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Professor Monica Miller’s new book, “Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity,” features on its cover a color photograph of New York artist Iké Udé dressed in dark pinstripe trousers, soft gray side-buttoned shoes with matching gloves, and a long dark suit coat that just shows the cuffs of his checkered shirt, a yellow and red boutonniere pinned to his lapel. He is perched on the very edge of a low green-cushioned sedan, his side turned to the camera. His right leg rests delicately on his bent left knee, his elbow at a 20-degree angle and the fingertips of his gloved right hand just touching the top of his pinstriped right knee. His chin, turned ever so slightly away from the camera, is lifted to display his head in perfect profile.

The impeccable dress, the precise calculus used to arrange limbs and torso to best display the body to advantage, and the utter defiance of self-presentation—all of these are the mark of the black dandy. Released last week by Duke University Press, “Slaves to Fashion” explores the central role that this type of sartorial performance has played in the creation of black identity over the course of the last three centuries. Miller, assistant professor of English at Barnard, points to the black dandy, a category that includes people as diverse as W.E.B. Du Bois and hip-hop star Andre 3000, as a central figure in the African-American community for talking about empowerment. “Dandies are not always the wealthiest, but they aspire to other things and show that existing hierarchies can be broken,” says Miller. “It’s about making something out of nothing.”

Crafting something out of nothing is a fair description for Miller’s project as a whole. The inspiration for the project came in a course on W.E.B. Du Bois that Miller took as a graduate student. “We were reading ‘The Souls of Black Folk’”, Miller says, “when I came across a footnote on Du Bois’s political image saying that he was often caricatured as a black dandy. This was surprising to me because the images of him always seemed very serious, but the caricature was meant as a huge insult. So I started asking why it would matter so much for Du Bois to be associated with the black dandy.”

What Miller began to uncover was the long history of the black dandy, a figure that was originally used in black minstrel shows as a way of denigrating black aspiration. The black dandy appears in major literary works of the 19th century, including those by Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe, in theatrical productions, paintings, caricatures, and even as a musical phenomenon. “It became obvious that there was a lot to say,” Miller says. “This was a major discussion.” Although a good deal of literature exists on the question of dandyism, Miller’s study represents one of the first to look at the phenomenon within the African-American community. By focusing on black fashion as it plays out in moments of historical transition, such as the movement from slavery to freedom in America, Miller demonstrates how black fashion can be used to understand how African Americans have thought about themselves and how those notions have shifted in different contexts. Miller further brings to light a gradual evolution from what she calls “being subject to a sartorial regime”—from when slaves were dressed up by their masters to reflect the latter’s affluence to ultimately gaining control over their own self-presentation.

Looking into questions of black style has also brought to light a new dimension of W.E.B. Du Bois’s character for Miller. Reading through Du Bois’s autobiographical materials, it became clear to Miller that he “was really concerned with looking good.” “There was a huge concern with respectability and being able to have self-respect,” Miller reflects. “By African-American standards, Du Bois was very cosmopolitan, and he wanted to signal that through his dress.” In the end, Miller says, the political cartoon “really got him.” Drawing from a variety of written and visual sources from both sides of the Atlantic, Miller’s book looks at such discussions of black identity as they played out during the time that separates the first appearance of the dandy Mungo on the London stage in the mid-18th century and contemporary artists like Udé. According to Miller, dandies throughout history have shared an aesthetic of the
incongruous, that of the “slave dressed in silk,” along with a constant sense of “clearly trying to do something with how they dress.” Throughout her book, Miller uses the black dandy as an entry into questions of class, gender, and nationality—notions that dandies have often destabilized through their meticulously loud dress.

At times celebrated for their ability to combine extravagance and meticulousness and at times subject to harsh criticism for lacking respectability, dandies have always been extremely conspicuous figures and ones that have tended to elicit strong reactions. For Miller, this in itself is a sign of dandyism’s centrality. “Many people tend to see dress as something superficial or unimportant. But the fact that dandies have attracted so much attention and such strong reactions speaks to the importance of something as frivolous as dress. We should really understand dress as an act of agency, as something that is oriented towards the future.”