Zoot suits, mashers & New Romantics: the evolution of the dandy

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Zootsuiters, mods, mashes, and sapurs. Since the early 19th century, fashionable male subcultures have popped up across the globe, and in his new book The Dandy, a People's History of Sartorial splendour, Peter Anderson examines how the idea of the dandy has evolved over time, arguing that the idea of dressing well was not limited to the elites. I spoke to him to find out more about Britain's first male fashion icon and why wearing a baggy suit in the 1940s could have you mistaken for a rioter.

Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Peter, to talk all about the history of Dandeism. So for anyone who's not familiar with that term or maybe has heard it but doesn't really know what we're talking about, what's your definition of A dandy. There is a common definition of of the dandy, but I I think I should say that in my book I have sort of my own definition of it, because I write not about the the type of dandies that most scholars have have written about before. I write about ordinary men from the lower stratus of of society who try to be dandies.

They have been called different things in in different decades, in different periods. But there I think there is a a a running thread go going through from from the early 19th century up until at least the late 20th century. One of the things that I have as a sort of running thread is that they all wore suits. They all wore a sort of tie and so on.

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