Gustav Temple reviews the new sartorial tome by Rose Callahan and Nathaniel Adams.
First there was I am Dandy (2013), followed by We Are Dandy (2016). We seem to have skipped You Are Dandy (because you are probably not) and now, thirteen years after the first collection, They Are Dandy hits bookshelves across the world. And the new tome proves that dandyism is here to stay, regenerating itself continually as the decades pass.
As the publisher is keen to point out, in a hand-wringing press release that apologises in advance for showing photos of people having fun with clothing, “Far from a homogenous relic of the past, contemporary dandyism is a powerful way for individuals to assert their visibility and push against rigid societal codes.”
Nathaniel Adams and Rose Callahan, old friends of The Chap based respectively in New Orleans and New York, have no truck with such cautious language, knowing full well that dandyism is immune to rigid societal codes; in fact dandyism makes up its own societal codes as it goes along, always one step ahead of society and always determined not to be swallowed up by fleeting trends, whether in clothing, identity politics or pronouns.
When they set off on their journeys around the world with camera and notebook in hand, all Callahan and Adams want to do is to meet the men and women who shake convention wherever they live, merely through dressing splendidly. In New York they meet 13-year old Gilbert Wing, who mixes true vintage with his self-made 1920s regalia; in London they encounter Grand Flaneurs Ben Golik, Stewart Vickers and the Discount Count, while their travels also took them to Los Angeles, Fargo and Paris.
In every location, they unearth the diamonds lurking beneath the rocks, Callahan photographing them in a setting that sums up not only where they are from, but also where they are at. Meanwhile, Adams questions them in his lighthearted but incisive manner, putting each subject at their ease while extracting the nuggets that explain why they are not dressing like everyone else around them.
The result is an encyclopaedia of sartorial excellence that gives hope for the future of fashion, in a world rapidly being sucked into a vortex of blandness and conformity. Adams & Callahan have indeed – yet without feeling the need to spell it out – documented “an inclusive landscape where dandyism belongs to anyone obsessed with masculine elegance, regardless of class, race, age, sexuality, or gender.”
They Are Dandy is published by Gestalten
