later work of Gustave Caillebotte, Dans un Café (1880), helps strengthen the idea that to Caillebotte, feminine clothing was necessary solely to attract eligible women. In Dans un Café, Caillebotte's "urban stranger" while being somewhat separated from the other men in the picture is not truly isolated and this correlates with the fact that no women are depicted either. The urban stranger here is the man in the center of Dans un Café who wears characteristically mainstream masculine clothes: a very plain suit top that is so black it blends in with his tie, gray loose-fitting pants as opposed to the tighter flâneur favored variety, and most importantly the so-called “melon hat” (Cassin-Scott 165), the top of which is round like a bowl rather than flat as with the top hat. He does stand alone against the wall and through a reflection of the mirror besides him, we see he looks to a pair of men sitting across from each other at a table. In this way, he could be said to be “isolated” since spatially he is separated from the others. However, there is something different about this urban stranger. Unlike the paintings discussed earlier, we see this “urban stranger’s” face instead of a just side profile. This serves to make him more open and connectable him to the viewer. Indeed, again unlike the other urban strangers, this man holds his head up to be seen instead of down. In terms of clothing, the “urban stranger” and one of the men sitting down share similar hats of the melon variety. Even the other man sitting down who wears a flâneur-characteristic top hat lacks any other overt difference in clothing from the urban stranger. Indeed they all wear fairly dark colors.
hy would Caillebotte mitigate the harshness of the isolation effect by drawing so many connections between the “urban stranger,” the men at the table and the viewer? The key lies in the all-male environment. In going back to the motive that wearing feminine clothing was an attempt to express one’s heterosexual desires, Caillebotte uses this painting to show that in all-male environments, wearing masculine clothing does not cause isolation. There simply is no need to intensify the isolation and “punish” the urban stranger because there are no women to woo.
erhaps as time went on for Caillebotte, the desire to make specific connections between feminine clothing and women needed not only affirmative depiction (in the form of isolation in the essay’s paintings) but also contradictory depiction in this painting. Both types say one thing, “the flâneur isn’t gay.”