An iconic figure whose evolving image reflects the uses of style as an active component of cultural change since the early nineteenth century, the dandy has come to be understood in terms of the rhetoric of performance, the language of irony, the semiotics of style. Style, fashion, urban life, modernity, consumer culture, celebrity, masquerade, gender identity, the position of the artist in society, the presentation of self in everyday life, the postmodern subject: all these things are implied by or embodied in the complex figure of the dandy. In this essay I should like to examine the basic characteristics of dandyism, its mutations, and its paradoxes.