The figure of the dandy is often seen as a familiar symbol of early 19th-century London. But what happens when this figure is transplanted to colonial Australia?
While Beau Brummell’s Regency dandy epitomised restraint and understated elegance, Australian iterations rediscovered the flamboyance and swagger of earlier fashions. In a society where clothing could be a tool of defiance or reinvention, Australian colonial dandyism embodied a mode of global modernity that anticipates the cultures of fashion, sociality and spectatorship of today.
Join Professor Clara Tuite to explore how the idea and image of the dandy were reimagined in the colonial context. Discover the fashionings of gentleman-convict dandy artists to the convict inflection of the laboring-class Cockney culture of “the flash,” and the complex modellings and resignifications by proud Indigenous men of settler-colonial military attire.
Clara Tuite is Professor of English at the University of Melbourne, where she teaches and researches Romanticism and nineteenth-century literature and culture. A leading international scholar of Jane Austen and Lord Byron, her Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (Cambridge University Press, 2002) was shortlisted for the 2003 Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book, and her Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (CUP, 2015) was awarded the Elma Dangerfield Prize for Best Book (by the International Association of Byron Societies). She has a particular interest in the social contexts of British and Irish literature, the history of sexuality, celebrity culture, and the cultural history of fashion, especially nineteenth-century dandyism and ‘flash’ culture.
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