Le dandy cherche ce quelque chose qu’on nous permettra d’appeler la modernité

A step breaks the silence. The sound of a leather sole on a hardwood floor taps intermittently. Click clack click clack. Like a confident debutante, my father appears at the top of the stairs, illuminated by the living room’s soft warm light. From top to bottom. He is wearing a navy blue double-breasted blazer with strong shoulders and almost military brass buttons. The sleeves cut perfectly, letting the starched whiteness of a dress shirt poke through and the glimmer of a gold watch appear. A polka-dotted ascot is fastened tightly around his neck, with the excedent silk tucked in the shirt like an extravagant bib. I frankly cannot remember the trousers. But I remember the shoes. The shoes. The color of a Romanée-Conti seen through the rays of a bistro’s candles. A leather so creamy and shiny it brought to my mouth the taste of caramel. Click clack click clack. He steps proudly in front of the mirror.

An act of redemptive narcissism (to use Lyle Ashton Harris’ term). Self-love as a “form of resistance to the tyranny of mediocrity.”

My father called it “lightning”. The irrefutable feeling that an outfit was unmistakably it. Prior to my arrival, my father had accumulated a few grails that he wears to this day. This navy blazer from Holt Renfrew and these shoes that I famously wore to prom. Both older than me, both still engendering the unmistakable feeling of lightning.

The spectre of the Black Dandy haunts every bit of my style and is revived in every outfit I put on. Most of what I know about dressing came from my parents. They dressed me sharply with no exception, no days off. Their meticulous paranoia that their “lytle Blackamore” had to be a reflection of their own success in the predominantly white spaces I spent most of my time in. As James Laver reminds us, “Clothes are never a frivolity. They are always an expression of the fundamental social and economic pressures of the time.”

The Black Dandy understands the gravity of superficiality and the superfluousness of seriousness. The Black Dandy is the three-dimensional space of play where anxiety and subversion juke endlessly in poetic and troubling intersections. The Black Dandy’s clothes allow interstellar time and class travel. They speak loudly of possibilities in a world where orality is the main mode of communication. Fashion like money talks. The Dandy’s aesthetic ruses reveal the performativity of identity itself, the fiction of race, gender and all other categories. For their final trick, the Black Dandy makes themselves visible but not fully legible. The trickster is unknowable because he is always in disguise.

The Black Dandy, in the words of Glissant, clamors for the right to opacity. They construct an amethyst of Blackness rich with refractions (like Howie’s opal). A Blackness so unique, so strange, so queer, so full of complexity, depths, breadths and multitudes, that it ominously leers back. It screams back. A Blackness you could lose yourself into.

It goes without saying but you should absolutely buy and read Monica Miller’s “Slaves to Fashion”, which is the direct inspiration for this essay.

Happy Met Weekend to those who celebrate.