Samizdata

This afternoon I went to meet a business contact and walked past Chesterfield Street, in the area of London to the north of Piccadilly. The houses in the quiet street date back to the 18th Century and many of them, with their elegant Georgian front doors and understated proportions, have circular blue signs on the front, describing certain famous people who used to live there. One house states that Beau Brummell, “leader of fashion”, lived in one of the houses. Many foreign visitors who walk past the building and who wonder who this character was may have little idea of the man who rose rapidly to become at one stage the “most famous man in England”, setting new standards of dress and elegance for men. He lived the sort of life that puts modern gaudy celebrities in the shade. His life was a wild mixture of dazzling social success, fame and renown. But his later life was tragic, although the pain was partly self-inflicted: he eloped to France to escape from mounting debts and eventually died from disease.

A biography by Ian Kelly, now available in paperback, is an excellent story of how Brummell, descended from an upwardly-mobile civil servant and businessman, managed in a relatively short space of time to set the tone for Regency England. What I found so striking about the book was that although it showed that early 19th Century England was a very class-ridden place full of snobberies and harsh social conventions, it was also fluid and open to upward mobility to a degree that almost makes one wonder whether the age of George IV is in some ways more open than our own. Brummell’s grandfather was a servant; his father worked in the civil service and yet, by a mix of business acumen and a bit of sharp dealing in government contracts, amassed enough wealth to put his children through Eton and set his offspring up in the height of luxury. In some ways Brummell was the first person to be famous for being famous, for creating his own identity so well that he inspired people like Disraeli or, for that matter, Oscar Wilde (there is some debate on whether Brummell was bi-sexual). The Cary Grants, Errol Flynns or David Nivens are part of this suave tradition and so for that matter are such fictional characters as Sherlock Holmes and James Bond in his dark blue suits and evening dinner jackets.

Kelly is wonderful in how he describes how Brummell set about the task of creating a new style of dress that continues to affect tailoring to this day. Inspired in part by the sort of uniforms worn by Napoleon’s and Wellington’s armies, particularly the dashing cavalry regiments, and by the new-found enthusiasm for all things Greek and Roman, Brummell set about driving forward the elegant styles associated with the Regency period. The classic English male attire which he created has its echoes down the ages. Even those City financiers who now ply their trade in the Square Mile of London or the capital’s Canary Wharf financial district continue to wear suits and neckties that owe something to Brummell’s influence.

Of course, many people, including finance professionals, lawyers and the like, have adopted a more casual dress sense since the days when no man in London would be allowed to live if he was seen wearing brown shoes in the city during the week or to be seen without a hat and cane. Dress-down Fridays are now the norm, although I have noticed how people often look exactly the same on a Friday, as if Thomas Pink shirts, Dockers’ trousers and loafers are as much a uniform as the old products of Saville Row.

Anyway, in these times when scruffiness is in vogue, perhaps we need a new Brummell to ensure that the movers and shakers of global capitalism dress to do justice to the noble calling of making enormous amounts of money. London is a great town, whatever its faults, so perhaps we should do it the honour of dressing accordingly.

On the subject of the Regency period and the characters of that time, Paul Johnson’s book is definitely worth checking out.