitude, and that throughout the crisis of the war and the less spectacular but still trying crises of peace they have displayed a high degree of cohesion, of unity of thought and action, of a truly national sentiment and will, has elicited expressions of respect from all quarters of the world. The manner in which the Frenchmen faced the war and the manner in which they have faced post-war problems have alike been conditioned in large part by the fact that Frenchmen constitute a distinctive nationality with well marked national habits and with what may properly be termed a national psychology.¹⁹

Not all types or characteristics of masculi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Art deco, the ensemble and Einfühlung
• 2 Shame and melancholia
• 3 Silhouette and movement
• 4 Décor and sobriety
• 5 Elegance and civilisation
• 6 Industry and luxury
• Select bibliography
• Index
• Plates