The Downwardly Mobile Dandy & The Trailer Park Quaintrelle

​“When we speak of excellence in dress we do not mean richness of clothing, nor manifested elaboration. Faultless propriety, perfect harmony, and a refined simplicity,—these are the charms which fascinate here. It is as great a sin to be finical in dress as to be negligent.” --“A Gentleman”

For centuries, fashion trends have been driven by the elite for the elite. The royals, the aristocrats, the movie stars, the moguls, all have held a high degree of influence over fashion. Wearing the best duds has long been associated with wealth and status. Yet the common plebe did not always have to muck about in plastic clothing subject to disintegration when caught in acid rain. In the past, good clothing, and good-looking clothing with style and verve, was also in the grasp of everyday, salt-of-the-earth working people.

The most celebrated brands these days, from Louis Vuitton to Chanel to Gucci, are icons of unobtainium for mere commoners. The aura of their status is imbued with exclusivity. The fashion figures who command respect inside the echo chamber of the Spectacle wear outfits costing thousands of dollars. Those who can afford them are obsessed with maintaining the spectacle of their elitism. Many who can’t even afford to emulate the spectacle, yet still seek to, maintain an illusion of wealth under the burden of debt and enslave themselves to keeping up appearances. 

As much as the entertainment industry likes to rub the red carpet in the faces of the masses, propping up their extravagant lifestyle on the adoration of those they insult, a well fashioned life is not just the province of the fashion elite.

As whatever remains of the middle class gets wiped out and swiped up by the plutocrats of our day, there are other options for those of us who choose to live within our means, and live well. To be able to manage with what one has will once again be a virtue as the realities of all manner of shortages come home to roost. It is often nice to have things we want, but it is also a virtue to be content with just having our needs met. Choosing to embrace the life of LESS[1] puts one in a position to be downwardly mobile. Yet even in the case of downshifting to the realities of energy descent, a person can be a downwardly mobile dandy, or a trailer park quaintrelle.

The dandy, and his counterpart on the female end of the gender spectrum, the quaintrelle, are best characterized as people whose appearances, combined with temperament and wit, have a sublime effect on those they come in contact with. This is achieved through cultivating an aesthetic of composed elegance, dignity, equanimity, and a keen sense of wit and whimsy.[2] Self-expression through clothes may seem less important than just having functional attire for work, and keeping warm in winter and cool on the long, ever-hotter days of summer, but it is important. Clothes can influence how we think and feel about ourselves and the ways others interact with us. In times of energy descent and cultural crisis these powerful factors aren’t to be ignored.

From the very beginning the dandy has been downwardly mobile. George Bryan “Beau” Brummell, who is considered to be the first dandy, died penniless in a French asylum in 1840. If he’d done some other work and had some other interests instead of spending the first five hours his day getting dressed, he might not have lost his mind. I don’t want readers to take dandyism so far they end up on the wrong end of a psychiatrist. How we dress isn’t that important. Rather, the trailer park quaintrelle makes a conscious and controlled descent into that lap of luxury sometimes called genteel poverty. The downwardly mobile dandy chooses to live a life of nonchalant refinement, leisure and the cultivation of culture even as the current civilization slowly disintegrates around him. 

Brummell’s descent is actually a cautionary tale for the would-be deindustrial dandy. It is a lesson in the power of staying out of debt and out of the madhouse, and his story is worth looking at in brief. Brummell came from a middle-class family, but his father William had high hopes of his son becoming a gentleman. On his father’s part it might have been psychological compensation for the rumors that had swirled around his own birth: that he was the bastard child of no less than Frederick, Prince of Wales, casually cast aside. The elder Brummell imposed his thwarted aristocratic aspiration onto his own boy, and the imprinted desire of being genteel manifested in an obsession with clothing.

When the young Beau Brummell was at Eton College he made one of his first marks on fashion, a modern variation on the cravat, adorned with a gold buckle. This distinguished him amidst a sea of schoolmates whose families had more coins in the coffer than his own. After a brief stint at Oxford where he spent his time composing Latin verse, he left at age sixteen to join the military, and began to rub elbows with people in power.

He found a spot as a low-ranking officer in the 10th Royal Hussars, the personal regiment of the Prince of Wales, later to be King George IV. These dragoons became known for their lavish and elaborate uniforms. It wasn’t cheap to be a member of this branch of the military. Brummell could barely afford it, even with the inheritance left to him by his then deceased father, which amounted to about £22,000, no small sum in the last years of the 18th century. The 10th Hussars held elaborate banquets and paid extra for fine entertainment, so as to divert and impress the prince, and these expenses came out of the officers’ own pockets. To fit into this milieu Beau developed a habit for spending. During his three years of service he used his style and charm to enamor himself of the Prince and was raised to the rank of captain, much to the chagrin of his fellow officers.

The Prince was fascinated by Beau, whose wit and elocution were on equal footing with his flair for flashy dress. When Brummell left the service, he found himself well positioned to have a place in London society. His dead father would have been proud to know his son was circulating among posh people. He even came to be an “influencer.” Opting for a slightly less ornate way of dressing than others at the time (though no less expensive), he donned well-fitted bespoke coats, clean bright shirts, and trousers. The showpieces were his cravats that he knotted into elaborate designs. Soon other fops were flocking to him for advice on how to rock their neckerchiefs to maximum effect.   

As he drifted along inside his aristocratic fantasy, he lost touch with his middle-class background, and with reality. A nightmare of unchecked excess followed. He thought an adequate yearly allowance for a wardrobe was £800, when at the time a typical craftsman only made about £52 a year. Instead of using spit, he recommended that boots be polished with champagne. Perhaps it was easy for him to live this way, for after he had disposed of his father’s fortune, he started disposing of other people’s money loaned to him on credit. He’d also picked up the ever popular pastime of betting. Living beyond his means, gambling money that wasn’t his, he was on borrowed time.

A spat with the Prince sent him on a downward spiral into disarray. His exorbitant lifestyle caught up with him and he fled to France to escape debtor’s prison. His life was built around keeping up appearances, and when his ascent up the social ladder was canceled, he had to turn his life into a disappearance.  Away from his home country, and without others to prop him up, he unraveled and over time started to look more and more like a slob. Two decades later, sick with syphilis, he ended up in a madhouse where he died.

To me this fastidious focus, obsession, and single-minded devotion to fawning over fleeting fashion, seems, let’s say, a touch shallow. But here the maxim “The opposite of one bad idea is reliably another” can be useful. In America, it seems, many people have gone to the opposite extreme and their outer form of dressing is as neglected as their inner lives.

The dandy is dead. We have entered the age of fugly. Websites such as “People of Walmart”[3] attest to the many atrocities against decorum.  Just as the built environment influences our experience with the landscape, so does the prevailing fashion of our time influence our experience within the social landscape. If deconstructionism in architecture can be considered an aesthetic assault on the consciousness of people, so too can the embrace of fugly clothing.

What is fugly? Think neon-pink stockings, studded cowboy wear, neck tats, loud floral Hawaiian shirts made out of rayon, plastic sneakers, bubble coats that make people look like they are ready to be shipped somewhere by an angry Amazon employee.

Meanwhile haute couture remains forever out of reach of the common everyday woman or man. Whatever glamour remains in the spectacle of red-carpet taste-shapers is now just as often defiled by publicity stunts: Lady GaGa wore a suit of raw meat that would have been better left alive, or as dinner for a hungry family. The value of the jewels on a celebrity’s ankle bracelet could pay off the mortgage of a modest home.  
 
The fashions of our futures need not resemble the haute couture of today’s clueless class. The way people dress ten, twenty, thirty years from now may look like a pastiche of punk rock style, as people make do with patched together pieces found in forgotten dressers and scrounged from Goodwill warehouses. One hundred years from now they may hearken back to seventeenth-century styles once prominent in coastal towns, even as the coasts themselves continue to shift; they may in time be echoes of garments once worn by Native Americans or Aboriginal Australians or other tribal cultures; five hundred years from now as new great cultures emerge from the ashes of the coming dark age, the way people adorn themselves may well be in an unknown idiom tongue, yet timeless.

Just as the architect Christopher Alexander proposed there is a timeless way of building, I think there exists a timeless way of dressing.[4] Clothing, like architecture, should seek to mimic universal proportions and harmonies, and so encourage the elevation of body and mind. Many styles now considered old-fashioned reflect this timeless way. These ways may have been temporarily thrown into the dumpster, but for those willing to dive into history’s bin, the timeless style may yet be reclaimed.

Natural materials will complement a natural environment. The garish monstrosity of a sloganeering T-shirt, nylon shorts, and synthetic accoutrements reinforces the spectacle of a synthetic life. Wearing artificial clothes lends itself to being an artificial person. Mass produced in dehumanized factories, the products of mere transactional relationships, they are vestments of a mechanized life. Absent are those threads which bind us together by the rituals of growing, harvesting, shearing, and weaving. Shopping becomes a bandage patched over the wound left from living in an asymmetrical built and fashioned environment. 

Somewhere in between the out-of-touch cluelessness of Beau Brummell–like celebrity-level pretense and the decrepitude of the deliberately awful, there exists a mean where the two extremes may resolve and find a useful proportion. As the world deindustrializes, the downwardly mobile dandies and trailer park quaintrelles bring a modicum of taste, decorum, and style back into society.  

THE BESPOKE DEINDUSTRIALIST

​In James Howard Kunstler’s World Made by Hand novels, he addressed the idea of being well dressed as something that contributed to the mental and cultural health of the citizens of the fictional town of Union Grove. Yet many couldn’t be bothered. These were the characters who seemed to have the most trouble coping with the realities of collapse and decline that had happened in his future America. When the religious leader Brother Jobe and his flock in the New Faith Church migrated from the southern coast to the town in upstate New York where the novels are set, many of the townspeople were amazed to see his congregants wearing clean linen shirts, fitted trousers and dresses, hats, and other accessories. Their attire was made so well they stood out from the slapdash townies making do patching off-the-rack clothes they’d bought in the times when the big-box stores and chains still existed. Over the course of the books Brother Jobe determined to raise up the depressed spirit of the people. One of the ways he went about doing so was to get them fitted out in something better than rags. He organized his people to open up stores selling tailor-made clothes, even a haberdashery. These enterprises contributed to the restoration of Union Grove’s main street. With the help of Robert Earle they put together a town laundry. With people cleaned up and feeling good about themselves in well-defined duds they began to act with greater self-esteem and civility.

In John Michael Greer’s novel Retrotopia he contrasted the cruddy synthetic materials used for clothing in the Atlantic Republic with the refined sense of comfort, elegance and timeless style from eras past that had been readopted by the people of the Lakeland Republic. The main character Peter Carr is wearing bioplastic-based clothes when he first arrives in the Lakeland Republic. It isn’t long after he gets settled into his hotel, and goes for a long walk around the capitol of Toledo, that his plastic shoes fall apart. On arrival he thought the way the Lakelanders dressed was a touch odd and antiquated, until circumstance forced him to buy new shoes, which felt good to wear and walk in. Then, to fit in and to keep from being cold, he changed his whole outfit. He went from wearing what sounds like a threadbare tracksuit to a wool jacket, hempcloth shirt, and a raincoat over top of it all. His getup was topped off by the addition of a porkpie hat. After donning the local style he was happy that folks stopped staring at him for one, but he also felt comfortable, warm, dignified.

In thinking of people wearing plastic, I’m reminded of a remark about cyclists I once heard from adventurer and author Alistair Humphreys in an interview he gave on a radio show. He commented on a certain type of “MAMIL” or “Middle Aged Man In Lycra,” and that acronym has stuck with me ever since. I’m just a casual rider myself so I have never understood the obsession many cyclists seem to have with wearing spandex.

MAMILs remind me of some of the worst fashions ever presented in science fiction futures:  the stale synthetic unitards, I mean uniforms, worn by the space cadets of Star Trek. I can definitely see a version of Jean-Luc Picard training for the Tour de France in full MAMIL attire. Yet for a character who is an erudite diplomat his clothes are questionable at best. I think Picard would have looked better sipping his tea, Earl Grey, hot, wearing some kind of space finery we haven’t yet heard about. In Star Trek, and similar visions of impossible futures, it’s usually either MAMIL attire or robes. The cast of The Next Generation certainly didn’t care to wear the costumes. The material tended to bunch up, giving Picard the memorable tic of adjusting his uniform. The costumes even gave some of the cast back problems, as the tightly stretched spandex dug into their bodies for twelve- to fourteen-hour work days. Off set, the costuming department had to deal with the accumulated stench; spandex is good at soaking up the sweat and body odors.[1]  

Part of the draw of steampunk literature and its offshoots in other media is the sense of excitement about what characters get to wear. Top hats, cloaks, capes, and coats, all filled with hidden pockets, pocket watches, finished off with monocles or goggles, all made to withstand the rigors of adventure, inclement weather, and fine enough to lounge in with a snifter of brandy in a well-appointed study while plotting all manner of subterfuge.

Deindustrial writers can also make their characters clothing appeal to readers who might want to mimic it. The idea of clothes made to last and made by hand has already begun to show up as a trope in deindustrial fiction beyond Kunstler’s World Made by Hand quartet and Retrotopia. It can be found in the After Oil anthologies and Into the Ruins, and has continued with the stories in New Maps. The characters in David England’s “A Hollow Honor” (iss. 1:3) , for example, are all dressed to the nines for a fine occasion.  By contrast, in Karen Mandell’s story “Tug of War” (iss. 1:2), the soil had been so depleted it couldn’t support the growth of cotton or other plants needed for textiles. When the characters in her story go to a dance they have to raid the wardrobes left behind by the former occupants of a home they took residence in. The other attendees wear a mishmash of styles taken from whatever is available.

In contemplating the varieties of futures ahead of us, I think it is probable people will wear a mixture of legacy clothing from the industrial era, as well as new homespun and bespoke clothes. The decades ahead may look a bit punk, a bricolage of styles and eras, all stitched together, with needle, thread and safety pins, just as the punk rock movement itself was made up of a mixture of previous youth and artistic subcultures.[2]  

TO FASHION A LIFE

If you want to “collapse now and avoid the rush” in terms of clothing, what I suggest for fans of deindustrial fiction is a bit of everyday cosplay. Let us start to wear now the kind of clothes we envisage the various peoples of the various futures to wear. Let us look to older styles and fashions, and combine them with new imagined styles, informed by personal vision, in order to create something unique and our own. We can also stock our wardrobe with necessities in the same way we might stock the pantry with dried beans and rice. In addition to having extra pairs of work clothes, socks, underwear and shoes, fancier dress-up clothing should be also be stashed in our closets for weddings, funerals and other occasions. A fortune need not be spent if you accept hand-me-downs and invest a bit of time in combing thrift stores, garage sales, and other second-hand venues. Sewing, mending, weaving, knitting, and other related textile arts are sure to be profitable skills, within the home economy, and as a primary or secondary income stream.

As the current system runs into overshoot, and its baroque complexities falter, folks will, of necessity, look for local and low-power solutions. As the resources needed to make synthetic clothing gradually disappear, the ability to fashion a life at an earlier level of technology will become an enviable skill. Looking backwards and making note of what worked for other peoples in various climates in older times can be part of the process. The lives we fashion might as well be beautiful, and with an aesthetic sense that is in harmony with natural patterns.    

“The real reason I like natural fabrics,” outdoorsman Fennel Hudson writes, “is not just because they are traditional, but because of their provenance. I like the thought that, for example, a favorite tweed jacket was once a sheep, living upon a mountain in Scotland.”

The non-profit Fibershed organization offers another useful “farm-to-closet” vision. They are working to develop local natural dye and fiber systems with an emphasis on land and soil regeneration, while helping to create bioregional textile economies. As necessity puts us back in touch with local and natural materials, the timeless way of dressing, in tune with the ecosystem, and in tune with the needs of the people, will be spun out. Woven within that cloth will be the many styles and stories of our futures.

​Fashions are subject to ebb and flow, and change in some ways from generation to generation. The tide of the dandy may have gone out to sea, but I think it is due for a return. All we have to do is go down and comb the beach beneath the streets for those gifts of the dandy the ocean has seen fit to cough back up.  

NOTES:
​
[1] “Less Energy, Stuff, and Stimulation,”in John Michael Greer’s phrase from The Blood of the Earth (Bibliotheque Rouge, 2012).

[2] The dandy is also often a flâneur, as Charles Baudelaire gave definition to both and linked them together as being part of the metaphysical aspect of Romanticism in his essay “The Painter of Modern Life.” 

[3] https://www.peopleofwalmart.com

[4] Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

​[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3022935/how-star-trek-killed-something-worse-than-klingons-spandex

[2] Jon Savage shows in his book Teenage: the Creation of a Youth Culture, that the punk rock subculture had antecendents in a number of post WWII subcultures such as the Beats, Situationism, and others all combined and "stuck together with safety pins".

RE/SOURCES:

There are numerous books on style and fashion, from the timeless to the fleeting, available from your local library if you, as an aspiring dandy or quaintrelle, need a touch of inspiration. The genre is so well represented I refrained from listing those kinds of books. Happy hunting!

D’Aurevilly, Barbey. 1928. The Anatomy of Dandyism: With Some Observations on Beau Brummell, trans. D.B. Wyndham Lewis. London, England: Peter Davies.

Burgess, Rebecca. 2019. Fibershed: Growing a Movement of Farmers, Fashion Activists, and Makers for a New Textile Economy. White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green.

“A Gentleman.” 1836. The Laws of Etiquette: or, Short Rules and Reflections for Conduct in Society. Philadelphia, Pa.: Carey, Lea & Blanchard.

Greer, John Michael. 2016. Retrotopia. Founders House Publishing, s.l.
Hudson, Fennel. 2013. A Meaningful Life: Fennel’s Journal, No. 1. Marford, Wrexham, Wales: ‎ Fennel's Priory Limited.

Kelly, Ian. 2006. Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Man of Style. New York, N.Y.: Free Press.

Kunstler, James Howard. 2009–2016. World Made by Hand series: World Made by Hand (2007), The Witch of Hebron (2010), A History of the Future (2014), The Harrows of Spring (2016). New York, N.Y.: Atlantic Monthly Press.

Savage, Jon. 2007. Teenage: the Creation of Youth Culture. New York, N.Y.: Viking.
Whimsy, Lord Breaulove Swells (a.k.a. Victor Allen Crawford III). 2006. The Affected Provincial’s Companion. London, England: Bloomsbury

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This was another essay for my Cheap Thrills column in an issue of New Maps. I am adding these all to my website now, since they originally appeared first in print.

Find my other Cheap Thrills articles here at the links below:
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A COMPLEXITY OF SPECTACLES

DREAM FORAGING

STREAM FORAGING

THE POWER OF THREE: TERNARY LOGIC, TRIOLECTICS AND THREE SIDED FOOTBALL

RADIOS NEXT GOLDEN AGE

THE ART AND PLEASURE OF LETTER WRITING

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