Dandyism

Definition Wikipedia:
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Many would know this type in his more modern, simplified form: Metrosexual.

You might even connect the modern type with an older version in romanticism and call him a Romantic idealist.

Albert Camus reflects:

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The dandy creates his own unity by aesthetic means.
But it is an aesthetic of singularity and of negation. ‘To live and die before a mirror’: that, according to Baudelaire, was the dandy’s slogan. It is indeed a coherent slogan.
The dandy is, by occupation, always in opposition. He can only exist by defiance. Up to now man derived his coherence from his creator. But from the moment that he consecrates his rupture with Him, he finds himself delivered over to the fleeting moment, to the passing days, and to wasted sensibility. The dandy rallies his forces and creates a unity for himself by the very violence of his refusal. Profligate, like all people without a rule of life, he is coherent as an actor.
But an actor implies a public; the dandy can only play a part by setting himself up in opposition. He can only be sure of his own existence by finding it in the expression of other’s faces. Other people are his mirror. A mirror that quickly becomes clouded, it is true, since human capacity for attention is limited. It must be ceaselessly stimulated, spurred on by provocation. The dandy, therefore, is always compelled to astonish. Singularity is his vocation, excess his way to perfection. Perpetually incomplete, always on the fringe of things, he compels others to create him, while denying their values. He plays at life because he is unable to live it. He plays at it until he dies, except for the moments when he is alone and without a mirror.
For the dandy, to be alone is not to exist. The romantics talked grandly about solitude only because it was their real horror, the one thing they could not bear. – Camus, Albert {The Rebel}

The type is a consequence of a dead, or absent, God.
It relates to Sartre horror concerning freedom.

In the void left over by God's demise, the average mind seeks purpose and identity in the eyes of others.
He only matters if he produces and consumes, in accordance to the common ideals.
He is nobody if he is not acknowledged.

He fears solitude, because there is nobody there to validate his existence.

He cannot create, or recreate, himself, now that the creator is gone, without a pattern...something, a pattern, to cut his garment by (skin) and sew himself together with (ideas).
He is the image this produces.
His substance is derived from the illusions he projects and reflects.

You're right, it is intimately bound up with Sartre's bad-faith. The dandy lives in bad-faith, in a denial of his own autonomy, a turning away from the anguish of his own freedom, for he objectifies himself. By living and dying in front of the mirror, the dandy forces upon himself the look of the Other, through himself, like a cross of his own choosing. It is a type of slavery, to be sure, but a familiar slavery, a familiar facticity (I am handsome, I am well-dressed, I am wealthy) that eclipses the responsibility of freedom: in this way, it is also a type of masochism. The dandy enjoys his slavery, for he trembles before the very thought of its alternative: of solitude, of freedom. Camus: "The romantics talked grandly about solitude only because it was their real horror, the one thing they could not bear." To Camus' solitude, I would add Sartre's freedom, authenticity, and anguish.

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His substance is derived from the illusions he projects and reflects.

His substance is this illusion. For Sartre, the being for-itself is "not that which it is and is that which it is not." This is to say that the properly free human is not reducible to the objective facts that frame his being (his birth-place, the religion of his parents, etc.), the properly free human is, in this sense, also what he is not: he is nobody. By deriving his substance from the illusion of himself -- as you've put it -- the dandy becomes somebody! This illusion becomes him, entirely. His life becomes inauthentic; he wins the fight against anguish only by turning away from it like a frightened child, and in doing so, sacrifices his own freedom.

You must bear in mind that this type of freedom is not always beneficial to the free.

What I mean to say is that to free sheep, for example, would mean that you would deny yourself that easy prey, forcing you to become less independent.

From the mouths of "madmen":

Manson, Charles wrote:

• You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody's crazy.

• Look down at me and you see a fool; look up at me and you see a god; look straight at me and you see yourself.

• You expect to break me? Impossible! You broke me years ago. You killed me years ago...

• I can't judge any of you. I have no malice against you and no ribbons for you. But I think that it is high time that you all start looking at yourselves, and judging the lie that you live in.

• I will have you removed if you don't stop. I have a little system of my own.

• No sense makes sense.

• Ego is the man, the male image. Ego is the phallic symbol, the helmet, the gun. The man behind the gun, the mind behind the man behind the gun. My philosophy is that ego is the thinking mind. The mind you scheme with, make war with. They shoved all the love in the back, hid it away. Ego is like, "I'm going to war with my ego stick.”

• I have X'd myself from your world.

• I was so smart when I was a kid that I learnt that I was dumb fast.

• Progress? There's no such thing as progress. There's only change. You dig a hole in the ground, you build up a city, and you fight a war, and you call it progress?

• Have you ever seen the coyote in the desert? Watching, tuned in, completely aware. Christ on the cross, the coyote in the desert — it’s the same thing, man. The coyote is beautiful. He moves through the desert delicately, aware of everything, looking around. He hears every sound, smells every smell, sees everything that moves. He’s in a state of total paranoia, and total paranoia is total awareness.

• I lived in Hollywood and I had all that, the Rolls Royce and the Ferrari and the pad in Beverly Hills. I had the surf board and the Beach Boys and the bishkis and the Neil Diamond and the ramskam and the Jimmy shriffen and the Elvis Presley's best of bestlies and all them guys. The Dean and Martins and the Nancy Sinatras and the goffs and sofrins, "Will you do it to me? I hear you do it good honey" and all that kind of "Will you come up to my house later?" So I went through all that and I seen that was a bigger prison than the one I just got out of and I really didn't care to go back in prison. See, prison doesn't begin and end at the gate. Prison is in the mind. It's locked in one world that's dead and dying, or it's open to a world that's free and alive.

• There's nothing wrong with being incompetent.… It just means you don't have to do as much.

Camus, Albert wrote:

The man who could not understand how one could love one's neighbor cannot understand either how one can kill him.
Caught between unjustifiable virtue and unacceptable crime, consumed with pity and incapable of love, a recluse deprived of the benefits of cynicism, this man of supreme intelligence is killed by contradiction. "My mind is of this world," he said; "what good is it to try to understand what is not of this world?" But he lived only for what is not of this world, and his proud search for the absolute is precisely what removed him from the world of which he loved no part.

Speaking of Dostoyevsky's Ivan...Brothers Karamazov.

The dandy, of old, is what we now know as Metro-sexual.

He is a male, only in appearance, as his mindset and his aesthetic sensitivity. He creates an image, in accordance with what is fashionable, because the Dandy is always up-to-date, and a member of the fashionably avant guard.
His mind is completely preoccupied with the immediate, making him the representation of what is trending at any given point in a culture's history.
He is modern, across the ages, because we changes images the way one changes shirts.
He is feminine because fitting in and being on the forefront of his group's becoming, its progress towards its own being, makes him obsessive about fitting in and only fighting the mold by remaining outside the mediocre and the passe.  
He wants to be a part of, but still distinguishable, distinguished in tastes. For him remaining on the forefront is the constant work of predicting what will become trendy and what, next, consumer good, will go viral.  
The Dandy is consumed with consuming, and being consumed as the epitome of the chic.

For him identity is a malleable persona, he puts-on and then takes-off to move onto the next one - he is whatever the others want him to be, what they idealize and covet.
Causing envy is his aphrodisiac, and he will not be outdone in his erotic appeal.
The heterosexual dandy must keep his nose to the air, sniffing the pheromones that tell him what is "in" amongst the females this year and the next.
He does not attract in the usual masculine way, by exuding strength and authority, but he scrambles to become seductive in the way females are describing their tastes in magazine articles and unofficial surveys.

Haha ah, yes. The metro-sexual, i.e., the meta-physical female. I can't stand these abortions of men. But it's, really, no surprise considering the memetic war going on to emasculate and feminize boys and men. Hell, it's even a biological war; e.g., transgender genital operations. But more on point with the pretty boy, metro-sexual pansies, I see them all over the place where I live. They always brag about how many fresh, brand name sneakers they have stashed in their closets. How feminine!

Some of the aspects which are part of the subconscious of the dandy would be grandiosity and disdain. Let us not forget narcissism.

There is no desire for intimate engagement and in fact, the most important element for the dandy is distance.  His supercilious style of ostentatious neglect assumed by him exposes that he considers himself a master in all things of which he displays a certain implicit superiority.  He stands up to those who attack or deride  him, usually with vitriol that is difficult to match and he seems not to give much weight to criticism, but in turn never forgets

He is not  benign as some may presume, underneath all his sophisticated finery lives a raging narcissist.

Narcissist, in the context of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], is the selective overcompensating love for the artifice, constructed using social conventions, symbols, uniforms of type, so as to hide that naked, flesh, which pronounces the nature of the creature with plain and direct certainty.
The narcissist falls in love with his own delusion, when others help him believe in its truth, or despite what others think, by totally isolating himself from their judgments, because he despises what nature has made him out to be.
With the aid of modern technologies he may also choose to intervene upon this flesh, tucking, and pulling, and injecting, and padding it ...remoulding it so that it ceases to represent the past, turning it, with slow meticulous mediations, into a fabrication of the present: a superficial garment.
Unfortunately he cannot change his cells, or the memories, codes, they carry as remnants of this past he so despises and wishes to forget.

The conflict between this constructed image and those unalterable codes of heritage, turn him into a raging schizophrenic at odds with his very self.

Satyr wrote

Quote :

Narcissist, in the context of Narcissism & Schizophrenia, is the selective overcompensating love for the artifice, constructed using social conventions, symbols, uniforms of type, so as to hide that naked, flesh, which pronounces the nature of the creature with plain and direct certainty.

I understand and I do read all that you contribute on this Forum.

I am responding purely from this thread  concerning Dandyism, which is usually accompanied by narcissism.

Book review by The Guardian

Dandy in the Underworld

The importance of being dandy

Narcissistic, superficial, decadent - these perfumed popinjays may not always write the best books, but they are masterpieces in themselves.

Aside from breaking all records on the number of sharp-tongued aphorisms and pithy put-downs per page than any other book in recent history, the publication last week of Sebastian Horsley's memoir Dandy in the Underworld was a timely reminder that no one but the British does the literary dandy quite so well.

A narcissistic Soho-based peacock, Horsley is best known as the artist who in 2000 took his messiah complex to its natural conclusion by having himself crucified. All you really need to know is that Horsley's privileged but dysfunctional upbringing spawned a man with an insatiable appetite for crack, heroin and prostitutes - and, on occasion, affairs with men such as Glasgow hard man turned artist Jimmy Boyle. Horsley died of an "accidental" overdose of heroin and cocaine in 2010.

The Evening Standard

IT SEEMS Sebastian Horsley is to be a dandy on celluloid now that his scabrous no-holds-barred autobiography, Dandy in the Underworld, has been optioned by Stephen Fry's Sprout Films. Horsley's memoir was widely regarded to be one of the most revolting of recent times, and only last year he was thrown out of America on grounds of moral turpitude. He is delighted at the news, claiming that: 'Turning your book into a movie is like turning your daughter over to a pimp. Fun.'


privileged but dysfunctional upbringing is an important element in the development of a "dandy"

In an editorial article in The Observer in 2004, Horsley described his preference for sex with prostitutes, writing "What I hate with women generally is the intimacy, the invasion of my innermost space, the slow strangulation of my art." He also stated that he himself had worked as a prostitute for a while. He argued that prostitution should not be legalized, as that would take away part of its thrill.