Hey, remember Billy Porter's incredible gown on the Oscars red carpet? My goodness, he looked fantastic. And the article he published in Vogue to explain why he did it? Amazing icing on the delicious cake.

But maybe you still have questions. Maybe some of your questions are: “Goddammit, but why aren't men allowed to wear clothes like that? How did it get to be this way?”

Gather 'round, children, and I'll tell you a horrible story about why men's fashion is Kind Of Like That.

So, back in Regency England—the period spanning roughly 1795 to 1837—there was this guy called Beau Brummell, and he's the reason we can't have nice things.

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The Brummell family, middle-class Londoners with loftier aspirations, were desperate to climb that next rung on the social ladder. Their son, Beau, was born in 1778. As a boy, Beau was educated with gentlemen's sons at Eton and, by the age of sixteen when he left Oxford, was already starting to be something of a stylistic beacon for the young men of his set. His influence only increased during his time in the army, where he befriended the prince—the future King George IV—presumably by means of his (very well-documented) scathing wit and irreverence, to put it charitably. In other words, he made a habitual performance of wry cruelty, lifting himself up by putting other people down, and a lot of people, even to this day, think that kind of thing is funny.

Back in Regency England, there was this guy called Beau Brummell, and he's the reason we can't have nice things.

Beau Brummell was a dandy. You've probably heard the term before, but I would bet dollars to donuts that you think “dandy” means bright colors, lots of lace and gilt, and a big powdered wig. (That's a fop; they're different things.) A dandy was the Regency equivalent of that guy who in the '80s and '90s could be found apathetically lounging on doorjambs at parties, smoking a cigarette and doing an excellent and studied performance of cynical carelessness. Brummel made an art of (as Robert Pattinson once so evocatively phrased it) pretentious dishevelment. In fact, it allegedly took him hours to be so artfully and pretentiously disheveled.

Dandyism was concerned with physical appearance, a façade of leisure and privilege, and the “cult of the self”—and Beau Fucking Brummell was the king of the dandies. He went so hard on his own aesthetic that he (with some assistance from abstract outside forces like the Napoleonic Wars) managed to wrench men's fashion away from the bright, ornamented style of 40 or 50 years previous, and steer it into a conservative dreariness that is not unfamiliar to the modern eye.

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And then men's fashion pretty much froze for the next 200 years. There were a few secondary influences, but Brummell was at the epicenter of the big tipping point, at least for middle-to-upper-class Western masculinity. You know, the people who have functionally owned the world for more than three hundred years.

Beau Brummell was the Regency equivalent of the worst kind of Instagram influencer. He disdained and mocked his peers, insulted people when they asked for his opinion, and generally went around negging everyone. And it totally worked.

Beau Brummell was the Regency equivalent of the worst kind of Instagram influencer.

He said, "To be truly elegant one should not be noticed." There is some benefit to this sort of mentality: After all, if there's a set of Rules that demand that everyone wear a nearly identical suit, then there is no possibility for error or embarrassment, as long as you conform. That's worth amputating all opportunities for genuine self-expression, isn't it? It's worth repressing everything special or unique about yourself, crushing it down and keeping it there so that you can fit into the box, right?

But no one really fits into the box. See, there is only a very narrow demographic of people who get the luxury of being both elegant and unnoticed. Disabled people don't get that luxury. Fat people don't get it. People of color don't get it. Female-presenting people, gender nonconforming people, and visibly queer people in general—they don't get it. They are either relegated to being perpetually on stage for the rest of the world, constantly noticed, judged, and scrutinized, or they are forced to make do however they can, invisibly, because the rest of society has decided it can't stomach the sight of them, and certainly doesn't want to give them the opportunity to (gasp!) draw positive attention to themselves.

Toxic masculinity enacts passive, insidious violence: It is that tiny box that men are expected (and in some contexts required) to attempt to cram themselves into. If you fit into it really well, you might not even know the box is there.

But no one really fits into the box.

But back to Beau “Bane of My Actual Life” Brummell. Beau Brummell, who was the beginning of two hundred years of death for men's fashion, and the reason that many (straight, white, heterosexual) men today feel self-conscious about wearing color, or textures, or patterns, or anything else that makes them stand out from the sea of dull blues and grays. Sure, there have always been flares of counter-culture (almost all of which relied on styles appropriated from marginalized communities), but the prevailing baseline of “appropriate and presentable” menswear—the things worn by senators, CEOs, lawyers—has not significantly changed in centuries.

Look at so many of those “10 tips for adding style to your wardrobe” articles for men today—the majority of the points are still trivial things like, “Try wearing colorful socks or pocket squares.” We've gotten to a point where many men are so desperate to express their individuality and feel so paralyzed by the constraints of mainstream fashion that the only way they can break out is in tiny, underhanded ways—socks, pocket squares, an unusual tie knot. No one says, “Have you thought about a brocade waistcoat, earrings, or eyeliner? How about nail polish?” No one says, “What would make you feel like a million bucks? What do you wear in your wildest dreams?”

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I wrote this big Twitter thread ranting about Beau “Actual Dickhead” Brummell last month. Needless to say, it made a lot of people very angry, specifically many men who, deep in their toxic masculinity, aggressively rejected the idea that they might ever want to think about sartorial self-expression. (Which ... that's fine. Really. You do you, boys. The whole point is that there shouldn't be any rules at all, and that you should wear exactly whatever you want.) But I got so many other responses—men who reached out to say that they cried to discover this new thing about themselves. Who said they longed to dress differently but felt like they shouldn't. Who didn't know they were allowed to even want to dress beautifully.

Many men are aching just to be seen. To have their physical embodiments acknowledged, and to be just a little bit less anonymous. And yet the thought of that is terrifying, too. When you've been invisible your whole life, the idea of standing out hits you like stage fright: Either you're unnoticed, or everyone notices you. It's both paralyzing and, on some level, deeply seductive. (And, because they've never been seen, many men—sweet, well-meaning men!—don't understand why women don't like to be catcalled. I have had men say to me, “It would make my whole week to be complimented by a stranger. It'd make my whole year.” They're dying of thirst in the desert, and they can't quite understand why people drowning at sea have anything to complain about.)

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But back, once more, to Beau “Why Didn't Anyone Slap Him?” Brummell, the author of all this misery, if indeed it has an author that can be named. He claimed that he spent five hours a day dressing and that he had his shoes polished with champagne. His preferred style was so restrictively tight that one required the aid of a valet to actually get dressed. He also didn't eat vegetables, and he drove himself so far into debt for his Artfully Nonchalant fashions that he had to flee the country and ended up dying of syphilis in an asylum, impoverished. So the story has a happy ending after all, at least for petty bitches like me.

Two hundred years later, we are still feeling the weight of his influence. But Billy Porter has been breaking my heart with his fashion this last year, and he's not the only one—the men on the red carpets recently are giving us something to actually look at besides another anonymous tuxedo. Perhaps it's beginning to change, and Brummell's legacy is finally starting to fade. Perhaps we're starting to remember that everyone likes feeling special, that dress is one way to do that, that it's not unmanly to like color and sparkle, that extravagant self-expression is not necessarily a bad thing. That having the desire to be ornamented, to be gorgeous, to be seen, is not a bad thing.

I have so much hope for the future. Boys, you could be beautiful if you wanted. You're allowed.

Alexandra Rowland Alexandra Rowland is the author of A Conspiracy of Truths (2018) and A Choir of Lies (forthcoming, 2019), and they are one of three hosts of the literary podcast, Be the Serpent.

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