ABSTRACT
Yinka Shonibare appears, in Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998), fine and fancy, charming and debonair, confident and poised, a feast for the eyes, and a fine figure of a man, at whom we have no choice but to gaze, admiringly. Master of a Victorian world of corsets and petticoats, liveried servants, mob-capped maids, billiards, and a salon, adored by all in his company, this dandy’s authority and prestige are unquestionable. The Diary, a series of five Chromogenic photographs, each 72 × 90 inches, depicts the revels of a black dandy holding court in a luxurious nineteenth-century stately home. The dandy, in the most general sense, is a literary and social figure who, through observation and innovation, has evolved an exquisitely perfect personal style of dress and behavior, which facilitates his dazzling social ascent.1 Dandyism is about style, with a complex relationship to class as well as to the idealization and activity of the body, and a fraught racial history, making the dandy an ideal figure on which to base an exploration of the elusiveness of identity.
