efore examining Caillebotte's paintings, the flâneur and his relationship to contemporary fashion trends in men's clothing must be established. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain, France's principal foreign investor, had brought a new fashion trend called "dandyism" to France. In England, a dandy was a feminized male aristocrat with excellent social skills and fastidious taste in clothing (Herbert 34). The dandy's clothing would include extravagant items such as an English top hat, tight-fitting breeches or trousers, and a shirt with the collar worn upright, held in place by a cravat, a large square of material like silk or muslin, wrapped around the neck and tied in the front in a knot or bow (Laver 160). By the middle of the nineteenth century, the English dandy was eagerly adopted by the French upper class, which modified him into the flâneur. Describing the relationship between the two, Robert Herbert in his book Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society writes, "The dandy was not necessarily a flâneur, but the flâneur was almost always a dandy" (Herbert 34). By this Herbert means that the flâneur shared all the characteristics of the dandy but had other unique traits such as the power of subtle observation. The central characteristic of the dandy, his taste in extravagant clothing, however, remained with the flâneur (Herbert 34).
till, despite the popularity of the flâneur trend in France among those wealthy enough to afford its extravagant lifestyle, it was contentious with mainstream attitudes about masculinity. Rula Razek argues in his book Dress Codes: Reading Nineteenth Century Fashion that the French Convention's 1793 repeal of oppressive clothing laws that dictated what citizens of a specific class could and could not wear, worked to incorporate spendthrift attitudes toward clothing into popular French fashion through the next century (Razek 3). The repeal achieved this end by making it harder to know a person's class simply through his clothing. Indeed, since the law no longer mandated the outward lines between social classes, theoretically anyone could now appear to be of a different class. Therefore, the popular belief was that no implicit status benefit came from buying flashy clothing. Instead, popular fashion converged to the middle of the road, where economic concerns for real tangible value dominated and "frivolous devotion to fashion" was ridiculed (Razek 8). Extravagance in men's clothing, because it induced spectacle, was considered feminine and clothing simplicity was masculine. Popular outfits tended to be plain in style, durable and usually dark in color. Dark colors were especially important to the majority of people at that time. Jack Cassin-Scott emphasizes the normative nature of the mainstream French fashion trends in his book Costume and Fashion in Color: 1760 - 1920, by arguing from the 1840s on, "it was considered most incorrect to wear anything but black" (Cassin-Scott 165). Cassin-Scott's argument succinctly recites the view of many in nineteenth century France against wearing colorful, feminine clothing as something a man simply ought not to do. As a result, by the late nineteenth century, a conflict developed in France between popular attitudes of masculine, simple and dark clothing and the flâneurs' feminine extravagance.