By Monica L. Miller
Dandyism was once at first imposed on black males in eighteenth-century England, because the Atlantic slave exchange and an rising tradition of conspicuous intake generated a style in dandified black servants. “Luxury slaves” tweaked and transformed their uniforms, and have been quickly identified for his or her sartorial novelty and occasionally flamboyant personalities. Tracing the background of the black dandy ahead to modern superstar incarnations equivalent to Andre 3000 and Sean Combs, Miller explains how black humans grew to become arbiters of fashion and the way they've got traditionally used the dandy’s signature tools—clothing, gesture, and wit—to holiday down restricting id markers and suggest new methods of fashioning political and social risk within the black Atlantic international. With an aplomb precious of her iconographic topic, she considers the black dandy in terms of 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 modern visible art.
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Extra resources for Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity
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For Robin D. G. ”35 The complexity of the cultural expressivity and performativity of “ordinary folks” is also the subject of Shane White’s and Graham White’s groundbreaking history Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (1998), a study that, like Kelley’s work, emphasizes the absolute knowingness with which African Americans sang, danced, dressed, and strolled. ”37 Black dandyism serves as both liberation and a mode of conformity. Black dandy manipulation of sartorial style does not and cannot always lead directly to the creation of a new, wholly liberating aesthetic.
While sipping his coffee, a colonial product, as he himself once was, Soubise was both a consumer and dangerously close to a commodity. When I later argue that in The Marrow of Tradition, Charles Chesnutt’s Reconstruction-era novel, Chesnutt dresses Sandy, a former slave turned faithful old servant, in an outfit that befits his old and new Negro status, I also note that at the end of the novel Sandy’s years of loyalty are rewarded with the inheritance of his former master’s wardrobe, an act reminiscent of slavery times that repositions him firmly back into old Negro status.
8 By 1769 “mungo” was “a typical name for a black slave,” “a Negro,” as a result of the artistry of Bickerstaffe and Dibdin. ’” Soon after Mungo’s initial performance, almost immediately after the appearance of the slave in a strange, glittering uniform, it had apparently become typical to think of black slaves in terms of society and fashion. How and why mungos or black slaves in England became swells—people distinguished in the eighteenth century for their unique, often flamboyant, hyper-haute dress and mischievous attitude— is the subject of this chapter.