THE DANDY: A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF SARTORIAL SPLENDOR (Virtual)

This new book by historian Peter K. Andersson upends everything you thought you knew about style. Far from an elite pastime, dandyism has long flourished “from below,” in the hands of clerks, shop assistants, domestic servants and laborers who wielded fashion as their own form of rebellion. Tracing two centuries of flamboyant flair—from Beau Brummell’s Regency affectations and Baudelaire’s Paris “gandins,” to Teddy Boys, Zoot Suiters, Mods, New Romantics and even Berlin’s early transgender dandies—Andersson shows how taste-makers emerged from every stratum of society.