This book brings together the three most extraordinary French texts written about Dandism: Treaty of elegant life, by Honoré de Balzac, The painter of modern life, by Charles Baudelaire, and Del dandismo and George Brummell, by J.A. Barbey d’Aurevilly.
It is not a history text, much less a mere rescue of old writings. It is a pleasant walk through the world of dandism understood as a still current way of thinking about subjectivity, the tension between originality and everyday life, and the secret desire to become different, unique. The dandi is the great aesthetic figure of the nineteenth century and is still today, in its different reincarnations, the horizon that turns artists to artists.