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), p. 20. 104 Bernard Reynolds in Grace and Reynolds, Benton End Remembered , p. 34. 105 Chatto, ‘Sir Cedric Morris, Artist-Gardener’, p. 18. 106 A. Syme, A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-Siècle Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010 ), p. 12. 107 J. K. Huysmans, Against Nature (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998 [ 1884 ]). J., F. B., ‘When a Man Entertains: What a Bachelor Should Do in the Position of Host’, Homes and Gardens (June 1926), p. 79. 108 Morris C., ‘Concerning
Richly illustrated with over 110 colour and black and white images, the book productively contests the supposedly exclusive feminine aspect of the style moderne (art deco). It explores how alternative, parallel and overlapping experiences and expressions of decorative modernism, nationalism, gender and sexuality in the heady years surrounding World War I converge in the protean figure of the deco dandy. As such, the book significantly departs from and corrects the assumptions and biases that have dominated scholarship on and popular perceptions of art deco. The book outlines how designed products and representations of and for the dandy both existed within and outwith normative expectations of gender and sexuality complicating men’s relationship to consumer culture more broadly and the moderne more specifically. Through a sustained focus on the figure of the dandy, the book offers a broader view of art deco by claiming a greater place for the male body and masculinity in this history than has been given to date. The mass appeal of the dandy in the 1920s was a way to redeploy an iconic, popular and well-known typology as a means to stimulate national industries, to engender a desire for all things made in France. Important, essential and productive moments in the history of the cultural life of Paris presented in the book are instructive of the changing role performed by consumerism, masculinity, design history and national identity.
character’ of one and all.115 POTVIN 9781526134790 PRINT.indd 189 24/09/2020 08:48 190 Deco Dandy Notes 1 For more on the relationship between the bachelor and interior design, see J. Potvin, Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2014). 2 T. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (New York: Robert M. McBride & Company, [1886] 1900), p. 279. 3 J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, [1884] 1998), p. 27. 4 Ibid., pp. 27–8. 5