This project was conceived and curated by Alice Cicolini and Christopher Breward.
The exhibition launched in 2001, at a time when the figure of the dandy was a source of increasing fascination for many writers, artists and designers, many of whom had alighted on this sartorial identity as a way of expressing a form of contemporary British masculinity. As early as 1996, The Chap and The Idler were exploring dandy lifestyle and dress as an antidote to a social and retail landscape that was dominated by globalisation and brand.
Drawing on this energy, 21st Century Dandy explored six sartorially self-conscious male typologies in contemporary British culture of the time, illustrating the debt each owed to dandy philosophy. Nigel Shafron’s photographic portrait commissions that accompanied the exhibition and the book showed how dandyism is at once an exclusive and democratic stance - democratic because it appears so easily attainable, but elusive in that so few succeed in getting it right.
The exhibition launched in Moscow and toured internationally. The project later became the subject for New English Dandy, published in 2005 by Thames & Hudson.
Exhibition design by Stafford Schmool; Graphics by Miles Murray Sorrell FUEL.