Slaves to Fashion
is a pioneering cultural history of the black dandy, from his
emergence in Enlightenment England to his contemporary incarnations
in the cosmopolitan art worlds of London and New York. It is
populated by sartorial impresarios such as Julius Soubise, a freed
slave who sometimes wore diamond-buckled, red-heeled shoes as he
circulated through the social scene of eighteenth-century London, and
Yinka Shonibare, a prominent Afro-British artist who not only styles
himself as a fop but also creates ironic commentaries on black
dandyism in his work. Interpreting performances and representations
of black dandyism in particular cultural settings and literary and
visual texts, Monica L. Miller emphasizes the importance of sartorial
style to black identity formation in the Atlantic diaspora.
Dandyism
was initially imposed on black men in eighteenth-century England, as
the Atlantic slave trade and an emerging culture of conspicuous
consumption generated a vogue in dandified black servants. "Luxury
slaves" tweaked and reworked their uniforms, and were soon known
for their sartorial novelty and sometimes flamboyant personalities.
Tracing the history of the black dandy forward to contemporary
celebrity incarnations such as Andre 3000 and Sean Combs, Miller
explains how black people became arbiters of style and how they have
historically used the dandy's signature tools-clothing, gesture, and
wit-to break down limiting identity markers and propose new ways of
fashioning political and social possibility in the black Atlantic
world. With an aplomb worthy of her iconographic subject, she
considers the black dandy in relation to nineteenth-century American
literature and drama, W. E. B. Du Bois's reflections on black
masculinity and cultural nationalism, the modernist aesthetics of the
Harlem Renaissance, and representations of black cosmopolitanism in
contemporary visual art.