Deco Dandy: Designing masculinity in 1920s Paris

By John Potvin

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Oct 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526134813

John Potvin

John Potvin is Associate Professor in Art History at Concordia University, Canada

Book preview

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 masculinity, however, were perceived equally, as different forms of masculinity and bodies competed for attention on the national stage.

Different bodies and identities experienced modernity differently. Nye asserts that

[t]he anxiety of health and numbers of population, the ideology of the family, and the crisis in masculinity played large roles in where the boundary between normal and abnormal male sexuality was actually drawn [… Furthermore,] bourgeois ideals of masculine honor were similarly influential in shaping the nature as well as the social response to the perversions, in this instance through the projection of keenly felt masculine anxieties onto the bodies and minds of men who engaged in unconventional sexual behaviour.²⁰

The concept of respectability, integral to the bourgeois will to power, only ‘triumphed’ in the nineteenth century. ‘But respectability came to rule behavior patterns in all these areas, and was based on a consistent attitude toward the human body, its sensuous qualities and its sexual functions’.²¹ For the bourgeois, ‘side by side with their economic activity it was above all the ideal of respectability which came to characterize their style of life. Through respectability, they sought to maintain their status and self-respect against both the lower classes and the aristocracy. They perceived their way of life, based as it was upon frugality, devotion to duty, and restraint of the passions, as superior to that of the lazy lower classes and the profligate aristocracy’.²² Since the birth of the homosexual in 1869, the terminology used to describe the neologism was identical to that of the aristocrat and the dandy, which all too often leads to a collapse of the distinctions marking one from the other. In its quest to ensure respectability as part of a preferred national masculine ideal, the forces of nationalism throughout the Third Republic (1870–1940) attempted to wrestle the notion of manliness and male beauty away from sensuous pleasures and the lower passions.²³ Consumer culture quickly fell prey to this respectable manly ideal. As will become evident throughout the book, Ancient Greece was repeatedly called upon, even within the arena of consumer culture, to legitimate and shore up almost any characterisation of ideal masculinity.

Writing in 1930, Hayes suggested that ‘[a]ll Frenchmen take it for granted that they are Frenchmen. All Frenchmen take it equally for granted that France is the leader and champion of the world’s civilization’.²⁴ Marc Ferro remembers how ‘[i]n France, the Republican tradition has come to make of our country a place that embodies liberty, equality, fraternity, human rights, and civilization in the context of colonial expansion. France’s embodiment as the Republic with all its virtues, its great history and also claim to have revolutionized the world has remained unquestioned, and all eyes have been turned upon her […]. Those who were not French could only hope to become so.’²⁵ A critical aspect of the ‘colonial culture’, which entered into a period of ‘affirmation’ between World War I and the mid 1920s²⁶ endemic to the various cultural products and consumer culture surveyed here, is the tacit absence of racial difference and the implicit whiteness of the heroism of cultural and consumer life where class and race often collided. ‘For those affected, the national community necessarily excluded African Blacks, barbarian and fanatic peoples, inferior races, and other unassimilable populations – in other words, almost all of the nonwhite peoples in the Empire.’²⁷ Writing in 1921 in Monsieur, Pierre Bonardi was quick to racialise the notion of elegance as he asserted that the crass nouveaux riches were no different than the ‘negro elegance’ of African countries that, unlike living up to Brummell’s dictum that true elegance mocks itself, equated garish ostentation with elegance. Bonardi goes so far as to classify three distinct types of so-called Black experience: (1) those who have not come into contact with Europeans; (2) those who live in close proximity to whites; and (3) those who live with whites. The first group, he declared, ‘goes almost completely nude and adorn their skin, namely their hair, teeth and skin. The white race has only found two or three ways to wear their hair, unlike the black race which has found thousands.’²⁸ This elemental system of racial profiling through sartorial codes underscores the way in which elegance is not simply a question of class, in every sense of the term, but a product of white French national interests, rendered pure and distinct within the pages of an influential magazine like Monsieur that made every effort to safeguard a clear distinction between civilisation and barbarism.

Deco dandy

Through a sustained focus on the figure of the 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. It compels us to rethink the twinned histories of modernism and art deco through the agency of the dandy, a figure at once alternative and dissident and yet a cypher for larger cultural and national aspirations. The mass appeal of the dandy in the 1920s was a way to redeploy an iconic typology to stimulate national industries, that is, to rekindle a desire for all things made in France. The important, essential and productive moments in the history of the cultural life of Paris presented here (and French interventions beyond its borders and foreign involvement within the city) are instructive of the changing role performed by consumerism, masculinity, design and national identity. As Mary Lynn Stewart argues, consumerism in the 1920s presented women with an entry point into the cultural sphere.²⁹ Could the same not also be said for men who were themselves entering into different, non-traditional domains? Together the art, design and fashion explored here comprise a rich landscape and composite impression of the registers of post-war masculinity. The period also marks a pivotal moment in the history and historiography of the dandy, a period in which there existed a broader desire to translate the codes of the dandy from an elitist singular figure to one whose ideals could be harnessed for and by the many. This desire also coincided, or perhaps, more appropriately, collided, with a supposed sexual freedom that the city allowed for. Through intersecting circumstances, the dandy was set free to experiment and become perhaps even more himself.

In no way does this book boast a pretence of being complete or the last word on the subject. Rather, the ambition is to offer new critical methods and pathways into the study of masculinity and art and design history and material culture more broadly. The book is also not an attempt to enumerate all the dandies of the period or narrate their biographies as much as it is a way to move beyond viewing the dandy as a universal, transhistorical, transnational figure that seemingly exists outside of the vagaries of time and space. The cultural agents and products included in the book did not simply turn to the style moderne because of its popularity but rather because it generated specific, untested and novel ways to address, or redress, alternative representations, performances and expressions of masculinity that stood in sharp contrast to the visual culture and cultural context which preceded and existed during the war. At the same time, it should be underlined that the registers of heroism were adopted and adapted to fit and define this protean figure to forge an identity that did not necessarily turn its back on national interests and wellbeing, but rather stood as an alternative to and yet reinforced dominant cultural ideals. The book attempts a history of the key themes, motifs and tensions at play in the 1920s that acknowledge the past while attempting to construct an entire arena in which men’s fashion, design and cultural production revolved around the figure of the dandy as a means to legitimate and contrive an entire industry. Largely, while not exclusively, the material presented throughout the book focuses attention on the exceptionally fertile period between the years leading up to World War I and the aftermath of the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. It begins with the personal and gradually moves into a concern for broader institutional and cultural production which evokes key features, characteristics, elements, challenges and tensions that help to delineate the contours of the deco dandy. As part of its ambition, the book also sets out to proffer a missing queer intervention by way of an exploration of dissident queer figures who, for the most part, remain neglected emissaries of the style moderne. Specifically, the cultural output of the expressionist painter Nils Dardel, silent film star Jaque Catelain and modern ballet dancer Jean Börlin are highlighted. Jumping off from these dandies, the book then considers networks, channels and events that, like in the cases of these men, expose and speak to thematic threads that helped to define national agendas and concerns. Typically, the 1925 Exposition stands as the point of departure for a retrospective analysis of art deco and women’s fashions of the period. However, like the development of the moderne itself and the advances made in men’s tailoring, the Exposition serves as a sort of culmination while at the same time a beacon projecting into the future, as Chapter 6 argues. As such the 1925 Exposition and two of its subsequent surrogate expositions mark the end point of this story. Although objects are vital in the articulation of the dandy, the book is less concerned with the specificity of certain objects than it is about the conditions of consumption and the expressions of and theories and observations on dandyism to attempt a meta-perspective that both troubles and enlarges our current understanding of art deco.

Dance historian Lynn Garafola has developed the term ‘lifestyle modernism’ to expose how aspects of everyday life are taken up, or appropriated, by artists and transformed into elite goods whether artistic or commodified. Her vantage point, however, is one of criticism, for she claims that the original ethos of modernism was not that of commodified aesthetics, but rather a revolutionary, avant-garde zeal. Lifestyle modernism refers to what she identifies as an ‘art of the sophisticated commonplace’ created by men like Jean Cocteau.³⁰ Garafola argues that it is also characterised by many of the modern ballets in Paris in the 1920s, most notably Jean Börlin’s Ballets Suédois precisely because it consolidated ‘vanguard form and commercial entertainment’.³¹ Through a novel complicity between exoticism, modernism, popular styles and upper-crust glamour, lifestyle modernism blurred boundaries that eroded the core principles of the avant-garde project, a project that, I assert, was at its most basic, racist, sexist and homophobic. Garafola’s perspective on the artistic appropriation of men like Cocteau and Börlin points to an audience whose agency has been stripped by a so-called elite whose output was seemingly devoid of cultural worth or value. Here, rather than view lifestyle modernism as a co-optation or attack of the initial ambitions of the avant-garde, I seek to enlarge and purposefully misappropriate Garafola’s concept toward decidedly more emancipatory aims and agentic ambitions. The 1920s saw an increased importance placed on national concerns for both welfare and aesthetic rehabilitation through increased consumption in tandem with the notion that the ideals of modernism were no longer the purview of a select elite group of artists and intellectuals. Lifestyle modernism was largely facilitated through an emergent and rapidly expanding consumerism that made itself more readily available to constituents largely denied by the hetero-masculinist zeal of revolutionary avant-gardism which repudiated fashion, the feminine, consumption and sexual alterity. Like the dandy himself, the ethos of lifestyle modernism ensured that life and art remained inseparable, maintained through the commodification of lifestyle and culture, and provided men like Börlin and Cocteau an entry point into the domain of culture. As Rosemary Hennessy argues: ‘One effect of the aestheticization of daily life in industrial capitalism is that the social relations cultural production depends on are even further mystified […]. In keeping with the aesthetic emphasis on cultural forms, style becomes an increasingly crucial marker of social value and identity.’³² Lifestyle modernism, I claim, provided the landscape that enabled the deco dandy to flourish.

As a result, I explore the conjuncture of the style moderne and masculinity by remaining sensitive to those gestures – both human and structural – which hint at the contours of the deco dandy’s ever-evolving lifestyle modernism. I argue for the importance of another series of registers and representations of masculinity that stand outside and yet within similar cultural parameters but which have received a modicum, if any, scholarly attention given their close association with fashion, femininity and consumption, remaining ‘cognisant of the ways in which masculine representations both act to give meaning to consumer’s relationships with commodities and other consumers’.³³ The book asserts that masculinities, dissident and otherwise, were constitutive of and continue to go underrecognised within the amorphous landscape of the style moderne in ways that have yet to be fleshed out. We speak of representations of gender and sexuality but part of this spectrum of representations is achieved through various design industries. It is here that I seek to contribute to our current understanding of the affect of representation and its collision with gender and sexuality which formed the very blueprint of the moderne and its design-ations of masculinity and the male body. In short, I ask how did various forms of design and visual and material practices help establish a choreography for the deco dandy’s performances? For example, we too often associate the dandy as a marginal figure and yet above the fray. Whether conscious or unwitting, the dandy, as person, idea or representation can also be co-opted and deployed to become complicit with a national narrative of normativity and respectability. This choreography of design and masculinity forms an integral part of the lifestyle modernism developed in the period that could at once be both dissident and commercially viable.

The title of the book purposefully weds two celebrated cultural phenomena vilified for their purportedly decorative and excessive nature. Oddly, the two have never been placed together, their mutual relationship ignored, neglected and misplaced in the literature (scholarly and otherwise) to date. From the outset, the deco dandy reveals the intricacies and limits of representation. The figure wedded seemingly polar opposites and contradictions and proved to be the quintessential cipher of a transitionary period marking pre- from post-war. Ambiguous and ambivalent in his position as both the subject and object of consumption, he was at once decorative and masculine, displayed effeminate contours despite his athletic prowess, was fashionably attired while physically fit, readily embraced the promise of modernism while retaining the safety of tradition and legacy and finally championed the distinction of luxury tailoring while preparing the way for the potentiality of industrially motivated expansion. A particularly salient feature of the deco dandy that distinguished him from his predecessors and a leitmotif that runs throughout most of the book is the relationship he harnessed between design and physical fitness. Although physique culture (or physical culture) has its roots in the late nineteenth century, in the 1920s it was deployed less for the service of strongmen and excessive muscularity as it once had been, and more for how it engendered a novel language and means to transform masculine tailoring and the figure of the dandy himself.

Art deco’s expansive and idiosyncratic interpretation of modern and modernist ideals could help expand and rebuild France. The style moderne began in the last years of the first decade of the twentieth century and through the auspices of luxury and glamour attempted to render the masses modern. As the first style that no longer addressed an artistic elite, but a consumer base, the moderne insinuated itself into an impressive array of media including expositions and art salons, architecture and art, magazines and advertisements, film screens and dance stages, etiquette tracts and essays, art criticism and fashion-advice manuals. With its anti-traditional stance and partial rejection of the past and despite its mass appeal, the moderne largely catered to a sophisticated clientele eager to display its wealth and modernity while exotic techniques, sources and materials lent themselves well to a more fashionable temper. By pivoting around the dandy, I mobilise various media and fields rarely written about together in regards to the figure: dance, cinema, photography, painting, criticism, fashion, design, graphic design, expositions and interiors. The figure of the deco dandy is replete with contradictions and duplicitous stances. He is at once restrained and decorative, straight and queer, normative and subversive. However, what is certain throughout the material investigated here is that he is resolutely French. Endemic to the deco dandy’s allure and success, I suggest, are two key concepts: the ensemble and Einfühlung. Together, the force of these two concepts facilitated, empowered and reinforced the potentialities of the deco dandy’s lifestyle modernism.

Ensemble

From an ensemble of insignificant and useless practices he fashions a craft which bears his personal stamp, and which appeals and seduces in the manner of a work of art. He confers on minute signs of costume, bearing and language, a meaning and a power they do not naturally possess. In short, he makes us believe in what does not exist. (Jules Lemaître, writing on the dandy in 1889)³⁴

The constituent principle of elegance is unity. (Charles Baudelaire)³⁵

Despite critic and dramatist Jules Lemaître’s rather sardonic attack, he nevertheless points us to a critical feature not only of the dandy’s persona but also of this book, that of the ensemble and its influence on the construction of lifestyle. The idea that the dandy is able to create the illusion of something that does not yet exist makes the figure an ideal spokesperson for market capitalism, aesthetic management and lifestyle modernism. Much like the dandy, as a grand illusionist, the ensemblier (or what is generally understood as an interior decorator or artist-decorator in the Anglophone world) both assembles and therefore constructs the illusion of a complete, whole image, an entire designed lifestyle that is at once identifiable and comprehensive in thought and execution. The ensemble provided evidence of ‘both individuality and good taste’,³⁶ and above all else it had to be a thing of beauty and elegance. As Roland Marchand has also confirmed, the ensemble fostered the production of unique pieces distinct from mass production, as it formed a complete and whole package by conjuring ‘an appropriate atmosphere’.³⁷ According to L’Art et la Mode every element was meant to harmonise within the ensemble: ‘There is no carpet in your living room, this wall hanging, this piece of furniture, this sketch: there is one ensemble. The eye must move through with ease, like a fish in the water, and not laboriously look for one’s balance.’³⁸ The ensemblier, a specifically French phenomenon that emerged in the immediate pre-war period, as well as his ensembles were riddled with contradictory gendered implications. This modern profession was largely populated by men and yet their labour involved the traditionally feminine pursuits of consumption and working for and beautifying the domestic interior.³⁹

The ensemblier moderne rids the interior of the effeminate tendencies of the cluttered and overpopulated eclectic bourgeois spaces of traditional nineteenth-century domesticity. The ensemble of the 1920s is deployed here as an important point of departure to unpack the comprehensive and complete dandy lifestyle engendered and perpetuated in the aftermath of devastation, violence and cultural nihilism. As the encyclopaedia for the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes stated: ‘Thus the arts of adornment assert themselves in simple lines, in beautiful materials, in contrasting provisions of colour as does architecture or the arts of furniture. These are the common trends that have identical causes.’⁴⁰ This intermediality and synthesis of the arts that the ensemble boasted, driven by consumer desire and national need, meant it assumed a pre-eminent position within the development and success of art deco. The term ensemble offers for us in this context a purposeful wordplay of meanings and intersections. As a concept, the ensemble does not simply pertain to a set of furnishings that together create a cohesive interior design scheme, but also equally refers to a fashion ensemble (or complete look) or a dance or theatre ensemble (a group of performers). The implications of the ensemble are such that through a form of performance, the whole takes precedence over the individual components to conjure something greater than its parts. These various facets of the term speak to a totalising enterprise that hints at how the dandy proved to be emblematic of an entire and particular consumer ethic that fulfilled the desires, pleasures and codes of honour for oneself while at the same time being interpolated into national debates and concerns. A dandy is, after all, first and foremost a performer who is identifiable not through one particular movement, hat, fabric, chair or gesture, but through the calculated management of the whole; the ensemble, in other words.

The 1920s was the first decade in which modernisation and mass consumption had become part of everyday life so much so that, as Don Slater has concluded, consumerism became the ‘path to modernity’ itself.⁴¹ For the dandy, this particular historical moment also importantly exposes how, as Elisa Glick has observed, the ‘logic of the dandy is the logic of the commodity’.⁴² If the logic of the dandy is the logic of commodity capitalism and if the style moderne is the logic of decorative modernism, it is rather odd that a discussion of their intersections has, until now, remained elusive. Today, like so many identities and terms, we think of the dandy as a rather loose and more fluid self-fashioned identity. This, however, was also true in the 1920s. The post-war period was marked by rapid capitalist expansion and social and political upheaval. As such the term dandy could be assigned to anyone and at any time to depreciate or aggrandise their stature within an ever-shifting cultural terrain. It was a period when many special interests, including nation states themselves, attempted to offer (re)definitions of a new world order. Pre-war class and gender systems were set aside entirely or trenchantly reaffirmed as part of a retour à l’ordre (return to order). These opposing forces were set against a backdrop of renewed interest in expanding commodity capitalism across the widest possible spectrum toward rebuilding a nation devastated by war and cultural and economic mayhem.

Art deco was ‘largely parasitic of other styles’ precisely because, unlike any previous styles or movements, it embraced ‘marketing and consumerism’. As Tim Benton points out, the so-called masters of art deco style questioned the ‘psychological’ potential that design and fashion possessed ‘in promoting pleasure and stimulating the senses’.⁴³ While undoubtedly the term parasitic implies rather negative connotations, it does nevertheless encapsulate what were the new strategies that called upon the dandy to serve as a conduit for enhancing national prestige and generating greater market share. What, then, do we make of the much-neglected visual and