Convict Dandies in Colonial Australia

The figure of the dandy is often seen as a familiar symbol of early 19th-century London. But what happens when this figure is transplanted to colonial Australia?

While Beau Brummell’s Regency dandy epitomised restraint and understated elegance, Australian iterations rediscovered the flamboyance and swagger of earlier fashions. In a society where clothing could be a tool of defiance or reinvention, Australian colonial dandyism embodied a mode of global modernity that anticipates the cultures of fashion, sociality and spectatorship of today.

Join Professor Clara Tuite to explore how the idea and image of the dandy were reimagined in the colonial context. Discover the fashionings of gentleman-convict dandy artists to the convict inflection of the laboring-class Cockney culture of 'the flash', and the complex modellings and resignifications by proud Indigenous men of settler-colonial military attire.