Slaves to fashion

"Clothes make the manand other intergendered subjectivitiesin this stimulating study of the social meaning of fashion in the black community. Barnard English professor Miller surveys the history of sartorial style and flamboyance among black dandies and the cultural responses, both fascinated and alarmed, they have provoked. She paints a broad and teeming panorama: the 18th-century English dandy whose stylishness subtly subverted the markers of slavery; his appearance in the writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain and W.E.B. Du Bois; his reappearance in 20th-century Harlem as an icon of freedom and modernity; his role in avant-garde film and art; and modern-day avatars Sean Combs and Andre 3000. Throughout, she explores the protean manifestations of dandyism, its blurring of racial and sexual boundaries, its significations of status and respectability, its capacity to satirize white fashionableness even as it expressed black determination to emulate and surpass white high-style. Miller's writing can be densely academic"A dandy is a kind of embodied, animated sign system that deconstructs given and normative categories of identity"but she offers an incisive, nuanced analysis of a rich vein of cultural history. Photos. (Nov.)" —Publishers Weekly Reviews.