ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the concept of the vampire dandy and its explicit/implicit relationship to the nineteenth century dandy, the vampire, and its twenty-first century incarnation, the metrosexual. These figures, or models of masculinity, in many similar ways interrogate conventional conceptions of masculinity and sexuality, appearing during times of political or economic crisis. In many ways the vampire is the embodiment of the fine between sex and death, and in many respects a conjunction of extremes. The conflation of the vampire and the dandy is an historic one that is applied sympathetically to the man who is no longer encumbered by the need to be physically strong, or rather the strength comes from elsewhere. In a curious and ironic inversion, while the vampire had always been surrounded by anachronisms that reflect his embeddedness in an imponderably distant past, the contemporary vampire dandy is arguably an after-effect of technology.
