Search results for "dandyism"

‘Strange old Italian dresses’: Walter Pater, Victorian fashionista?

2019

This article discusses Aesthetic dress as conceived by Walter Pater. Indeed in “Leonardo Da Vinci” (1869), the unfinished Gaston de Latour (1888-1894?), “The School of Giorgione” (1877) and “A Prince of Court Painters” (1885), Pater mentions and describes dress with special emphasis on details. Such descriptions belong to a series of writings on Aesthetic dress, admittedly a core component of British Aestheticism. Pater’s descriptions should therefore be contrasted to the 1870s portraits of Whistler, and to the 1880s-1890s writings of Whistler, Oscar Wilde and Max Beerbohm, along with the caricatures of Aesthetes by George du Maurier and Sir Leslie Ward. Pater responds by progressively deli…