"If people turn to look at you in the street, you are not well
dressed, but either too stiff, too tight, or too fashionable." --
Beau Brummell Long before tabloids and television, Beau Brummell
was the first person famous for being famous, the male socialite of
his time, the first metrosexual -- 200 years before the word was
conceived. His name has become synonymous with wit, profligacy,
fine tailoring, and fashion. A style pundit, Brummell was singly
responsible for changing forever the way men dress -- inventing, in
effect, the suit. Brummell cut a dramatic swath through British
society, from his early years as a favorite of the Prince of Wales
and an arbiter of taste in the Age of Elegance, to his precipitous
fall into poverty, incarceration, and madness. Brummell created the
blueprint for celebrity crash and burn, falling dramatically out of
favor and spending his last years in a hellish asylum. For nearly
two decades, Brummell ruled over the tastes and pursuits of the
well heeled and influential, and for almost as long, lived in
penury and exile. With vivid prose, critically acclaimed biographer
Ian Kelly unlocks the glittering, turbulent world of
late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth-century London -- the first truly
modern metropolis: venal, fashion-and-celebrity obsessed,
self-centered and self-doubting -- through the life of one of its
greatest heroes and most tragic victims. Brummell personified
London's West End, where a new style of masculinity and modern
men's fashion were first defined. Brummell was the leading Casanova
and elusive bachelor of his time, appealing to both men and women
of his society. The man Lord Byron once claimed was more important
than Napoleon, Brummell was the ultimate cosmopolitan man. "Toyboy"
to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and leader of playboys
including the eventual king of England, Brummell inspired Pushkin
to write Eugene Onegin, and Byron to write Don Juan, and he
influenced others from Oscar Wilde to Coco Chanel. Through love
letters, historical records, and poems, Kelly reveals the man
inside the suit, unlocking the scandalous behavior of London's high
society while illuminating Brummell's enigmatic life in the
colorful, tumultuous West End. A rare rendering of an era filled
with excess, scandal, promiscuity, opulence, and luxury, Beau
Brummell is the first comprehensive view of an elegant and
ultimately tragic figure whose influence continues to this day.
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