dandy, flaneuse, loiterer
Who can pass?
Hanging around, loitering, sometimes I want to stand out, be seen…I just need a suit
Suited and booted: an investigation of the contemporary flaneur through performance and street parade.
I continue to explore hybrid perspectives on the contemporary flaneur and flaneuse drawing on thoughts and writings of (amongst others) Walter Benjamin, Franz Hessel, Janet Wolff, Alice Cicolini, Sally Munt and Lauren Elkin. These have been investigated and developed through a number of enactments, performances and street parades . One of these was Shade, a collaborative performance process for which I devised and performed original material in the character of the Dandy, over a two-year period.
Shade was a collaborative performance parade about influence and exchange, beautifully tailored suits acting as passports; dressing to pass across borders, traditions and identities.
Jacky Puzey, Shade director, created a bespoke Dandy suit for me modelled on a Zoot-suit style three-piece I had bought in Detroit, Michigan, some years previously. The suit, called Husky style, was made for young African American teenage boys, so the sizing works well.
The Dandy crosses borders through style - street style, radical tailoring, dandy style, gender/public place politics, drawing on Le Sape collective of Congolese Dandies, and on my own histories of living in Detroit, dressing in suits, and being out on the streets as a woman. Although, the Sapeurs form the main strand in the creation of the Dandy suit, I was not attempting to re-present the Congolese experience, rather to create opportunities for conversation through cloth across cultures, of which the Dandy is an overt presence, and how that act of parading style in contested locations resonates across histories of dress, colonialism and postcolonialism, visibility and place, gender and cross-dressing politics.
Is it loitering, or being a flåneur, or flåneuse, or a dandy? What’s the difference? I tried to find out …
The Flaneur 1 https://vimeo.com/manage/77247868/general
The Flaneur 2 https://vimeo.com/manage/77277199/general
