Dandy

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A dandy is a man who places particular importance upon physical appearance and personal grooming, refined language and leisurely hobbies. More narrowly, a dandy refers to a self-made man both in person and persona, who emulated the aristocratic style of life and dress especially during the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Britain and France, regardless of his middle-class origin, birth, and background. This type of man became a kind of stereotype, subculture, or stock character. Early manifestations of dandyism were Le petit-maître (the Little Master) and the musk-wearing Muscadin ruffians of the middle-class Thermidorean reaction (1794–1795). Modern dandyism, however, emerged in stratified societies of Europe during the 1790s revolution periods, especially in London and Paris. Within social settings, the dandy cultivated a persona characterized by extreme posed cynicism, or "intellectual dandyism" as defined by Victorian novelist George Meredith; whereas Thomas Carlyle, in his novel...

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