What do we know about Beau Brummell?

Beau Brummell was an infamous figure in his day because of his close relationship with the Prince Regent - later to become George IV - and for what Virginia Woolf described as ' some curious combination of wit, of taste, of insolence, of independence'. (Woolf, 1925: np) Brummell has since been the subject of many narrative accounts of his life, one of the most recent being a BBC Television Drama, This Charming Man, adapted from a popular biography by Ian Kelly.

Kelly's reading of Brummell, as a modern-day celebrity, is informed by the theoretical writing on contemporary celebrity culture. (Church-Gibson: 2011, Dyer: 2007, Turner: 2014) For fashion historians and fashion theorists, Beau Brummell is also a significant figure because he is accredited with the reinvention of menswear and thus a new version of hegemonic masculinity. While the implications of these readings of him are explored as part of a wider understanding of the cultural significance of fashion as popular culture, attitudes to fashion history, which have seen it described as 'hemline history' (Jarvis, 1998:3) ensure that Brummell is generally not considered in more 'serious' historical theorizing.

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