The life of George 'Beau' Brummell with Chris Browne

A series of men, all of whom were given the honorific title “Beau”, were the leaders in English social behaviour and arbiters of fashion in clothing from the 17th to the early 19th century. They were history’s equivalent of today’s online influencers. The last of these was George “Beau” Brummell, who was the unchallenged leader of English society and fashion from the 1790s until 1820. Brummell’s focus on elegance in men’s dress has had a lasting influence which still can be seen in the status of bespoke gentlemen’s tailoring in London today.

Professor Emeritus Chris Browne is a retired medical researcher and academic who spent much of his childhood in British colonial Africa and the Middle East, before returning to the UK to attend school. After degrees from the Universities of York and Oxford, followed by five years in medical research at McGill University in Montreal in the late 1970s, he has spent most of his working life in the Faculty of Medicine at Monash University.