Part Two: Beau Brummell: The First Celebrity and Inventor of the Suit and Tie

fucking plant sap every day. God. I love it when people have all of the money in the world to be healthy aren't purely because they don't believe in medicine. It's always a lot of fun, the Steve Jobs effect we call it. Yeah, Yeah, all of your problems are entirely self generated. Anyway, what a choice, princess. Are you ready to get back to the story of Beau Brummel, who we have just gotten up to age sixteen, right, he is, Yeah.

deep vein of cool running through it. I appreciate that. Yeah, somebody's going to point out that he killed someone in the nineteen seventies and then then I'll have to feel.

we were just talking about it before we recorded. I had mistakenly thought he was involved in the Natalie Wood thing, and I just realized when he died, like, oh, I was just like tarring this man with a horrible brush for no reason, just because I'm bad at the keeping track of celebrities.

think he's kind of fine on this. But I think it's you just half hear something and you mistakenly like blame some random famous person for something they did not do. I'm sure we've all done it at some point. It's just too many names out there to keep track of, Like, yeah.

generally starting to be seen as a full adult. You're still most people see this kind of view you as very young, but you're often like working full time, right, Like, you're supporting yourself or helping to support your family by that age if you're a man, and it's not super common, especially among commoners. It's rare for girls to like, it's not the norm for girls to be like married and having kids at that time, but it's not unheard of, especially among the aristocracy.

around because he's this like party boy. He's loved by his classmates. He has no ambition. That is kind of a thing about bo for someone who's as famous as he was. He never wants to do anything. He doesn't want to be in government. He doesn't want a job. He just likes having fun, and his parents seem to recognize that and are sort of disgusted with him because his dad is not entirely a self made man, but

makes a lot of money. His biographer suggests that his mom's death and his failure with Julia pushes him at this point away from the women who had been his primary influences and early friends into the world of rich, young assholes like the Prince of Wales in seventeen ninety four. The next year, his father dies just as George is

finishing his time at Eton. I've heard wildly divergent estimates of what his family estate is worth, right the low end, and this is what is Ian Kelly says, probably around five million pounds in modern money. But also you can never get very close to accurate descriptions of what the money is worth because most people don't use money in

their day to day life. An average like peasant or whatever, an average like person you know in the countryside is particularly in the countryside, if you're farming, money is not a day to day thing for you. Most of what you do, you accomplish you either grow it, you pull out of the ground, or your barter with your neighbors. Every now and then you'll get money you can pay your taxes with, like directly with the crops that you grow.

People in the city use money, but even then a lot of it's on credit in script like and so when you're talking about these wealthy people who do have fortunes, even something like if you're saying something is like the equivalent of a million pounds, just based on how we calculate stuff it's usually really much more than that, because most people don't have money most of the time. Right. I've seen some astibats that the family fortune was more

like fifty million dollars. Either way, his dad leaves them a lot of money, and the custom of the time, most people would have given it all to the oldest brother, William.

That doesn't happen with the Brummels. Billy that their dad is kind of a forward thinking guy and he splits the estate up and to his credit, this shows you a little bit of a progressive streak in the Brummels. He has two sons and a daughter and each of them gets the same share of the family money, which is rare yeah and nice yeah, depending on how you want to calculate it. George's share of this is probably between like one and a half million to three million,

pounds in modern money, it's a lot. It is enough that if he had wanted to live a modest life, he could have been comfortable and never worked. It's also enough that not enough to be comfortable and live like a rich person. Right today, if you inherit three million dollars at sixteen, if you invest that, right, you can

live comfortably forever if your tastes aren't too fancy. But if you want to live in a New York high rise, right, And we're all like, you're going to run through three million dollars pretty quick.

the family. The guardian sends the boys to Oxford initially because he's like, well, you're done at Eton, you should all go to the best school.

kind of get wrapped up. But there's like a number of different universities. One of like a guy who goes to Oxford in the period of like basically a generation before George is Edward Gibbon, who you might not know him by name. But he is the guy who writes the history of the decline in fall of the Roman Empire. Right, he is one of the biggest names in the history of academia, right, like yeah, yeah, yeah, very yeah. And this is what he says about Oxford. In this time

I spent fourteen months at Magdalene College. They proved to be the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life. Right, we didn't do shit but drink. Ian Kelly quotes a contemporary politician who preceded Georgie at Oxford by a little bit, and said, a gentleman commoner was under no restraint and never called upon to attend either lectures or chapel or hall. The set of men with whom I lived were very pleasant, but very idle fellows. Our life was an imitation of

high life in London. We are learning how we are pretending to be adults, and we are learning how to be ready to be rich diletants in the city, you know. And we're not learning that because there's nothing to do. We're arning that because being a rich diletant in the city is how you get the jobs running the empire. Right. This is part of why some of the people who run it do stuff like try to hold Afghanistan not all that long after this period of time and get everybody killed.

you can insult in who you shouldn't. The fact that you have to be able to drink to excess to it, but not too much because you don't want to lose track of like maintaining your path in this social structure that requires a lot of a person. And it doesn't breed people who are good at governing India, but it creates people who are good at understanding how to hold power in India. You know, right, It doesn't.

Everybody's fucking everybody's talking shit and gossiping about each other. And George all he wants. He doesn't want any of the jobs. He wants to sail to the top of that without actually being responsible for anything. Right, he is in a lot of ways slacker, right, Yeah, like he is. He is kind of like the patron saint of slackers, you know, which is part of why I respect.

a lot of refugees do. A lot of these French nobles and wealthy people who flee wind up coming to London and stuff, and the whole aristocrats. He is terrified is this shit gonna spread? Because they're not looking at it as just the French Revolution. They're also looking at what just happened in the United States, right, which did include a lot of violence towards members of the British aristocracy who stayed loyal, And they're thinking, are we about to have an uprising of the common people?

sweep British fashion earlier in the seventeen eighties. Wool replaces silk, gold and silver seems the less desirable than flat colors in an age where you never know is a mob about to come for us, So this is starting to happen. And parts of this had started before the French Revolution, but that really accelerates this. Like, I don't know if I want to be wearing the equivalent of like two hundred thousand dollars in silk at all times, and like gold braid, literal gold braid, Like I.

the ruling class, and they are. But part of what lets people get away with this is that suits are a thing that rich people wear, but also a lot of people wear. I would say ninety nine percent of people I have seen wearing tailored suits, we're not wealthy.

Most of them are working class, right, because for a lot of working class people like you, just wear a suit to work, right, like, or at least a casual suit or something, and that has allowed I think it's as opposed to in this kind of pre regency period, early regency period, if you see a rich person, you

immediately know by their dress that they're rich, right. And part of what's going to happen, this change in fashion is going to change that it's never again going to be as easy to tell how rich the rich are just by their clothes unless you really know your fashion shit right. Right.

to get. I want some of my money released now because I need to buy a commission in the Royal Army. I want to pay to become an officer in the Army. If you join the army today. Number one, you never pay, because that's that would that would be very sketchy to pay to join the army. You will start. There's two tracks, and the British are actually part of why because the British helped to invent and they're kind of cribbing from the Romans. We crib apart from the Romans from the

French from the British. You know how we organize our army. There's two tracks in the military, and this is true, then it's true this day there's noncommissioned officers, privates, sergeants, corporals. Right, that's not the order, it doesn't it whatever, And then there's officers. Right, that's your lieutenants, your captains, your majors, your colonels, YadA, YadA, YadA, on and up. They do

slightly different things and they're different social classes. Historically, this is a little bit less the case in the United States, but not really that much, because officers have to have a college degree, right, generally, not always. My grandpa never graduated eighth grade, but he became an officer because everyone above him got shot to death in Korea, you know, does happen occasionally, but as a general rule, officers are

people who have an education, right. And in this period, officers are usually the aristocracy or gentlemen commoners, right like bo And in the modern militaries, there's no way to start out as a higher rank. You start out at the bottom of your perspective wrung, usually either like a

private or a second lieutenant. If you're an officer, right, because modern militaries have found that if you can bribe people for better jobs, what happens is all of your officers suck and they get everyone killed all the time.

This is a problem in a lot of different militaries, right, it's always yeah, yeah, you look at a lot of these to go into kind of some contemporary history, there's been a lot written about, like you have these wars between Israel and a lot of its neighbors, and a lot of these armies, like Egypt and Syria perform really badly.

And part of it is because if you're a dictator, if you're a strong man in power, you don't necessarily want an army that makes it easy for good officers to gain power, because that's your those are the people who might overthrow you, right, So you want toadies and stuff people are effectively buying, and that's how a lot of shit works in the British army kind of for quite a while, and especially during this period back in

the late seventeen hundreds and early eighteen hundreds. Rank is not something a rich man earned, it was something he bought, and this practice had started in the reign of Charles. The second being able to buy a commission actually had a reasonable origin. It was trying to deal with the fact that you had a lot of rich guys who wanted to be officers. They would join, they would get everybody killed, or if a battle would go badly, they would run away and they would kind of like fuck

over the army. So they were trying to establish accountability. And initially the way buying a commission worked is it was like, hey, what was like bonding out of jail? It was in order to become an officer, you give us a chunk of money and when you're done, we'll give it to you back unless you run away in battle or get everybody killed. If you fuck up, you

don't get this money back. Right. So it starts from a good, an intelligent desire to like, we need to have some accountability, right, But by the time bo is there, it has turned into a way for if you're an asshole with a lot of money, you can pay to have a cool sounding rank, Like I would like it if people called me captain. I would like to be called colonel. Right, here's a pile of money, now I'm

a colonel. Right. But it did lead to people who didn't know their shit being in command of military units and British defeat in the Revolutionary War is going to be blamed by a lot of people at home on these officers who have paid for their commissions. And I think historians have largely agreed that that's not that's not a primary cause. It wasn't zero percent of why things go badly for them, but it's not the main reason things do right, But a lot of people do blame

that for the defeat at the time. Right. It's also worth noting that the Army does this because the Army is the second tier British military thing, the Royal Navy. You're never able to do this. It's got some corruption of its own. But that's part of why the Navy always wins, you know, as they don't do stupid shit. They're like, this is going to be sick. Yeah, we don't have any We have no flex with the Navy.

The Navy's go look at us and everyone we're picking fights with, right like otherwise we're just getting We're.

So thank you, Oracles. We're back, Princess. Is there a dead person you'd like our oracles to get you in contact with?

didn't deserve what happened to him. So by the late seventeen nineties, only some cavalry and infantry regiments let people purchase commissions, and a lot of these are show units meant for parade duty rather than like fighting Napoleon, which is happening at this time. In Napoleon pretty good at fighting. You don't want to send some asshole who had sell one thousand men like you know what, Yeah, you.

and here that equivalent is the tenth Light Dragoons. Now the Prince of Wales at this point is George Augustus Frederick born in seventeen sixty two. He is in his early thirties when sixteen year old George Brummel pays to join his unit. Now in the future, he is going to be King George, the fourth one of the shit of all of the dogshit kings Endom has ever had, near the bottom of the pile. He is famous for

being a selfish asshole to everyone around him. He's famous for, like among the standards of the Kings of England, people being like, yeah, this guy was really addict to people. Just didn't seem to care about anyone else.

his fault. His dad won't let him do anything. He doesn't want him to have a real job because the prince the only real job that's fit for a prince is to be a soldier. And that's dangerous, right, your heir is the future of the dynasty. Dad wants you safe at home, not getting into any trouble. And so you can't actually learn to be good at anything. There's nothing for you. And so the prince he grows past

his twenties to his thirties. The only thing his wife will say, the only thing he was ever good at was fashion. He knew fabric, he knew good cuts of clothing. He was even he could have been a great taylor. You know, if he had come about in a different time where he was actually allowed and needed to do something, he might have actually been a person with a skill, and it would have been better for him. Because he is miserable his whole life because he has no talent,

like most people. We have these guys today, a lot of people who are not good for anything fetishize military uniforms and dressing and looking and pretending to be militant as a way to hide the fact that they have no talent. Right, he is he's like one of these guys who marches around city streets and fucking soldier get up and whatnot, wave in a flag or whatever. Like he is. He has a lot of that in him.

brother is the fallest of fail sons. He's not allowed to do anything. It's like if you go, this is what he writes in the letter, being like, I want you to bring me these back. The complete uniforms a koutramah, settle, saddle and bridle, et cetera of one of the Zatan's Hussa Hussars, as well as one of the officer's complete uniforms clothing, sword caps, saddle, bridle, chabric, pistols. In short, everything complete. I want the whole, all of the uniform,

all of the bits, all of the dresses. He's like, you know that this is a guy. This today he might have wound up like in a nerdier thing, being one of those rich dudes who has like all of the fucking Imperial officer, you know, every Stormtrooper uniform, a great Darth Vader costume. He's that kind of guy, only he's not again making his brother buy it for it is.

hussar is a kind of cavalry. They are These guys are the Navy seals of their day. They are special forces. They are the best of the best.

elite units of Hussars. Now, these guys aren't Nazis. That don't exist yet, right, This is just it looks cool to have a skull and crossbones in your helmet.

Is their reputation for being deadly skilled professionals. He wants respect and people respect these men right and bo Brummles's biography, Ian Kelly writes such was the issue's importance in his mind that he wrote directly to Sir Henry Dundas Secretary for War, threatening that if he were not granted the rank and uniform of a major general, it must lead to a total separation between the King and my He put it more eloquently to his father, I have no option but to lead a life which must to the

public eye, where the color of idleness, which, from the sense of it so appearing, must sit irksomely upon me. A uniform would make him appear properly royal, a soldier prince leading his people. In letters to his father, he likened himself to the Black Prince, and in the portraits he commissioned and poised himself as a man of action, a military prince. He wants to be seen as this

great warrior. He's never going to get a chance to do that, right, he would have gotten killed immediately, He would have gotten the whole British would have won the shit out of this war if he would have let this son of a bish near battlefield.

just start playing Warhammer. Right. But this is his equivalent of playing one of these like toy soldier games, right, Instead of he doesn't have to buy models and build and paint them. He just gets a body of men. He designs their uniform from the ground up. He is kind of like painting these you want some men? He's like, yeah, give him some men, some men. We don't need let him dress them up. However, he wants he can watch them around on a field and pretend he's a general.

Now to give you an idea of like how little his father trusts him. He gets this unit gets made early on, and like I think the yeah, this in seventeen ninety three, he doesn't get or in seventeen eighty three or something like that, but he doesn't get command of it until seventeen nine when war with France starts. So at first other people are running this because his dad doesn't even trust him to run a fake unit

designed for him to like look fancy in. But when war with France starts, they're like, we're going to need to get a lot of soldiers, and if we show the Prince Regent trotting around with his fake army, it might make the royalty look like we're more invested in this fight, and maybe more commoners will join up to die for us. Right, So he makes his son, He gives him proper command of the unit in seventeen ninety three,

but he backdates his rank to seventeen eighty two. He like retcon's his son being a colonel in the army, so he's not the most junior officer because you can't have that, right, Oh yeah, yeah.

it's a way to get close to the Prince. Social and professional advancement in regency England is tied entirely to who you know, and the Prince is basically the best man to know. He had met the Prince once earlier at Windsor Castle, and the future King had expressed an interest. George comes to the castle dressed differently from everyone else,

dressed really down. He's kind of dressed casually, but it's sort of he looks like he just rolled out of bed, but he spent four hours setting himself up to look like he just rolled out of bed, and he looks like he's dressed down, but in the because he's wearing this outfit that's like a costume, right, that's like a casual costume. But he is perfectly tailored. He has every single measurement. He has set out to show off his body to the best degree. And the King is like, oh, dude,

you look fucking dope, say a prince. Yeah, and the Prince, you know not to body shame a dead man. He is known for being corpulent, right, and so he he is insecure about this. He gets made fun of for this. And Bo is thin and muscular and handsome. Right, So the Prince is like, how can I dress like you? And he listens to everything this sixteen year old boy has to say. Right, he's desperate to be this kid.

He's just because he's cool. Right. One of the criticisms I might have of Ian Kelly, he's a very good and a very serious biographer. He jumps around this fact that like because he Kelly kind of leans into this. It's a little bit of a mystery why everyone likes him so much. Some of it was this he was charming. He was like, what he doesn't because he's a little bit too I think professional to say this is like, Bo's just cool, right.

He is sixteen and they all look up to him. Right now, he can drink with the best of them. He's very funny, and pretty soon the Prince is dressing like him, which means everyone else starts dressing like him.

like these ancient Greek statues, right, that everybody worships. Right. English writing breaches had become popular by this point in post revolutionary France, because they're they're at leisure. Right, they're almost like a little more like blue jeans. A lot of people see them as right, they're a galitarian, you know,

but these were the most popular writing breaches. And the writing breeches Bow wears before he joins this unit are usually knee high because you're wearing them with cavalry boots, which go up very high the tenth just because the prince likes them. Their breeches go down low, low enough that you can actually wear them with regular shoes. They're close to trousers, right, modern slacks, you know, in a

lot of ways other than how tight they are. George Brummel appreciates these pants, right, and he's going to kind of he's going to integrate them into his uniform. And these the pants that he starts wearing when he's in the tenth are seen by people as like one of the precursors to modern slacks. George Brummel appreciated these pants, but the rest of the uniform he considered a pain

because it was so intricate and expensive. It cost about three hundred and fifty pounds to buy your own uniform, and yeah, right, that's not cheap today, But a housekeeper back then makes fifteen.

is alcoholism. They did do some drills and war games, but those are mostly you spend the day writing around doing a war game, and then you spend several days drunk off your ass just.

three bottles for, right. And there's also a term of like a three bottle man, a man who can easily put away three bottles of wine in the night and like still keep his head about him, be ready the next day to go ride around and do whatever gonna bullshit, right, And that's all you're doing is drinking and riding around. The Prince described as ideal soldiers as mina fashion and gentlemen, and he spent most of his time forcing bottles of wine down their throats and doing his Basically, they're all

doing karaoke. That's what partying is then, as you all sing together while you get recklessly drunk. One veteran of the unit later recalled the officers of those days, were thrown headlong into a vicious school, where at times they were expected to act as if in reality they were thinking beings, and at others chastised for merely thinking. The officers were suffered to get drunk, swear, gamble, seduce, and

run into debt. A pleasure. That such a school produced many scamps, many incorrigible, bad characters, is but little surprising. It is indeed truly wonderful that it produced anything else.

officers in roars of laughter. Every regiment in those days had a practiced and privileged jester, whose province it was to put an immediate stop to serious conversation by pun or joke and return to quote the hilarity which usually pervades our military society. So he is he has seen as the guy is like he can stop anyone from

like he's making dark jokes. He's making jokes, you know, Lewde jokes about women, and his goal is to redirect conversation to keep everybody in a high spirits right, especially when they start losing money as they're all going into debt trying to afford to be in this unit. That's part of his job, and he's good at it. He does so well at this side of army life that after a year in the regiment, at age seventeen, he is picked to be the best man at the royal wedding,

or at least one of a couple of them. Right, he's the best man at Charles the Fort's royal wedding. That's crazy now, the wedding itself is a disaster. The Prince and the princess know each other from paintings like that's what they have, and like letters where they describe each other and they both lie right there. Neither of them is honest, right.

the time. So, because he's such a piece of shit, the Prince is going to spend their wedding night and honeymoon mostly mocking his new bride, and George is kind he tries to redirect. He feels like bad for her because he's this, Yeah, she's a little like weird and foreign, but she just like left her home to come here, and she seems really lonely and like you're being very shitty to her. The future, he does, however, get incredibly absolutely housed with the Prince. They are just drunk as shit.

The Prince is too drunk to fuck right when they come in on their honeymoon. She blames bo for that, like, honestly, that might have been the best thing for everybody, but she blames bo for like you got him too drunk to even do the one thing he's supposed to do. Right, So tomorrow, tomorrow, honey. George buys a promotion to lieutenant in seventeen ninety five, and then captain in seventeen ninety six. His only injury came when he fell off a horse

and broke his nose, thus ruining his profile. In seventeen ninety eight, yeah, some people say it makes him more handsome, like Harrison Ford's little chin scirt. Probably, yes, yeah, that's gonna be my guess, because he still does pretty well. In seventeen ninety eight, the regiment moves to Manchester and George is like, that's the end of my military career, and I want to go to Manchester because that's not London.

London is the city that matters. And here's how his earliest biographer, William Jesse, describes him going to the Prince to talk about leaving. Why the fact is, your Royal Highness, I have heard that we are ordered to Manchester. Now you must be aware how disagreeable this would be to me. I really could not go, think your Royal Highness Manchester. Besides, you would not be there. I have, therefore, with your Royal Highness's permission, determined to sell out, Like why would

I do there? You're not there? What kind of places with that.

is where. That's why that starts, because that's where he goes and a lot of his tailors are right. He starts buying clothes, he starts building relationships with a bunch of different tailors. He one of his things is he will talk shit about people who are like, oh, you go to the same tailor for your waistcoat and your jacket. There's no good there's no good vest man who's a good jacket. Man, you bought your house, your hat and

shoes from the same tailor. Okay, they look like it. Yeah, look like the.

a turning point. The term dandy had first entered the lexicon in seventeen eighty and it means basically a person who studies, who is obsessed with fashion. Kind of right, Bo is going to be the man. He doesn't originate that term, but he defines it. When people write about dandies in this period, most of them are writing about bow Right. Most of his contemporaries see him as the first of the Dandies. In seventeen ninety five, the Prime

Minister has introduced a new tax on wig powder. This is a part of the war against Napoleon, and it accelerated the demise of the old style of fashion, which had been on its way out since the French Revolution. At least Bo is going to be one of the first people and a lot of the Prince and a lot of other people follow him who stops wearing a wig, And he kind of does. If you look at the way Napoleon looked, that kind of almost Greek statue hairstyle.

That's how Bo wears his hair, and it's how everybody starts to wear their hair.

back on extravagance. It accepts if grooming became regarded as a feminine trait. Right, And that's weird because in part Bo is going to advocate much more grooming than had been. He loves to groom, but his kind of grooming is you should be clean, you should wear good clothing, you should have good skin, and as a result, you won't

need to wear cosmetics as much. So it is people see it as less grooming because he's saying, no, you'd actually take care of your body rather than getting obsessed with all the ways to hide the fact that you're filthy and gross. You know, that's the kind of fashionista he is now. A lot of these changes in style had started before Bow and would have happened without him.

He doesn't kill the old style of fashion entirely on its own, but it dies as he comes into his own as like a popular man in high society, and he is the first person with a vision of what's going to come next, right, And that's why he's able to make this change. She's able to make it because the prince is the king of high society in London, and he is dressing like Bo. He is telling one

else to everyone else to dress like Bo. Bo is going around all these tailors and when people realize this is who the king follows for fashion advice, they will go to the same tailors that Bo is and they will ask them what is he wearing? What does he say is the best fabrics? What does he say is the best way to dress? And part of why he gets credit for inventing the suit is he doesn't have one tailor. There's not one guy who makes an outfit

that he wears because he picks all these tailors. It's them who are kind of coming up with these alterations and innovations on new styles, but he is the one putting them all together. So he gets all the credit for creating the suit, even though he's using a bunch.

And it takes him hours and they will It becomes like one of the most fashionable things to do because again, part of what this guy is doing, he is living the life of a TikTok influencer. But we're like a TikTok fashion influencer. You've taken videos of you putting on your makeup, videos you.

he does it very intentionally. Some of whyse because he's got a great eye for style. Bo is probably the first fashionable amount of influence to insist that what matters is not how vinsive your clothing looks. It's not having all these layers, it's not having all this jewelry, it's not having all this paint on your face. It's having really quality fabrics, particularly fine linen, and it's cut in a way to show off your natural attributes. Right. You don't want to wear too much. You want to show

off your body because you're showing off. I have the time and money to spend all my time thinking about how I look and how I present myself, right, rather than I paid somebody to buy me the fanciest clothing, you know.

been like, yeah, we don't buy from sham. We get ourselves passivate and like spend the actual money and instead of like so in a lot of ways, it is like this revolution of like because even though macaroni thing, it just sells me a bunch of like kids that went to the continent, like went to Abiza for a weekend and We're like, this is my personality.

five and one hundred and ninety pounds. He's built like a Greek statue.

see the outline of his dick. You know, he's got those like gray fucking gray us look right, Yeah, yeah, this becomes he's probably around Yeah, we don't know exactly. Weirdly enough, Ian Kelly is the one who calculates how tall he probably was because his wine merchants kept track of his weight and we know some of his measurements, so you can kind of triangulate about But he's tall, and he's reasonably muscular, and then right like, he's got

that kind of that kind of build, you know. The last ingredient to BOE's success was that he had a modern understanding of how to manage and cultivate celebrity. He kind of invents Western celebrity in a very real way. Part of it is that he's very witty, he's very funny. People copy him and quote him right, which spreads his fame.

He also he develops an affectation of carrying around it's basically like a magnifying glass that he will look at people as they walk in at parties and judge their outfits and be like, oh, you must have gotten your boots from a shirt man like that, and he's being a bitch, but he's also he's really funny with it,

and that's part of the entertainment. Is Bo's going and he's gonna talk some shit at you, but in the way that like a stand up comedian, it's gonna maybe pick random people from the audience and give him some shit, and like you, you come into the experience knowing that's gonna happen. Part of what he's doing is he's like he's part stand up comedy. Right.

I go to the party in this? And Bo quote Bo examined him from head to toe with as much attention as an adjutant of the lifeguards, with the sentries on a drawing room day. Turn round, said the bow, His grace did so, and the examination was continued in front. When it was concluded, Brummel stepped forward and, feeling the lapel delicately with his thumb and fingers, said, in the most earnest and amusing manner, Bedford, do you call this thing a coat? This is really a coat? Is a coat?

is he's putting on a show. He's pantomime. He's going up and up to him with a spyglass and looking around. People are not just laughing at the duke who's getting a little bit of shit talked about his fashion, since they're laughing at BO being this parody of himself. This really like obsessive, like like ridiculous fashion. I like that's

part of the joke. The joke is on him. And that's why no one ever gets too angry at Bo, because part of it is that, like he's funny, you know, like he's and this.

his reputation for incredible excess, usually by lying. He spreads myths about himself. He starts telling everyone. They ask him, wow, you have the shiniest, the blackest boots. How do you black your boots? And he's like, oh, I only shine them with fine champagne. I use champagne to shine my boot champagne. It's not a great way to chase boots. This is a lie. He's poking fun at his image. He's like, obviously, I the bow, I wax my boots,

which fine champagne. Of course, you know, and people know this is a bit right In modern era, a lot of people are like, wow, this guy was like such a wasteful rich ass while he's whacked. No, no, people at the time know he's fucking around, right, he claims, because it's again a sign of wealth to be able to eat meat for every meal. He claims he doesn't

even eat vegetables. When one high born lady at a party is like, do you really not eat vegetables, He's like, well, madam, one side eate a p you know, I had a single pee once? Right again he's fucking around, you know.

If I did not impertinently stare at duchesses out of countenance and over my shoulder to a prince, I should be forgotten in a week. And if the world is so silly as to admire my absurdities, you and I may know better, But what's that signify? Right? Look, if the world wants me to be this ridiculous parody of a rich man and they're going to reward me for that, you and I may know. I'm more than that, I could be better than that, but why bother right now?

a way to protect myself exactly. It's TikTok and Instagram didn't exist then Bo was a poster, but he had to do his posting analog style. And the way he did this since he can't make a bunch of different videos, he goes one on one to every tailor in the city. He tells them his thoughts on the different dresses and fabrica of the day, and they tell everyone what he thinks.

You go around, you follow the Bow route on Savile Row in these other fashionable streets, and everybody's quoting him right his presence, and they give him a lot of shit for free and shit on credit because the fact that Bo's shops somewhere will get out and then you can use as you can just tell people that Bo says you should buy this or that, right, and that'll sell it.

Right in the making of himself, he creates rules that others begin to follow, you know, And that's where a lot of the ship to Bo gets because he does he locks down men's fashion. For some would argue centuries because of how dominant he is, but he doesn't do that because he's against men expressing themselves. He is expressing himself as a man and how he thinks he likes to look. It's it's this culture that he understands how fucked up it is that takes that to an extreme

right because it becomes law. I don't know how much you want to blame him for that, because he is just trying to get.

He could sometimes hours getting it right right, and again everyone's watching him. He'll cut during the day and he has it's an act too. He's got his man servant. When people are like waiting in the salon having their tea or whatnot, waiting for him to be ready to come out, his man servant walk back and forth with these boty baskets with dozens of crumpled cravats in them, and he'll be like, these are all failures today. We've been trying for hours to get it just right, you know.

But he might be ready for you now he's close. Yeah, exactly right. We know a lot about his daily routine because it's the number one show in town. The Prince of Wales will show up a lot of the time because he wants some of Bow's pool to rub off on him. High born men come by every day just to watch Bow dress. Ian Kelly writes, once his friend, the Prince of Wales adopted both the style and habit

of attending the Chesterfield Street that's where he lives. Levies Brummell's position in fashion history became assured he had the required arrogance, poise, and connections, but also understood that the rules were intimidating to many. The father of modern costume, as Max Beerbohm titled, Brummel had as styled. It was uniquely his, but perfect to the spirit of the age. Quiet, reasonable and beautiful, free from folly or affection, yet susceptible

to exquisite ordering, plastic, austere, economical. It appeared post revolutionary, neoclassical, ordered and enlightened, and in this it did seem democratic. It did not shout wealth or privilege. It quietly insisted the point it celebrated, not at least in the sheer time it took to achieve the look wealth, privilege and

elegant indolence. Brummelell's revolutionary fetishizing of detail was labored later described by Baudelaire as defining the man who is rich in idol and who has no other occupation than the perpetual pursuit of hea happiness, whose solitary vice is elegance.

new mass media of the day. In Bo's modern molding of his own celebrity, he largely gets credit for this development despite not making any of the clothes himself. And you know this also stops the fact that he uses all these tailors no one else shares credit with him. He gets the nickname Bo around seventeen ninety nine, and it had previously ad meant like beautiful. It's like calling a boy, you know, a pretty little, pretty little man, or something like that. It's initially it becomes with him.

It goes from being an insult to actually like a compliment, right, because it means that you were beautiful.

and fashion obsessed aged. The decimation of the beaver population of North America in the nineteenth century was set in motion by his sudden taste for beaver skin top hats like he carries it. He causes inadvertently a beaver genocide because he wears a hat one day that's made out of beaver skin and people just wipe them out. Oh my gosh, we're still dealing with the part of our

wildfire problem comes from this, to be honest. Oh yeah, yeah, Like the destruction of beaver populations in North America is actually still catastrophic to this day, and bo Brummel has a lot to do with it. Now he could he have yeah, right, yeah, yeah, you know, although I will say he's not innocent here too, because he is. He's not a fast fashion guy, but he is a disposable fashion guy. Part of it is because he loves white.

He insists on the thinnest gloves, the whitest shirts, the whitest thin often leather pants, right, and these will if thin white things don't last, you know, they get stand, they get holes in them. So he is throwing shit out constantly, which and so he inaugurates the cycle of like you are replacing everything rapidly, right, You are having it tailored every day, and you are having it cleaned every day, and you are running through your clothes. It's expensive.

It builds an industry for fashion, but it is deeply waste, right, And that is on him, right, that is something he has a major factor in right, and he is also he's an avatar of conspicuous consumption, right, and he's an avatar of it in a way that is democratic. Conspicuous consumption had been limited in part because there were only so many rich people, but in part because only rich

people could afford it. And he makes he makes looking good more affordable, which makes more people spend money to do it, So he increases the number of people who are focused on fashion as a luxury as a result of making it a little more democratic. He also lays down his fashion dict tots in a way that does not brook disagreement, because that's kind of the humor of the time. Fashion historian Anne Hollander argues it is possible to make the case that masculine formal address of today

is directly Brummell's responsibility. He's a little bit of a cult leader at his height, and that he will make things that are kind of seen as jokes and people will follow them to the letter. One of his bits was he would say, if John Bull, which is like Joshmo, right, turns around to look at you, you are not well dressed, but either too stiff, too tight, or too fashionable. Right,

you don't want to be noticed by the commoners. Only Richmond, who understand the quality of your cut should notice you common people. You should blend into the crowd. You know. It's the same. It's like with Silicon Valley fashion of the day. And again, how much you want to blame him morally for that right, But one thing that is interesting to me is that he is not interested in gaining power. Giving his given his standing with the Prince and his status in culture, he should have been a

powerful man. He should have wound up in government, and he had the opportunity, but he never tries. He has no ambition. Maybe it's he was just lazy. Maybe it's that he recognized doing that you're going to have to do awful things and did. He really didn't want to. His life was fine as it was. He was happy with the things that he had. I don't know, but this is part of the problem it's going to cost for him, is that he rapidly runs out of money.

Everything he has is on credit. The Prince is able to keep his creditors at bay by saying, hey, man, I'm going to be the king. This guy is my friend. Don't call in his debts and a lot of people are willing to extend him credit because they're like, he's going to be running the empire pretty soon, right, He's gonna have some kind of jobs, right, yeah, Yeah, But he never quite does, like and so this is eventually

going to create an unsustainable situation. But before it does, he launches one more trend among the high society in London. When we're all grateful for he gets them to stop smelling like shit.

made out of poison. Yeah yeah, so he helps out with the health of the upper class to a significant degree. In that manner, he spends more than a decade as the it person in London society, which is a long time to be that kind of guy. In addition to the prototypical suit, he also starts the tradition of rich people dressing like farmers. Like he wears hunting jackets and like outdoor clothing that's not actually meant to be worn outdoors.

It's meant to walk around the parking, but it imitates outdoor clothing.

at this point. And he's also gambling starting in his late twenties and early thirties, which quickly focks him over. You know, all this might have been survival if he had stayed in the King's good graces, but Bo nursed to contempt for the prince. He never thinks he's a good man. He doesn't like the way he treats his wife, he doesn't like the way he treats anyone, and he loves making fun of him. This story's probably not true, but it gives you a hint of the kind of

shit he would talk about. Their prince. Their story they're all hung over. He's at the palace one day with the prince and he's being like, hey, hey, princey, go fetch mission champagne. Go give me some champagne. King, you know, future king, pick me up a fucking bottle. Get your man servant to bring me a bottle. And it gets

like kicked out. That probably didn't literally happen, but stuff like it did, because we have a lot of stories about them having fights, and it's often because Bo he's usually good at taking the piss out of people and not making them angry, but the Prince is really fragile and doesn't like it's Sometimes Bogo's too far for him, and when he's in his late thirties. He's going to blow up their relationship entirely. And I'm gonna quote from

the New York Times here. A version of the story goes that one afternoon, after another of Brummels in the air to the Throne's frequent fallouts, he bumped into the Prince while strugling with his fellow dandy lord Alvinley. When the Prince warmly acknowledged Alvinlee but ignored him, Brumble is said to have coolly inquired Alvinley, who's your fat friend. The Prince never spoke to him again.

and muscular as he used to be. He's pushing forty now, right. You know, they just like a body.

to get some money out of him. Right, So his life falls apart in eighteen sixteen, after a horrible losing streak at one of the clubs where he kept a permanent table, he flees permanently from London to Calais on the French coast because his creditors won't follow him there. He has some investments, he's got some minuities, and Calais is a frances A war torn country at this point, so it's like the third world the people in London, and he can live off of what he's got there

reasonably well. He spends the rest of his life as a tourist attraction, still famous, and in the years after he flees London, a lot of famous people will continue to write about him. Authors like Benjamin Disraeli and Oscar Wilde feature him in their writing. Oscar Wilde is said to have patterned a lot of his life and personality, especially early on on both Yeah, yeah, very similar guys

for sure. The Duke of Wellington, the Destroyer of Napoleon, also worships his style right like he dresses based on how Bo dressed, and the playwright Lord Byron intentionally is also he is one of these guys who's dressing in

the image, and these guys are. You shouldn't give it as copying him as much as the way that like men today, if you want to look good, you can still look at pictures of how Carrie Grant dressed and go like, well shit, that guy knew how to put together an outfit, right, You do a lot worse than trying to dress like Carry Granted, Right, Like that's the kind of thing. He's just this immortal icon of cool

for people who glow up anywhere near that era. But his older life is not going to be a happy one. One by one his good friends died, and he grows lonelier and lonelier, And as he grows lonelier and lonelier, something grows inside him. Syphilis.

introduce royalty. I'll teach you how to be a high society man, and he does, and in return, Fichet spends Beau's final years humoring him. And because bo is losing his mind, his primary occupation in his last years is he he has Fichet escort him to balls and galas that exist only in his head. Right, Yeah, it's like a it's bleak. I'm going to quote from Ian Kelly here because he writes very evocatively about this end period

in Beau's life. Rummel had taught him how to announce royalty and how much obeisance was expected by the Victor of Waterloo, and Monsieur Brummel taught Fichet about clothes. It was Fichet also who acted as valet to the hotel, celebrated Dandy in Witt, helping him into his evening coat and handing him the whitest of cravats with the reverence of a sacristan. Yet these soires would end suddenly, and in the same way. One moment, Rummel would hold out his arm to escort the Duchess of d Evans across

the room. The next his eyes were open to the reality around him, the room was empty. There was nothing in front of him but the candles, the flowers, and the young frenchman with pity in his eyes. Fouchet eventually became inured, he said, to the dark pantomime of announcing Brummel's ghosts, the long dead duchesses and Cortizans, the regency

celebrities who had been Moucheaux's friends. But he dreaded the moment when Brummell woke from his masquerade and saw the reality around him, the ruination of his fame and fortune and of his mind. Babylon and all its desolation, as one friend of Brummel said, was a sight less awful. The Frenchman would then blow out the candles, shut the windows, and leave Beau Brummel, the most sociable man in London, for the complete privacy and utter silence of his ruined mind.