The Art of Seduction (13 page)

oppressed by our lack of freedom, we are drawn to those who are more
his skin-tight buckskin

fluid and flaunt their difference.

breeches, an hour with the

hairdresser and another two

Dandies seduce socially as well as sexually; groups form around them,
hours tying and "creasing

their style is wildly imitated, an entire court or crowd will fall in love
down" a series of starched

with them. In adapting the Dandy character for your own purposes, re
cravats until perfection was
achieved. But first of all

member that the Dandy is by nature a rare and beautiful flower. Be differ
two hours were spent
ent in ways that are both striking and aesthetic, never vulgar; poke fun at
scrubbing himself with

current trends and styles, go in a novel direction, and be supremely uninter
fetish zeal from head to toe
in milk, water and eau de

ested in what anyone else is doing. Most people are insecure; they will
Cologne. . . . Beau

wonder what you are up to, and slowly they will come to admire and imi
Brummell said he used
tate you, because you express yourself with total confidence.

only the froth of

champagne to polish his

The Dandy has traditionally been defined by clothing, and certainly
Hessian boots. He had

most Dandies create a unique visual style. Beau Brummel, the most famous
365 snuff boxes, those
Dandy of all, would spend hours on his toilette, particularly the inimitably
suitable for summer wear
styled knot in his necktie, for which he was famous throughout early
being quite unthinkable in
winter, and the fit of his

nineteenth-century England. But a Dandy's style cannot be obvious, for
gloves was achieved by

Dandies are subtle, and never try hard for attention—attention comes to
entrusting their cut to two

them. The person whose clothes are flagrantly different has little imagina
firms
—o
ne for the fingers,
the other for the thumbs.

tion or taste. Dandies show their difference in the little touches that mark
The Dandy • 49

their disdain for convention: Théophile Gautier's red vest, Oscar Wilde's
Sometimes, however, the
green velvet suit, Andy Warhol's silver wigs. The great English Prime Min-
tyranny of elegance became
altogether insupportable. A

ister Benjamin Disraeli had two magnificent canes, one for morning, one
Mr. Boothby committed
for evening; at noon he would change canes, no matter where he was. The
suicide and left a note
female Dandy works similarly. She may adopt male clothing, say, but if she
saying he could no longer
does, a touch here or there will set her truly apart: no man ever dressed
endure the ennui of
buttoning and unbuttoning.

quite like George Sand. The overtall hat, the riding boots worn on the

—
T H E GAME OF HEARTS:

streets of Paris, made her a sight to behold.

HARRIETTE WILSON'S

Remember, there must be a reference point. If your visual style is to-
MEMOIRS,
EDITED BY LESLEY

tally unfamiliar, people will think you at best an obvious attention-getter, at BLANCH

worst crazy. Instead, create your own fashion sense by adapting and altering prevailing styles to make yourself an object of fascination. Do this right and you will be wildly imitated. The Count d'Orsay, a great London dandy of
This royal manner which

[
the dandy
]
raises to the

the 1830s and 1840s, was closely watched by fashionable people; one day,
height of true royalty, the
caught in a sudden London rainstorm, he bought a
paltrok,
a kind of heavy,
dandy has taken this from
hooded duffle coat, off the back of a Dutch sailor. The
paltrok
immediately
women, who alone seem
naturally made for such a

became
the
coat to wear. Having people imitate you, of course, is a sign of
role. It is a somewhat by
your powers of seduction.

using the manner and the

The nonconformity of Dandies, however, goes far beyond appearances.
method of women that
It is an attitude toward life that sets them apart; adopt that attitude and a
the dandy dominates. And
this usurpation of

circle of followers will form around you.

femininity, he makes

Dandies are supremely impudent. They don't give a damn about other
women themselves approve
people, and never try to please. In the court of Louis XIV, the writer La
of this. . . . The dandy
has something antinatural

Bruyere noticed that courtiers who tried hard to please were invariably on
and androgynous about
the way down; nothing was more anti-seductive. As Barbey d'Aurevilly
him, which is precisely how
wrote, "Dandies please women by displeasing them."

he is able to endlessly

seduce.

Impudence was fundamental to the appeal of Oscar Wilde. In a London theater one night, after the first performance of one of Wilde's plays,

— J U L E S LEMAÎTRE,

LES CONTEMPORAINS

the ecstatic audience yelled for the author to appear onstage. Wilde made them wait and wait, then finally emerged, smoking a cigarette and wearing an expression of total disdain. "It may be bad manners to appear here smoking, but it is far worse to disturb me when I am smoking," he scolded his fans. The Count d'Orsay was equally impudent. At a London club one night, a Rothschild who was notoriously cheap accidentally dropped a gold coin on the floor, then bent down to look for it. The count immediately whipped out a thousand-franc note (worth much more than the coin),

rolled it up, lit it like a candle, and got down on all fours, as if to help light the way in the search. Only a Dandy could get away with such audacity. The insolence of the Rake is tied up with his desire to conquer a woman; he cares for nothing else. The insolence of the Dandy, on the other hand, is aimed at society and its conventions. It is not a woman he cares to conquer but a whole group, an entire social world. And since people are generally oppressed by the obligation of always being polite and self-sacrificing, they are delighted to spend time around a person who disdains such niceties. Dandies are masters of the art of living. They live for pleasure, not for work; they surround themselves with beautiful objects and eat and drink
50
•
The Art of Seduction

with the same relish they show for their clothes. This was how the great Roman writer Petronius, author of the
Satyricon,
was able to seduce the emperor Nero. Unlike the dull Seneca, the great Stoic thinker and Nero's tutor, Petronius knew how to make every detail of life a grand aesthetic adventure, from a feast to a simple conversation. This is not an attitude you should impose on those around you—you can't make yourself a nuisance—

but if you simply seem socially confident and sure of your taste, people will be drawn to you. The key is to make everything an aesthetic choice. Your ability to alleviate boredom by making life an art will make your company highly prized.

The opposite sex is a strange country we can never know, and this excites us, creates the proper sexual tension. But it is also a source of annoyance and frustration. Men do not understand how women think, and vice versa; each tries to make the other act more like a member of their own sex. Dandies may never try to please, but in this one area they have a pleasing effect: by adopting psychological traits of the opposite sex, they appeal to our inherent narcissism. Women identified with Rudolph Valentino's delicacy and attention to detail in courtship; men identified with Lou Andreas-Salomé's lack of interest in commitment. In the Heian court of eleventh-century Japan, Sei Shonagon, the writer of
The Pillow Book,
was powerfully seductive for men, especially literary types. She was fiercely independent, wrote poetry with the best, and had a certain emotional distance. Men wanted more from her than just to be her friend or companion, as if she were another man; charmed by her empathy for male psychology, they fell in love with her. This kind of mental transvestism—the ability to enter the spirit of the opposite sex, adapt to their way of thinking, mirror their tastes and attitudes—can be a key element in seduction. It is a way of mesmerizing your victim.

According to Freud, the human libido is essentially bisexual; most people are in some way attracted to people of their own sex, but social constraints (varying with culture and historical period) repress these impulses. The Dandy represents a release from such constraints. In several of Shakespeare's plays, a young girl (back then, the female roles in the theater were actually played by male actors) has to go into disguise and dresses up as a boy, eliciting all kinds of sexual interest from men, who later are delighted to find out that the boy is actually a girl. (Think, for example, of Rosalind in
As You Like It.)
Entertainers such as Josephine Baker (known as the Chocolate Dandy) and Marlene Dietrich would dress up as men in their acts, making themselves wildly popular—among men. Meanwhile the slightly

feminized male, the pretty boy, has always been seductive to women. Valentino embodied this quality. Elvis Presley had feminine features (the face, the hips), wore frilly pink shirts and eye makeup, and attracted the attention of women early on. The filmmaker Kenneth Anger said of Mick Jagger that it was "a bisexual charm which constituted an important part of the attraction he had over young girls . . . and which acted upon their unconscious." In Western culture for centuries, in fact, feminine beauty has been far more
The Dandy
•
51

fetishized than male beauty, so it is understandable that a feminine-looking face like that of Montgomery Clift would have more seductive power than that of John Wayne.

The Dandy figure has a place in politics as well. John F. Kennedy was a strange mix of the masculine and feminine, virile in his toughness with the Russians, and in his White House lawn football games, yet feminine in his graceful and dapper appearance. This ambiguity was a large part of his appeal. Disraeli was an incorrigible Dandy in dress and manner; some were suspicious of him as a result, but his courage in not caring what people thought of him also won him respect. And women of course adored him, for women always adore a Dandy. They appreciated the gentleness of his manner, his aesthetic sense, his love of clothes—in other words, his feminine qualities. The mainstay of Disraeli's power was in fact a female fan: Queen Victoria.

Do not be misled by the surface disapproval your Dandy pose may

elicit. Society may publicize its distrust of androgyny (in Christian theology, Satan is often represented as androgynous), but this conceals its fascination; what is most seductive is often what is most repressed. Learn a playful dandyism and you will become the magnet for people's dark, unrealized yearnings. The key to such power is ambiguity. In a society where the roles everyone plays are obvious, the refusal to conform to any standard will excite interest. Be both masculine and feminine, impudent and charming, subtle and outrageous. Let other people worry about being socially acceptable; those types are a dime a dozen, and you are after a power greater than they can imagine.

Symbol:
The

Orchid. Its shape and color oddly sug-

gest both sexes, its odor is sweet and decadent

—
it is a tropical flower of evil. Delicate and highly cul-

tivated, it is prized for its rarity; it is unlike any other flower.
52
•
The Art of Seduction

Dangers

The Dandy's strength, but also the Dandy's problem, is that he or she often works through transgressive feelings relating to sex roles. Although this activity is highly charged and seductive, it is also dangerous, since it touches on a source of great anxiety and insecurity. The greater dangers will often come from your own sex. Valentino had immense appeal for women, but men hated him. He was constantly dogged with accusations of being perversely unmasculine, and this caused him great pain. Salomé was equally disliked by women; Nietzsche's sister, and perhaps his closest friend, considered her an evil witch, and led a virulent campaign against her in the press long after the philosopher's death. There is little to be done in the face of resentment like this. Some Dandies try to fight the image they themselves have created, but this is unwise: to prove his masculinity, Valentino would engage in a boxing match, anything to prove his masculinity. He wound up looking only desperate. Better to accept society's occasional gibes with grace and insolence. After all, the Dandies' charm is that they don't really care what people think of them. That is how Andy Warhol played the game: when people tired of his antics or some scandal erupted, instead of trying to defend himself he would simply move on to some new image—decadent bohemian, high-society portraitist, etc.—as if to say, with a hint of disdain, that the problem lay not with him but with other people's attention span.

Another danger for the Dandy is the fact that insolence has its limits. Beau Brummel prided himself on two things: his trimness of figure and his acerbic wit. His main social patron was the Prince of Wales, who, in later years, grew plump. One night at dinner, the prince rang for the butler, and Brummel snidely remarked, "Do ring, Big Ben." The prince did not appreciate the joke, had Brummel shown out, and never spoke to him again. Without royal patronage, Brummel fell into poverty and madness.

Even a Dandy, then, must measure out his impudence. A true Dandy

knows the difference between a theatrically staged teasing of the powerful and a remark that will truly hurt, offend, or insult. It is particularly important to avoid insulting those in a position to injure you. In fact the pose may work best for those who can afford to offend—artists, bohemians, etc. In the work world, you will probably have to modify and tone down your Dandy image. Be pleasantly different, an amusement, rather than a person who challenges the group's conventions and makes others feel insecure.