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decadent paradox of decay and beauty in the catalogue for 2019’s 22nd Milan Triennial, ‘Our only chance at survival is to design our own beautiful extinction’.1

‘cult of the selfie’

also just realised this is a piece by alice conde :')

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As established in Jane Desmarais and David Weir's introduction to Decadence and Literature (2019), 'decadence' is a multidisciplinary critical concept that is relative to contemporary ideas about decline and decay. Discourse of decadence manifests most strongly at moments of unease about socio-historical transition and relates to extremes of taste, passing into the realms of the distasteful or the overly extravagant. Social decadence seemingly surrounds us in the West today, and the concept of decadence offers a way of understanding creative responses to contemporary anxieties over social, political, and environmental decline, such as the decadent paradox of decay and beauty in the catalogue for 2019's 22 nd Milan Triennial, 'Our only chance at survival is to design our own beautiful extinction'. ¹ It is fairly safe to say that the prescience of this statement merely a year later was unintentional, and I don't need to labour the point that we find ourselves, now more than ever, in a transitional moment, facing an uncertain and perilous future.

Decadence hit the mainstream in 2020 in more ways than one, but for the purposes of this blog post I will put disease aside in order to focus on the significance of decadent self-fashioning and performance. Charles Baudelaire wrote of dandyism in 'The Painter of Modern Life' (1863), 'It is first and foremost the burning need to create for oneself a personal originality [...]. It is a kind of cult of the self'. ² In February 2020 The Observer published an article on 'The rise of the red-carpet dandy', ³ celebrating the recent vogue for blurring gender boundaries spectacularly exemplified by Billy Porter's Christian Siriano tuxedo gown for the 2019 Oscars ceremony. Likewise, the Aubrey Beardsley exhibition at Tate Britain (4 March - 20 September 2020) was accompanied by a video discussion between art historian Stephen Calloway and drag performer Holly James Johnston on 'The Art of Being a Dandy'. ⁴ And most unexpectedly, in September, high street fashion retailer H&M announced that their Autumn/Winter 2020 'Refined Rebel' collection would be based on the 'radically fearless style' of gender-fluid fin de siècle decadent writer Vernon Lee. ⁵ What these examples reveal is that decadence, in today's age of the 'cult of the selfie', can be found in the practice of self-fashioning and performance of (gendered) identity. Whether through the simple act of purchasing a ruffled blouse in the style of Lee or immersing oneself deeper into the world of dandyism as a spectator or drag performer, the body is the site from which contemporary decadence is enacted.

H&M Refined Rebel Collection

While figures at the fin de siècle - themost intense flourishing of decadence - largely adopted an apolitical pose, today's decadence is more politically engaged and socially conscious. Nineteenth-century decadents were disdainful of progress and modernity, whereas twenty-first century decadence confronts the negative outcomes of progress, or at least points out where progress is lacking. As confirmed by recent scholarly efforts to (re)classify decadent work by marginalized or lesser-known figures - particularly women and people of colour - and to highlight expressions of non-normativity in decadent works, decadence has always been the domain of those on the peripheries of mainstream culture, even when they enjoy the relative privilege of the bourgeoisie. ⁶ Think of J.-K. Huysmans's aristocratic eccentric Des Esseintes shunning society in pursuit of solitary bodily experimentation against the grain of convention. However, decadence today might be considered as an act of resistance against sliding backwards into a less progressive, closeted, and bigoted worldview; it is performed and enacted by those who have been forced to the margins by the politics of conservatism, heteronormativity, whiteness, patriarchy, and wealth.

The parameters of who and what can be considered decadent are expanding, as exemplified by Julia Skelly's Radical Decadence: Excess in Contemporary Feminist Textiles and Craft (2014), which describes decadence as a performative 'sexed and gendered (and raced) act of interference' achieved through the aesthetics of excess and the transgression of social boundaries. ⁷ A particularly fertile way of considering decadence in a contemporary context is in terms of creative and personal responses to social decadence that engage directly with the concept of decline or can be classified as decadent in terms of their aesthetics, particularly the paradox of decay and beauty, as well as the use of excess to push the limits of taste to their extremes. Contemporary decadence in practice is not necessarily grounded in specialist academic knowledge of the critical concept. Indeed, I identify it in areas where the practitioners themselves may not define themselves as decadent at all (at least in the academic sense): namely, subversive performance in which those of us who share an appetite for decadence will recognize the taste for the distasteful, as Weir defines it. ⁸

RuPaul

Decadence has always been perversely obsessed with the body, the senses, pleasure and disgust, and in the twenty-first century the body becomes the site from which decadence is enacted, as demonstrated by Adam Alston's ongoing AHRC-funded Staging Decadence project which explores the 'enactment and embodiment of decadence as a transgressive, subversive or anarchic practice.' ⁹ For example, an Eco Trash performance club night held in London in April 2019 featured 'Sticky encounters with hybrid creatures, antidotes to overconsumption in a technofuturist dimension' including a live incarnation of Whitechapel's 'Fatberg' performed by Miss HerNia & Co, extravagantly costumed to resemble the mass of congealed fat and waste discovered in London's sewers, provocatively combining elements of striptease with grotesquery in a playful yet confrontational environmentally-conscious performance. ¹⁰ As exemplified by the current fashion for dandyism, aspects of decadent counter- or subculture are now being commercialized for a popular audience. The mainstreaming of drag performance by RuPaul's Drag Race (2009-present) has resulted in renewed interest in the Ballroom scene of decadent 1980s New York City dramatized in FX's drama series Pose, which debuted to critical acclaim in 2018. Pose pointedly juxtaposes the lives of gay and transgender Latinxs and African Americans during the AIDS crisis with the new Trump Tower yuppies who use cocaine, visit prostitutes, and enjoy the empty hedonism of obscene wealth. This contrast reminds us that true decadence is to be found outside the privileged and prejudiced milieu. As the marginal becomes mainstream, we need to turn once again to sub/counterculture to encounter a truly decadent taste for the distasteful.

The Boulet Brothers' Dragula: The Search for the World's First Drag Supermonster originated as a low-budget YouTube series in 2016 and has since passed through the hands of Netflix on its way to Amazon. Using the format of the reality TV drag competition popularized by RuPaul's Drag Race, Dragula unites contestants under the credo of 'drag, filth, horror, glamour', a quartet reminiscent of Holbrook Jackson's four chief characteristics of decadence: perversity, artificiality, egoism, and curiosity. ¹¹ Dragula's contestants use aestheticized signifiers of degeneration, decay, and sacrilege to signify queerness within queerness, showcasing spectacularly decadent performances that deliberately confront conventional standards of taste while simultaneously promoting ideals of compassion and self-acceptance among marginalized figures in an increasingly conservative political climate. As Swanthula Boulet declares in the introduction to Season Two, 'we pride ourselves on celebrating the strange, and the wild, and the sometimes dangerous side of queer culture.' ¹² The adorned bodies of Dragula'sdrag performers are the sites from which they enact resistance to the mainstream and embrace their position on the margins. Season One winner Vander Von Odd has spoken of the 'awful experience of growing up queer in a small, conservative town'; their drag is a direct reaction to this feeling of being an outcast. ¹³ As Vander explains to the top four contestants before the Season Two finale, the title of drag 'Supermonster' is a powerful reclamation of pejorative labels attached to them by conservative society:

'I think for me a Supermonster is very much someone who has personally witnessed [...] the nasty of the world and the evils of the world, it's the bullied kids, it's the kids who are left out, and I think that's why gay people or queer people as a community tend to have such a connection to horror films, or to the villains [...] the ostracized, the weird, the ones who weren't understood, but they took all the things that made them different, and turned them into their power. [...] and that's why so many people who haven't experienced that don't get it, they don't get why we love this darkness'.

Vander von Odd (2017), photo by DVSROSS

Vander's message is not one of true villainy. It is about cultivating self-acceptance and love for (similarly marginalized) others by performing the role of the monstrous and weird in order to reclaim power from those who use 'monster' as a derogatory term, and in this sense it is similar to the term 'decadent' which gains its power from its paradoxical positive and negative connotations.

Dragula gives a platform to drag performers regardless of sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation in a world where both cis and transgender women are largely denied visibility on the world's highest profile drag competition (in a 2018 interview for The Guardian RuPaul controversially defined drag as a 'big f-you to male dominated culture', but simultaneously denied women the opportunity to appear on the show ¹⁴). Dragula's contestants take part in challenges that push the limits of taste, but also contain a message about self-acceptance and the acceptance of others. Through dressing up as flamboyant and outrageous versions of typical monsters - vampires, aliens, zombies, ghouls - or creating opulent costumes from materials that others would ordinarily discard, as in Season Three's 'Trash Queen Couture' challenge, the contestants use their bodies as the sites from which to enact resistance to social norms via visually spectacular, grotesque and confrontational performance. ¹⁵ Like the controversially self-feminized nineteenth-century dandy figure, today's subversive drag performers carry an important message. As Vander states, 'It's a message of autonomy, of empowerment, of self, and of shamelessness. [...] It's a powerful statement of self.' ¹⁶

Boulet Brothers (2018), photo by DVSROSS

However, as Dragula reaches a wider global audience via popular streaming platforms, the Boulet Brothers fiercely resist assimilation into the mainstream. 'As the rest of the world begins to accept us, they're also trying to squeeze us into a little box and make us conform, and that just won't do', proclaims Swanthula Boulet. Decadence is always relational to the mainstream. As Dragula becomes queerer and more radical in reaction to its growing success, it increasingly resembles the nineteenth-century model of aestheticized self-marginalization. As I have argued elsewhere, decadence as we know it today will be a profoundly different concept in a just and equal society. ¹⁷ But until then, contemporary performance artists like Selina Thompson who engage directly with the critical concept of decadence interrogate 'what decadence might be and should be in a world without inequity and try to think how I might imagine that, and put it on stage.' ¹⁸ In my view the concept of decadence is most potent when its double meaning is most clear and its use in conservative political rhetoric is confronted by those performing the aesthetics of bodily excess in rebellion against those in power. What the above modes of contemporary decadent performance show is that today's socially-conscious decadents are artists, not agents, of social decline.

Alice Condé
Bio
Alice Condé is a member of the Decadence Research Centre at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is Deputy Editor of Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studiesand Secretary of the British Association of Decadence Studies (BADS).

Posted on:Tuesday 15th December, 2020

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Contemporary Decadence: Subversion and Social Consciousness

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As established in Jane Desmarais and David Weir's introduction to Decadence and Literature (2019), 'decadence' is a multidisciplinary critical concept that is relative to contemporary ideas about decline and decay. Discourse of decadence manifests most strongly at moments of unease about socio-historical transition and relates to extremes of taste, passing into the realms of the distasteful or the overly extravagant.

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Here are some Initial Ideas I have had in regards to the design aspect of our exhibition/project...
- up-cycling curtains (mashing of prints)
- heavy gender focus - corsetry used as signifier of gender
- anti-consumerism message... how can we actually send a message against the consumption of clothing through garment creation - do they literally decay?
- how about not making anything at all? digital or 3D creation

on this note I was thinking about an interesting element to modern Decadence lately... Our perception of others and social ranking often rely on how we portray ourselves online. Could our project have something to say about the obsession of self that occurs so regularly today - as this is directly linked to the 'cult of self' discussed last week at Goldsmiths.

how could we use social media to influence how we design and make our project?

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Fetishism could be a cool direction to explore as it is directly linked to pleasure and is often seen as taboo within the wider society - even within the queer community!

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Typing "BDSM and feminism" into Google predominantly yields results about women who enjoy sexual submission alongisde the age-old debate about whether or not getting spanked by your boyfriend makes you a bad feminist (it doesn't). Many of the articles raise concern that sexually submissive women are reinforcing long-standing patriarchal formulae that posit women as sexually passive and men as active. I'm not here to shit on women whose sexual preferences err on the masochistic side of BDSM, because at the end of the day, sex is about pleasure. While gender, race, and sexuality can have a significant impact on our approach to intimacy, they don't dictate sexual preferences.

What my Googling did reveal is a scarcity of literature covering women who sexually dominate men. In fact, the headline of one of the few articles on the topic suggests that "men struggle to deal with sexually dominant women" -a prevailing stereotype which I've personally found untrue. Other articles argue that, if men are going to be dominated, it should be behind closed doors by professional dominatrixes -not by their wives, girlfriends, or female sexual partners. What I'm trying to say is that being a female dom goes against the heteronormative approach to sex, which is probably why there's so little coverage of it. With that said, this isn't a solely political piece; although being a female dom can inform one's understanding of gender and sexuality, I'm more interested in the joy and liberation to be found in this role reversal.

It wasn't until the final day of my first year of college that I realized I'm dominant. During my last one-night-stand (because I was determined to see my first year out with a bang), a guy I'd met several hours prior asked me to spit in his mouth. Having dated an aspiring dentist for a few years before this encounter, I was taken aback by this affront on oral hygiene as well as the notion that I a girl, might be in a position to degrade a guy. Thankfully, there was enough alcohol in my system to shrug off my (many) questions and grant him his wish. So I spat in his mouth.

And the rest is history. From then on, I began asserting myself in the bedroom in ways I'd never imagined (thanks to years of social conditioning via drab displays of missionary sex on TV). In my second year of college, I slept with men who wanted nothing more than to call me "mistress" and get slapped around. I learned a lot about masculine desire from our pre-sex conversations, outlining desires, boundaries, and safe words. Some guys preferred psychological domination (e.g. taking orders, orgasm denial, verbal degradation) and others were after something more physical (within the limits of whatever pain threshold they had). In all of these encounters, was in charge. I was invited to witness a masculine vulnerability that rarely appears in heterosexual sex. It was especially exciting because many of my partners-especially the straight ones-had limited experience with being sexually submissive, making it feel like a gender experiment for everyone involved. To me, playing the role of a female dom meant liberation through sexual agency; to them, being submissive meant freedom to be passive where they'd conventionally been in charge. Interestingly, each participant is freed from expectation-both can move fluidly along the continuum between active and passive, relinquishing and reclaiming control.

But while I welcome any opportunity to sexually dominate men, the same is not necessarily true regarding my relationships with women. Much of the excitement I get from dominating men comes from the overt subversion of the aforementioned heterosexual paradigm (men active, women passive). It's thrilling because it's unexpected. To an extent, the fact that I'm aesthetically very feminine means that I'm expected to be more passive in my queer interactions. From a glance, my frilly combination of blonde hair, pink Docs, and pastel fits would suggest that I'm a pillow princess . Though this isn't strictly true, I also wouldn't say that I have a desire to dominate women in the same way I do men. If anything, with women I'm a switch who's simply there to enjoy whatever. It could be that I'm less inclined to politicize the sex I have with women, knowing that it exists beyond any male gaze or established "norms" (as there is painfully little representation of queer female sex). This means that the sex I have had with female partners-whether it has veered into BDSM or not-has often felt more intuitive and more naturalistic than it has with men.

For me, there is still a question mark over how BDSM intersects with my sexual attraction to women. I mean, I I want Megan Fox to step on me, but doesn't everyone? With men, meanwhile, I that playing with gender is fun-and subverting heteronormative formulae by taking on a sexually dominant role is an obvious way to do so. Beyond the politics of it all, being a female dom has meant seizing sexual agency and asserting my pleasure in a way that's thrilling for everyone! Not only is playing the dom fun, but it's taught me a lot about consent and taking responsibility for my partner's pleasure as well as my own. It's rare that we see masculine displays of submission-or feminine renditions of dominance-on screen, so it really is a privilege (and a pleasure) to engage with these concepts in real life. So if you're a woman reading this and you happen to stumble across a submissive man, I implore you: spit in his mouth.

By Alice Garnett

Photo by Miss Meatface

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Yes, Mistress: On Being a Female Dom - Lithium Magazine

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Typing "BDSM and feminism" into Google predominantly yields results about women who enjoy sexual submission alongisde the age-old debate about whether or not getting spanked by your boyfriend makes you a bad feminist (it doesn't). Many of the articles raise concern that sexually submissive women are reinforcing long-standing patriarchal formulae that posit women as sexually passive and men as active.

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Not 100% sure how this relates but something interesting to think about when it comes to Harry Styles...

I think we can get over critical these days but there has been an element of Harry's clear appropriation of queer culture (specifically POC queer culture) with a lack of referencing and representation of the history of queerness - how can we combat this lack of representation of non-white queer trailblazers in our work?

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When beloved boy band One Direction broke up in 2015, millions of fans all over the world were devastated. For many, the band's upbeat pop anthems and meticulously styled matching outfits were a staple of their adolescence-as reminiscent of middle school as braces and training bras. It was the end of an era, one which inspired the kind of euphoric obsession that can rarely be replicated later in life. The end of One Direction, however, was just the beginning of Harry Styles.

Harry was always the most universally adored member of One Direction, as well as the most recognized outside of the insular world of fandom. It's not hard to figure out why. His cherubic curls, husky voice, and lively but endlessly polite personality made for the perfect pop star: just approachable enough to emulate the innocent boy-next-door, but with a rough edge of sex appeal that could make even the most cynical teenage girl swoon. As the years following the band's founding went by, and One Direction fans grew older and more mature, the boys were given more leeway to cultivate their personal aesthetics. Even then, Harry was attracted to a more opulent look than the rest of his bandmates, who dressed almost exclusively in an amalgamation of dark-colored trackies, sneakers, and snapbacks. Standing next to them in eye-popping luxury suits and silk scarves, it became clear that Harry's future-whatever it might be-was inevitably going to stand out from the pack.

And it did. Since the band split up five years ago, Harry has become the verified Timberlake of the group. He's released two full albums, acted in an Oscar-winning film, hosted and performed on Saturday Night Live, and been selected as the face of Gucci's men's tailoring campaign. In his numerous Gucci photoshoots, Harry's outfits have grown more and more daring over time, ranging from plaid three-piece suits to purple ascots to neon pink blazers. On the cover of his most recent album, he poses in a pair of stunningly white sailor pants-adorned with gold buttons-and a plunging fuschia blouse. All custom Gucci, of course. The photo was shot with a fish-eye lens, distorting the image so that his already lengthy legs look even longer. It's the kind of Bowie-esque portrait that instantaneously creates the iconic.

But comparisons to legendary androgyne David Bowie come with a price: endless interrogations about his , accusations of queer-baiting , and unabashed hostility, even from former bandmate . It seems that no matter what he does, Harry just can't get gender or sexuality "right."

This is, of course, ridiculous. There is no "right" way to perform gender or sexuality, and that includes whether or not one chooses to publicly state their identity. Harry Styles is not queer-baiting you because he would rather not announce the most intimate aspects of his personhood to the entire world-and note that I use the word "personhood" with intention, because when all is said and done, Harry Styles is a person just like the rest of us. He is more than the content he produces; he doesn't owe you a label, whether that label is straight or queer. He does, however, owe the queer community more overt recognition as a major influence on his aesthetic.

While rainbow flags and other queer paraphernalia frequently appear with him on stage, Harry has never explicitly credited the LGBT community as the inspiration for his gender-neutral wardrobe. Perhaps he thinks that this goes without saying. But in the words of my friend Sasha Carney , " Styles is not a private individual in the way that you or I might be... Within the frame of [his] public persona, his dislinkage of effeminate queer aesthetics from queer identity labels, politics, or explicit queer desires makes perfect sense." According to their theory, real, tangible ties to queerness are additional baggage that Harry does not wish to claim, for PR reasons or otherwise.

It is my genuine hope that this dislinkage is not as intentional as some believe it to be - but either way, Harry's silence is in active disregard of a marginalized community that he could very easily uplift. Even a simple tweet about the history of queer fashion or drag ball culture would be a good first step , because when mainstream celebrities recognize and celebrate queer people, the world listens. Beyond that, it's just the right thing to give credit where credit is due, especially as far as subjugated groups are concerned.

Harry Styles as we know him would not exist without the contributions of queer -and specifically trans- elders such as Flawless Sabrina , Crystal LaBeija , and Gladys Bentley . They set the precedent in a time when wearing clothes made for the "opposite sex" wasn't just transgressive or unsual -it was illegal. They were the first to demand that conventional society treat people, all people, with kindness. And if that isn't what Harry's aesthetic is all about, then who and what does it really serve?

By Isabelle Robinson

Illustration by Alexa Flores

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The (Queer?) Opulence of Harry Styles - Lithium Magazine

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When beloved boy band One Direction broke up in 2015, millions of fans all over the world were devastated. For many, the band's upbeat pop anthems and meticulously styled matching outfits were a staple of their adolescence-as reminiscent of middle school as braces and training bras.

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someone actually spent 5,000 on a digital gucci bag in a virtual game... what has our society come to!!

But this shows my point that we use online platforms to show not only our identities, but our wealth and social status.

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Inside Roblox's virtual world, a digital-only Gucci bag sold for more money than the bag's value in the real world.

Available for only one hour on May 17 as part of the Italian House's virtual Gucci Garden exhibition, a digital iteration of the label's Dionysus Bag with Bee sold for an original price of 475 Robux (equivalent to $6 USD) on the gaming site. In the sale's aftermath, however, scalpers began flipping the virtual product for exorbitant prices, and while buyers turned down outrageous six-figure Robux offers, some were willing to cough up sizable sums for the coveted bag. One user paid roughly $4,115 USD, or 350,000 Robux, for the Roblox-only purse - almost $800 USD more than the real Dionysus Bag with Bee, which sells for $3,400 USD.

Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian took to Twitter to share the eye-opening sales numbers, reminding people that the in-game accessory holds no monetary value outside Roblox's virtual domain. "Remember: this Roblox purse is not an NFT and thus has no value/use/transferability outside the Roblox world - yet it's worth more than the physical one. Watch this space," he wrote.

A Gucci bag in Roblox resold for 350,000 Robux or roughly $4,115. The same purse IRL costs $3,400.

Remember: this Roblox purse is not an NFT and thus has no value/use/transferability outside the Roblox world-yet it's worth more than the physical one.

Watch this space. pic.twitter.com/m4WjfC1Eq1

- AlexisOhanian.eth 7️⃣7️⃣6️⃣ (@alexisohanian) May 24, 2021

Notably, the average price of the Dionysus Bag has since fallen significantly and the Roblox value has dipped to just under $800 USD. The silhouette first debuted on Gucci's Fall 2015 runway, creative director Alessandro Michele 's first collection for the label.

Several other digital Gucci products were sold during the same one-hour window, including a spiked basketball bag, diamond sunglasses and a guitar case, but none gained the same resell traction as the Dionysus Bag with Bee did following the sale.

Elsewhere, Gucci recently released an eyewear line inspired by Hollywood's vintage glamour. Take a look at the House's new old school glamour frames.

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A Virtual Gucci Bag Sold For More Money on Roblox Than The Actual Bag

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Inside Roblox's virtual world, a digital-only Gucci bag sold for more money than the bag's value in the real world. Available for only one hour on May 17 as part of the Italian House's virtual Gucci Garden exhibition, a digital iteration of the label's Dionysus Bag with Bee sold for an original price of 475 Robux (equivalent to $6 USD) on the gaming site.

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This graduate of royal college of art uses 3D technology to create art that acts as therapy to their gender dysphoria. The art is very maximalist and in some ways slightly grotesque in the best possible way. They are imagining a perfect world beyond our current gender binary through (what i would argue is) Decadence.

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Royal College of Art graduate Marcel/a Baltarete has created a series of short animations depicting themselves as otherworldly beings to alleviate and interrogate their feelings of gender dysphoria.

Gender dysphoria describes the distress that can be experienced by people, whose biological sex and gender identity do not match - a feeling Baltarete describes as "grief, discomfort and inadequacy all at the same time".

Baltarete, who is nonbinary and uses they/their pronouns, studied fashion at the RCA but changed mediums partway through their graduate degree.

Instead, they taught themself how to work with 3D modelling, augmented and virtual reality.

"I started feeling uncomfortable and dishonest with fitting garments on other people's bodies when I realised I didn't have a good understanding of my own body, as the questions around my own gender identity started to surface," they told Dezeen.

"I knew I had to explore these questions on my own body, but doing so in real life would have felt too exposing, so the digital world allowed me to maintain a safe distance."

Q is the world's first gender-neutral voice technology

Baltarete 3D scanned their head to create a virtual avatar of themselves, which is digitally enhanced and animated to transform into virtual beings with fur, translucent horns or impossibly glossy skin.

In two short films, titled A Journey of Digital Introspection and Relief part one and two, the designer plays with abstracted body parts that suggest different sexual organs, as a way of exploring their feelings about different gender expressions without having to engage with the realities of their own body.

A Journey of Digital Introspection and Relief I
Baltarete described the process as therapeutic, saying that it was able to relieve their feelings of gender dysphoria in favour of an unprecedented "gender euphoria".

"Digital re-embodiment allowed me to reimagine an alternative way of living, a post-human, trans-human future where I wouldn't be limited by any physical or mental constraints," they said.

"It also allowed me to question my desire for a fit, masculine-appearing body and if this is something I genuinely identify with or a product of my internalised misogyny."

Baltarete is currently an artist in residence at The Immersive Kind, an interdisciplinary collective working to ensure that digital technologies contribute to an accessible, inclusive and sustainable future rather than simply being used as a means of surveillance and subjugation.

A crucial step in this, according to the initiative's CEO and co-founder Kadine James, is broadening access to new technologies among people of colour and the LGBT+ community, which is underrepresented in the tech world.

"Queer designers have the power to present alternative approaches to digital representation," she told Dezeen.

"What we explored with Marcel/a was how we can work towards redesigning and inspiring 21st-century, inclusive approaches to the digitalisation of society.

Virtual reality headset by BeAnotherLab lets users try swapping gender

"To Marcel/a, the digital human can become an extension of a real human. There is a sense of freedom and liberation present in their work that can only be represented through the medium of extended reality," James continued.

Virtual and augmented reality are already being used as forms of therapy, with companies including Oxford VR and Stanford University's VR-IT clinic using it to treat phobias, social anxiety and PTSD.

Baltarete explained that their project could also help other people alleviate the depression and anxiety that can be associated with gender dysphoria.

"If this entire experience could take place in VR in a very realistic manner where you can physically experience a different body, I imagine the effects would be much greater," Baltarete said.

Interdisciplinary art collective BeAnotherLab has previously created a virtual reality headset that allows users to swap genders, in order to help them experience life from a different perspective.

Last year also saw creative agency Virtue develop the world's first gender-neutral voice, in a bid to eradicate bias in technology.

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Marcel/a Baltarete uses 3D animation as therapy for gender dysphoria

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Royal College of Art graduate Marcel/a Baltarete has created a series of short animations depicting themselves as otherworldly beings to alleviate and interrogate their feelings of gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria describes the distress that can be experienced by people, whose biological sex and gender identity do not match - a feeling Baltarete describes as "grief, discomfort and inadequacy all at the same time".

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Zach makes his own clothes and now has a successful business making bespoke tailoring and dresses. He rejects modern clothing and only wears clothing he has made from the 19th/early 20th Century.

A real modern Dandy!! I think this is really interesting in terms of modern consumption and a rejection of trends and social norms.

He also talks about how the clothing makes him feel 10ft tall and whilst he gets remarks here and there, nothing can compare to the confidence he feels in authentically enjoying wearing what he wants!

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Meet Zack, who only wears clothes from the 1820s and says ‘women want a gentleman who cares about his appearance’

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THIS is Zack Pinsent, the modern day dandy who has shunned modern fashion and only wears Regency-style clothing.

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Leigh Bowery walked this fine line of opulence and grotesque in the best way possible.

He often used notions of excess to shock and even disgust his audience - which in turn made a statement of his discontentment with societal norms and heteronormativity.

It would be great if our project aimed to celebrate those who are considered outsiders or 'others' in society and forcefully push against norms.

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There has been a real focus on the duality of the term Decadence and it's sort of hypocrisy.
There is a dark underbelly to the idea of opulence related to the idea of moral decline, decay and greed.

I think it would be interesting to make sure our project has a sickly twist to it, that we don't make it too flashy and opulent. We want to critique society and evoke thoughts with our project.

I think themes around consumerism, marginalisation (in terms of queerness) and class  are really interesting central themes that we could focus on?

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victorian 19th century modern space dandy style fashion gentleman regency fop macaroni

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A dandy is a man who places particular importance upon physical appearance, refined language, and leisurely hobbies, pursued with the appearance of nonchalance, in his cult of the Self. A dandy could be a self-made man who strove to imitate an aristocratic lifestyle despite coming from a middle-class background, especially in late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain.

Previous manifestations of the petit-maître (French for "small master") and the Muscadin have been noted by John C. Prevost, but the modern practice of dandyism first appeared in the revolutionary 1790s, both in London and in Paris. The dandy cultivated cynical reserve, yet to such extremes that novelist George Meredith, himself no dandy, once defined cynicism as "intellectual dandyism". Some took a more benign view; Thomas Carlyle wrote in Sartor Resartus that a dandy was no more than "a clothes-wearing man". Honoré de Balzac introduced the perfectly worldly and unmoved Henri de Marsay in La fille aux yeux d'or (1835), a part of La Comédie Humaine, who fulfils at first the model of a perfect dandy, until an obsessive love-pursuit unravels him in passionate and murderous jealousy.

Charles Baudelaire defined the dandy, in the later "metaphysical" phase of dandyism, as one who elevates æsthetics to a living religion, that the dandy's mere existence reproaches the responsible citizen of the middle class: "Dandyism in certain respects comes close to spirituality and to stoicism" and "These beings have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking .... Dandyism is a form of Romanticism. Contrary to what many thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of mind."

The linkage of clothing with political protest had become a particularly English characteristic during the 18th century. Given these connotations, dandyism can be seen as a political protest against the levelling effect of egalitarian principles, often including nostalgic adherence to feudal or pre-industrial values, such as the ideals of "the perfect gentleman" or "the autonomous aristocrat". Paradoxically, the dandy required an audience, as Susann Schmid observed in examining the "successfully marketed lives" of Oscar Wilde and Lord Byron, who exemplify the dandy's roles in the public sphere, both as writers and as personae providing sources of gossip and scandal. Nigel Rodgers in The Dandy: Peacock or Enigma? questions Wilde's status as a genuine dandy, seeing him as someone who only assumed a dandified stance in passing, not a man dedicated to the exacting ideals of dandyism.

The origin of the word is uncertain. Eccentricity, defined as taking characteristics such as dress and appearance to extremes, began to be applied generally to human behavior in the 1770s. Similarly, the word dandy first appears in the late 18th century. In the years immediately preceding the American Revolution, the first verse and chorus of " Yankee Doodle" derided the perceived poverty and rustic manners of American colonists, suggesting that whereas a fine horse and gold-braided clothing (" mac[c]aroni") were required to set a dandy apart from those around him, the average American colonist's means were so meager that ownership of a mere pony and a few feathers for personal ornamentation would qualify one of them as a "dandy" by comparison to and/or in the minds of his even less sophisticated Eurasian compatriots. A slightly later Scottish border ballad, circa 1780, also features the word, but probably without all the contextual aspects of its more recent meaning. The original, full form of 'dandy' may have been jack-a-dandy. It was a vogue word during the Napoleonic Wars. In that contemporary slang, a "dandy" was differentiated from a " fop" in that the dandy's dress was more refined and sober than the fop's.

In the twenty-first century, the word dandy is a jocular, often sarcastic adjective meaning "fine" or "great"; when used in the form of a noun, it refers to a well-groomed and well-dressed man, but often to one who is also self-absorbed.

The model dandy in British society was George Bryan "Beau" Brummell (1778-1840), in his early days, an undergraduate student at Oriel College, Oxford and later, an associate of the Prince Regent. Brummell was not from an aristocratic background; indeed, his greatness was "based on nothing at all," as J.A. Barbey d'Aurevilly observed in 1845. Never unpowdered or unperfumed, immaculately bathed and shaved, and dressed in a plain dark blue coat, he was always perfectly brushed, perfectly fitted, showing much perfectly starched linen, all freshly laundered, and composed with an elaborately knotted cravat. From the mid-1790s, Beau Brummell was the early incarnation of "the celebrity", a man chiefly famous for being famous.

By the time Pitt taxed hair powder in 1795 to help pay for the war against France and to discourage the use of flour (which had recently increased in both rarity and price, owing to bad harvests) in such a frivolous product, Brummell had already abandoned wearing a wig, and had his hair cut in the Roman fashion, "à la Brutus". Moreover, he led the transition from breeches to snugly tailored dark " pantaloons," which directly led to contemporary trousers, the sartorial mainstay of men's clothes in the Western world for the past two centuries. In 1799, upon coming of age, Beau Brummell inherited from his father a fortune of thirty thousand pounds, which he spent mostly on costume, gambling, and high living. In 1816 he suffered bankruptcy, the dandy's stereotyped fate; he fled his creditors to France, quietly dying in 1840, in a lunatic asylum in Caen, aged 61.

Men of more notable accomplishments than Beau Brummell also adopted the dandiacal pose: Lord Byron occasionally dressed the part, helping reintroduce the frilled, lace-cuffed and lace-collared " poet shirt". In that spirit, he had his portrait painted in Albanian costume.

Another prominent dandy of the period was Alfred Guillaume Gabriel d'Orsay, the Count d'Orsay, who had been friends with Byron and who moved in the highest social circles of London.

In 1836 Thomas Carlyle wrote:

A Dandy is a clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse, and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of Clothes wisely and well: so that the others dress to live, he lives to dress ... And now, for all this perennial Martyrdom, and Poesy, and even Prophecy, what is it that the Dandy asks in return? Solely, we may say, that you would recognise his existence; would admit him to be a living object; or even failing this, a visual object, or thing that will reflect rays of light...

By the mid-19th century, the English dandy, within the muted palette of male fashion, exhibited minute refinements-"The quality of the fine woollen cloth, the slope of a pocket flap or coat revers, exactly the right colour for the gloves, the correct amount of shine on boots and shoes, and so on. It was an image of a well-dressed man who, while taking infinite pains about his appearance, affected indifference to it. This refined dandyism continued to be regarded as an essential strand of male Englishness."

The beginnings of dandyism in France were bound to the politics of the French revolution; the initial stage of dandyism, the gilded youth, was a political statement of dressing in an aristocratic style in order to distinguish its members from the sans-culottes.

During his heyday, Beau Brummell's dictat on both fashion and etiquette reigned supreme. His habits of dress and fashion were much imitated, especially in France, where, in a curious development, they became the rage, especially in bohemian quarters. There, dandies sometimes were celebrated in revolutionary terms: self-created men of consciously designed personality, radically breaking with past traditions. With elaborate dress and idle, decadent styles of life, French bohemian dandies sought to convey contempt for and superiority to bourgeois society. In the latter 19th century, this fancy-dress bohemianism was a major influence on the Symbolist movement in French literature.

Baudelaire was deeply interested in dandyism, and memorably wrote that a dandy aspirant must have "no profession other than elegance... no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons... The dandy must aspire to be sublime without interruption; he must live and sleep before a mirror." Other French intellectuals also were interested in the dandies strolling the streets and boulevards of Paris. Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly wrote On Dandyism and George Brummell, an essay devoted, in great measure, to examining the career of Beau Brummell.

The literary dandy is a familiar figure in the writings, and sometimes the self-presentation, of Oscar Wilde, H.H. Munro (Clovis and Reginald), P.G. Wodehouse ( Bertie Wooster) and Ronald Firbank, writers linked by their subversive air.

The poets Algernon Charles Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, the American artist James McNeill Whistler, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Max Beerbohm were dandies of the Belle Époque, as was Robert de Montesquiou - Marcel Proust's inspiration for the Baron de Charlus. In Italy, Gabriele d'Annunzio and Carlo Bugatti exemplified the artistic bohemian dandyism of the fin de siecle. Wilde wrote that, "One should either be a work of Art, or wear a work of Art."

At the end of the 19th century, American dandies were called dudes. Evander Berry Wall was nicknamed the "King of the Dudes".

George Walden, in the essay Who's a Dandy?, identifies Noël Coward, Andy Warhol, and Quentin Crisp as modern dandies. The character Psmith in the novels of P. G. Wodehouse is considered a dandy, both physically and intellectually. Agatha Christie's Poirot is said to be a dandy.

The artist Sebastian Horsley described himself as a "dandy in the underworld" in his eponymous autobiography.

In Japan, dandyism has become a fashion subculture with historical roots dating back to the Edo period.

In Spain during the early 19th century a curious phenomenon developed linked to the idea of dandyism. While in England and France individuals from the middle classes adopted aristocratic manners, the Spanish aristocracy adopted the fashions of the lower classes, called majos. They were characterized by their elaborate outfits and sense of style as opposed to the modern Frenchified " afrancesados", as for their cheeky arrogant attitude. Some famous dandies in later times were amongst other the Duke of Osuna, Mariano Tellez-Girón, artist Salvador Dalí and poet Luís Cernuda.

Albert Camus said in L'Homme révolté (1951) that:

The dandy creates his own unity by aesthetic means. But it is an aesthetic of negation. "To live and die before a mirror": that according to Baudelaire, was the dandy's slogan. It is indeed a coherent slogan. The dandy is, by occupation, always in opposition. He can only exist by defiance... The dandy, therefore, is always compelled to astonish. Singularity is his vocation, excess his way to perfection. Perpetually incomplete, always on the fringe of things, he compels others to create him, while denying their values. He plays at life because he is unable to live it.

Jean Baudrillard said that dandyism is "an aesthetic form of nihilism".

The female counterpart is a quaintrelle, a woman who emphasizes a life of passion expressed through personal style, leisurely pastimes, charm, and cultivation of life's pleasures.

In the 12th century, cointerrels (male) and cointrelles (female) emerged, based upon coint, a word applied to things skillfully made, later indicating a person of beautiful dress and refined speech. By the 18th century, coint became quaint, indicating elegant speech and beauty. Middle English dictionaries note quaintrelle as a beautifully dressed woman (or overly dressed), but do not include the favorable personality elements of grace and charm. The notion of a quaintrelle sharing the major philosophical components of refinement with dandies is a modern development that returns quaintrelles to their historic roots.

Female dandies did overlap with male dandies for a brief period during the early 19th century when dandy had a derisive definition of "fop" or "over-the-top fellow"; the female equivalents were dandyess or dandizette. Charles Dickens, in All the Year Around (1869) comments, "The dandies and dandizettes of 1819-20 must have been a strange race. "Dandizette" was a term applied to the feminine devotees to dress, and their absurdities were fully equal to those of the dandies." In 1819, Charms of Dandyism, in three volumes, was published by Olivia Moreland, Chief of the Female Dandies; most likely one of many pseudonyms used by Thomas Ashe. Olivia Moreland may have existed, as Ashe did write several novels about living persons. Throughout the novel, dandyism is associated with "living in style". Later, as the word dandy evolved to denote refinement, it became applied solely to men. Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (2003) notes this evolution in the latter 19th century: "...or dandizette, although the term was increasingly reserved for men."

The series featured the further adventures of the title character played by Peter Wyngarde who had first appeared in Department S (1969). In that series he was a dilettante, dandy, and author of a series of adventure novels, working as part of a team of investigators. In Jason King he had left that service to concentrate on writing the adventures of Mark Caine, who closely resembled Jason King in looks, manner, style, and personality. None of the other regular characters from Department S appeared in this series, although Department S itself is occasionally referred to in dialogue.

1. "One who studies ostentatiously to dress fashionably and elegantly; a ^ fop, an exquisite." (OED).

2. ^ Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. 1989. dude, n. U.S.A name given in ridicule to a man affecting an exaggerated fastidiousness in dress, speech, and deportment, and very particular about what is æsthetically 'good form'; hence, extended to an exquisite, a dandy, 'a swell'.

3. ^ Cult de soi-même, Charles Baudelaire, "Le Dandy", noted in Susann Schmid, "Byron and Wilde: The Dandy in the Public Sphere" in Julie Hibbard et al. , eds. The Importance of Reinventing Oscar: versions of Wilde during the last 100 years 2002

4. Baudelaire, in his essay about painter ^ Constantin Guys, "The Painter of Modern Life".

5. ^ Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. 1989. dandy 1.a. One who studies above everything to dress elegantly and fashionably; a beau, fop, 'exquisite'. c1780 Sc. Song (see N. & Q. 8th Ser. IV. 81), I've heard my granny crack O' sixty twa years back When there were sic a stock of Dandies O; Oh they gaed to Kirk and Fair, Wi' their ribbons round their hair, And their stumpie drugget coats, quite the Dandy O.

6. See, for example, the ^ Dandyism blog by Christian Chensvold, continually since 2004, but with a published record on the subject since the mid-1990s. http://www.dandyism.net

7. Roman Meinhold, trans. John Irons. "The Ideal-Typical Incarnation of Fashion: The Dandy as...", in ^ Fashion Myths: A Cultural Critique. Bielefeld, Germany: transcript, 2014. 111-25. books.google.com/books?id=1XWiBQAAQBAJISBN 9783839424377

8. ^ Pask, Bruce (16 January 2009). "The New Japanese Dandyism". The New York Times. New York City.
Burton, Tara Isabella (14 December 2016). "Identity and the Rise of Dandyism, From Congo to Kyoto". The Village Voice. New York City.

9. ^ "Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulations - XVIII. On Nihilism". Egs.edu. Archived from the original on 19 April 2013.

Barbey d'Aurevilly, Jules. Of Dandyism and of George Brummell. Translated by Douglas Ainslie. New York: PAJ Publications, 1988.

Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten. 'Rulefollowing in Dandyism: Style as an Overcoming of Rule and Structure' in The Modern Language Review 90, April 1995, pp. 285-295.

Carassus, Émile. Le Mythe du Dandy 1971.

Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. In A Carlyle Reader: Selections from the Writings of Thomas Carlyle. Edited by G.B. Tennyson. London: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Jesse, Captain William. The Life of Beau Brummell. London: The Navarre Society Limited, 1927.

Lytton, Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton. Pelham or the Adventures of a Gentleman. Edited by Jerome McGann. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972.

Moers, Ellen. The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm. London: Secker and Warburg, 1960.

Murray, Venetia. An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England. New York: Viking, 1998.

Nicolay, Claire. Origins and Reception of Regency Dandyism: Brummell to Baudelaire. PhD diss., Loyola U of Chicago, 1998.

Prevost, John C., Le Dandysme en France (1817-1839) (Geneva and Paris) 1957.

Nigel Rodgers The Dandy: Peacock or Enigma? (London) 2012

Stanton, Domna. The Aristocrat as Art 1980.

Wharton, Grace and Philip. Wits and Beaux of Society. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1861.

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A dandy is a man who places particular importance upon physical appearance, refined language, and leisurely hobbies, pursued with the appearance of nonchalance, in his cult of the Self. A dandy could be a self-made man who strove to imitate an aristocratic lifestyle despite coming from a middle-class background, especially in late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain.

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Experimenting with silhouette with corset i made

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Experimenting with silhouette with corset i made

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Experimenting with silhouette using corset I made

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Experimenting with silhouette using corset I made

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Styling looks with garments I made and other discarded materials

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Styling looks with garments I made and other discarded materials