What’s the matter with the clothes I’m wearing?
“Can’t you tell that your tie’s too wide?”
Maybe I should buy some old tab collars?
“Welcome back to the age of jive”
Where have you been hidin’ out lately, honey?
You can’t dress trashy till you spend a lot of money
Everybody’s talkin’ ‘bout the new sound
Funny, but it’s still rock and roll to me
Billy Joel, It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me
Some vignettes of dandyism in the late 20th century compiled by Carlos Primo and Leticia García:
In 1979, during a tour with The Jacksons, Michael Jackson appeared on stage for the first time wearing a single white glove on his right hand [...]
In 1984, Steven Patrick Morrissey, nicknamed “the dandy of pop”, declares to Smash magazine that he always fills scenarios with flowers because that way he feels closer to Oscar Wilde, towards whom he feels an almost biblical admiration [...]
In 1977, Marc Bolan & The T-Rex released the single Hot George, whose cover reads "Marc Bolan does Beau Brummell."1
From my own harvest:
One of David Bowie, the greatest rock and roll dandy: on the cover of the British edition of The Man who Sold the World (1971), Bowie appears reclined on a chaise lounge covered in blue velvet. He’s wearing a long cream satin dress with art nouveau-style flourishes and holding a card between his index and middle finger, the rest of the deck lies on the floor. It is said that the his curls were inspired by the paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
In 1981, English band Bow Wow Wow, made up of former members of Adam and the Ants and singer Annabella Lwin, released their debut album, entitled See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang Yeah, City All Over! Go Ape Crazy! The record cover is a recreation of Le déjeuner sur l’herb by Édouard Manet, which features a naked woman having lunch with two fully dressed men. Like the original a century before, Bow Wow Wow’s cover created controversy, Lwin was only fourteen years old.
In 1992 Morrissey released a single entitled Interesting Drug. The video featured “a group of schoolboys hanging out in a restroom, wearing high heels, writing Morrissey graffiti, and reading The New Musical Express.”2 In the video, the headline of the NME article reads: “MORRISSEY: I am a total sex object. A lot of men and women find me unmistakably attractive.”
In 1996, Jarvis Cocker, frontman of Pulp, slipped past the BRIT awards’ security team and appeared on stage in the middle of Michael Jackson’s show. Cocker posed before the cameras, looked indifferently at Jackson, who was at the moment on top of some scaffolding, and lifted his jacket a couple of times to show his backside until a member of Jackson’s choir chased him off the stage. Known for his distinctive style, Cocker is perhaps one of the paradigmatic examples of the contemporary dandy, he would wear all kinds of clothes that openly clashed with the grunge aesthetics of the 90’s. “You’d sometimes see him at charity shops, rummaging through the 70s crushed velvet jackets even the tramps had scorned.”3
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