To Be Seen and Not Defined: Dandyism and the Black Intellectual Imagination
To Be Seen and Not Defined: Dandyism and the Black Intellectual Imagination A sharply tailored blazer, oversized sunglasses, a cigarette lit like the period at the end of a sentence: James Baldwin was a writer and a thinker who also understood the power of presentation. And he was not alone. Across the 20th century, a constellation of Black intellectuals and artists approached fashion not merely as ornamentation but as ontology. They dressed with intention, their clothes layered with subtext....