Part Two: Beau Brummell: The First Celebrity and Inventor of the Suit and Tie
01:20:11 Share

We are back and we're thinking about George IV. One of the, I mean, most of the kings of England sucked. Yeah. He definitely did as well. Of all the kings of England, bottom 10% are we going to say? Where's he going on the kings of England list? He's not even that iconic because at least Henry VIII, horrible person, but you know him.

Yeah, Henry VIII. Yeah. He was your eighth old man. He was a Henry. Henry VIII, he is he is. As I remember from the song. Yeah, I'm trying to think of who was a good king of England. Nobody. I guess technically... I think technically, I mean, kings...

No, because even Richard the Lionheart was, you know, doing crusades and those are good. Yeah, he was literally doing a crusade. Yeah, I was like, that's not great, dog. He might be your best. I don't know. Queen Victoria's got the Irish potato famine. Yeah, it might be Charles. If Charles drops dead having not done anything too terrible as king, I guess he might wind up being our best.

Five stars. A real model of behavior for failed sons around the world. But also proof you can always turn your girlfriend into your wife at any point. Never give up. Never surrender. You just gotta believe in yourself. You gotta believe in yourself and the fact that you're rich and famous. And who knows who he would be if he had gone to Eaton. He didn't go. He didn't go. No. They would have taught him

I don't know. I don't want to make fun too much of his sausage fingers because I think it's a serious medical issue, but...

He also refuses to take modern medicine because he believes in fucking wizards. So I guess it is his fault. He probably had there's a single pill that would fix all of his circulation problems. But he just like takes strychnine made from some sort of fucking plant sap every day. God, I love it when people have all of the money in the world to be healthy aren't purely because they don't believe in medicine. It's always a lot of fun. The Steve Jobs effect, we call it. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, all of your problems are entirely self-generated. Anyway. What a choice. Princess, are you ready to get back to the story of Bo Brummel? We have just gotten up to age 16, right? He is...

Yeah, I'm ready. And Bo is not afraid. Unlike Bo is not afraid. He at least is good at putting on such an image of confidence and fearlessness that dozens of people wrote about it. And their writing has come down to us 300 years later about how this guy is like a Fonzie level of cool. 300 years later, we have a whole library worth of just people talking about like, man, that guy was cool.

That guy was rad as shit. You know, that guy fucks. Yeah, he definitely fucks. Henry Winkler level of fucks. And you guys think about Henry Winkler as we throw to ads.

What does a therapist do when her family is the one who needs a little help? Seek therapy, of course. Don't miss the new season of the Hulu comedy Unprisoned starring Kerry Washington and Delroy Lindo. With a father out of prison, a son with growing anxiety, and a therapy practice in serious trouble, Kerry Washington's page needs to pull her family back together by any means necessary. Get ready for a new season of raw comedy and heartfelt connection on Unprisoned. All episodes are now streaming only on Hulu.

Okay, you say, I want some breakfast. Your so-called boyfriend says, we got eggs in the fridge. Obviously, when you say breakfast, you mean McDonald's. Definitely a side-eye situation. Bring home the bacon, steak patty, or others with a BOGO for $1 breakfast. Only in the app. Limited time only at participating McDonald's. Valid once a day. Must opt into rewards. Visit McDApp for details. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

And many more.

They're sharing the dishes that got them through their struggles and the wisdom they gained along the way. We're cooking up something special, so tune in every Thursday. Listen to Eating While Broke on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by State Farm. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

We're back. I love Henry Winkler. He's had a great career, you know? Yeah, great hair still. Yeah. Take that. Because it's easy to be, you know, as a young man, he was quite handsome. It's easy to seem cool briefly when you're like young and really handsome. But he grew up into a man who looks like, and I mean this as no insult to him, looks like your dad's accountant and is still really cool.

Like still, you kind of want to be Henry Winkler. And that means he's always just had that kind of deep vein of cool running through him. I appreciate that. Yeah. Somebody's going to point out that he killed someone in the 1970s and then I'll have to feel bad. I don't think so. He was too busy getting killed off as principals in horror movies to really do any murdering himself. He did do a lot of that, didn't he? Yeah.

Yeah, I'm just a little bit like, because there's that, I kept thinking that the man who, the fellow who died recently, the leading man who passed recently. Donald Sutherland. Yeah, we were just talking about it before we recorded. I had mistakenly thought he was involved in the Natalie Wood thing. And I just realized when he died, like, oh, I was just like tarring this man with a horrible brush for no reason. Just because I'm bad at keeping track of celebrities. Yeah.

And it made me feel like all these white men did something wrong. Yeah, it made me feel I've had a couple of weird arguments. Like I had one about Billy Joel with some lady in my mentions who was like, OK, you like him, but he's he's an abuser. He's like it was an abusive husband. And I was like, I don't know where you're getting that from. No one's ever accused him of that. Like his exes seem to speak really well of him. And he spent the last 30 years primarily raising money for like a battered woman shelter. I actually think he's kind of fine on this.

but I think it's, you just half hear something and you mistakenly like blame some random famous person for something they did not do. I'm sure we've all done it at some point. It's just too many names out there to keep track of. Like, yeah. Rumor rumors circulate about dead people. And you're just kind of like, well, they like, I remember like not to defend her, but I remember people saying like, oh yeah, Mary Tudor burned like over 300 people. And the number is like 275. It's like, that's still not great. That's not great. Yeah. I was,

I was fighting more. If you think about it in murder terms, thinking someone killed 25 more people than they did is a lot. Although not a lot if they did kill 275 people. So I don't know. I don't know where you want to go on this. You know? Yeah. We'll call that the Matthew Broderick conundrum. Anyway, look at Matthew Broderick. Dark, dark. I know. I know. It's dark history. Look, this is this is the show that we're on. My brother used to confuse Dennis Quaid and Harrison Ford. And I feel like.

That is not chill. Ooh, ooh, no. Not chill. Because Harrison Ford never killed anybody. Mm-mm. Not that I'm aware of. Except for with kindness. Anyway, we're talking about Bo.

So Bo's parents, you know, he is basically on his own in the world by age 16 or so, which is not uncommon in the period. In a lot of most of like the Western world at 14, you're generally starting to be seen as a full adult. You're still most people see this kind of view you as very young, but you're often like working full time, right? Like you're supporting yourself or helping to support your family by that age if you're a man.

And it's not super common, especially among commoners. It's rare for girls to like – it's not the norm for girls to be like married and having kids at that time. But it's not unheard of, especially among the aristocracy, right? So the fact that Beau's childhood ends a little early has a lot to do with the fact that his parents both die when he's very young. His mom passes in 1793 when he is 15 years old. Right.

He doesn't write a lot about her. The evidence we have seems that maybe by the time he was kind of in his late teens, they were a little bit cold. And his dad is cold on him. He is the least favorite son of his family. His mom and his dad both seem to view him as kind of a fuck around because he's this like party boy. He's loved by his classmates. He has no ambition. That is kind of a thing about Beau. For someone who's as famous as he was, he never wants to do anything. He doesn't want to be in government. He doesn't want a job.

He just likes having fun. And his parents seem to recognize that and are sort of disgusted with him because his dad is not entirely a self-made man, but makes a lot of money.

Mm-hmm.

I've heard wildly divergent estimates of what his family estate is worth, right? The low end, and this is what Ian Kelly says, probably around 5 million pounds in modern money. But also, you can never get very close to accurate descriptions of what the money is worth because most people don't use money in their day-to-day life. An average –

like peasant or whatever, an average person in the countryside, particularly in the countryside, if you're farming, money is not a day-to-day thing for you. Most of what you do, you accomplish. You either grow it, you pull it out of the ground, or you barter with your neighbors. Every now and then you'll get money. You even pay your taxes directly with the crops that you grow. People in the city use money, but even then, a lot of it's on credit and script. And so when you're talking about these wealthy people who do have fortunes

Even something like, if you're saying something that's like the equivalent of a million pounds, just based on how we calculate stuff, it's usually really much more than that because most people don't have money most of the time, right? I've seen some estimates that the family fortune was more like $50 million. Either way, his dad leaves them a lot of money. And

And the custom of the time, most people would have given it all to the oldest brother, William, right? A lot of this is a period of time in which a lot of colonization is happening. A lot of colonization is driven by second and third sons, you know, who don't get any of the family money. Losers. Losers, right? Like, yeah, you're born to be fucked with, you know? Your big brother is the one who's going to get all the money. That doesn't happen with the Brummels.

Billy, their dad, is kind of a forward-thinking guy, and he splits the estate up. And to his credit, this shows you a little bit of a progressive streak in the Brummels. He has two sons and a daughter, and each of them gets the same share of the family money, which is rare. Hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Depending on how you want to calculate it, George's share of this is probably between like one and a half million to three million pounds in modern money. It's a lot. It is enough that if he had wanted to live a modest life, he could have been comfortable and never worked. It's also enough that not enough to be comfortable and live like a rich person.

Right. Like today, if you inherit three million dollars at 16, if you invest that right, you can live comfortably forever if your tastes aren't too fancy. But if you want to live in a New York high rise, right, and we're all like you're going to run through three million dollars pretty quick. Real quick. Yeah. It's a lot of money. It's not enough to be rich forever. Right. That's the amount that he inherits. Right.

So he also, he's not going to immediately get access to it. It comes to him in a trust and he's going to have to beg his new guardian for any money initially that he wants to pay. And this guardian, it's like he's godfather or something. It's a friend of the family. The guardian sends the boys to Oxford initially because he's like, well, you're done at Eaton. You should all go to the best school of the day. And today, I actually got to speak at Oxford a year or so ago. Very nice town. Very pretty school. Very academically. My brother went there for a while.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like one of the most respected schools you can go to. It's not really a school back then in the way we think of things. There are classes. You learn some things. Most of what you learn if you are in this social class is how to drink like a son of a bitch.

Right. You are again. So double drinking. Yes, yes, yes. You learned how to drink as a boy. And now it's time to learn how to drink like a man. You know, like that's why you go to Oxford. That's most of what you learn. And I am not making this up. So one of the most prominent Oxford graduates who went there, he goes there a bit before George's day. But I think his statement about Oxford in this period of time and Oxford is it's not a college. It's a series of colleges in one town that all kind of get wrapped up.

but there's like a number of different universities.

One of like a guy who goes to Oxford in the period of like basically a generation before George is Edward Gibbon, who you might not know him by name, but he is the guy who writes the history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Right. He is one of the biggest names in the history of academia. Right. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very. Yeah. And this is what he says about Oxford in this time. I spent 14 months at Magdalene College. They proved to be the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life. Right. We didn't do shit but drink.

Ian Kelly quotes a contemporary politician who preceded George at Oxford by a little bit and said, "...a gentleman commoner was under no restraint and never called upon to attend either lectures or chapel or hall. The set of men with whom I lived were very pleasant but very idle fellows. Our life was an imitation of high life in London."

We are learning how we are pretending to be adults and we are learning how to be ready to be rich dilettantes in the city, you know, and we're not learning that because there's nothing to do. We're learning that because being a rich dilettante in the city is how you get the jobs running the empire, right? This is part of why some of the people who run it do stuff like try to hold Afghanistan not all that long after this period of time and get everybody killed. It

It also, part of what you do have to accept is there's a degree to, this is a very effective system at the end of the day in creating people who are hard and cruel enough to run an empire that is extremely powerful.

This is a the drinking, the the the insults, the petty bon mots, the the fact that you have to be so quick witted. You have to be able to keep track of who is where and who you can insult and who you shouldn't. The fact that you have to be able to drink to excess, but not too much because you don't want to lose track of like maintaining your path in the social structure that requires a lot of a person. And it doesn't breed people who are good at governing society.

India, but it creates people who are good at understanding how to hold power in India. You know, right. It does hold the line of like, right. They hold the line of the hierarchy. And they're also so from that, from the whole homosocial dynamic, they're also ready to believe the person on top of them knows best. So they'll just believe whatever being told by the person above them.

Yeah. Yeah. It's this – I have talked to – I was not a high school girl, but I have talked to my friends who were high school girls and they'll talk about especially when you're like –

I think the show Yellow Jackets gets an aspect of this pretty well. But like how how brutal girls can be in like social hierarchy to each other at that age. Men have their own version of that. And you should look at the culture that produces the rulers of England as like a really gossipy high school. Everybody's fucking everybody's talking shit and gossiping about each other.

And George, all he wants, he doesn't want any of the jobs. He wants to sail to the top of that without actually being responsible for anything. Right. He is in a lot of ways the consummate slacker. Right. Yeah. Like he is. He is kind of like the patron saint of slackers, you know, which is part of why I respect. When you're a B plus student, you're like, I'm going to be OK. Yeah. Like I'm a B plus student. I can pass all the classes. I'm not going to study, though. Yeah. Yeah.

So this segment of society was, as George came of age, also deeply spooked. The culprit of this scaredness, spookiness, was the French Revolution, which is kind of lingering. It hits while George is at Eton. He comes home from school for a holiday to be told that his family men are like, oh, yeah, they just did a revolution in France. Yeah.

Looks pretty nasty for people like us over there. The king and queen killed a lot of fucking people. And so everybody doesn't hit Great Britain, but a lot of refugees do. A lot of these French nobles and wealthy people who flee wind up coming to London and stuff. And it the whole aristocracy is terrified. Is this shit going to spread?

because they're not looking at it as just the French Revolution. They're also looking at what just happened in the United States, right? Which did include a lot of violence towards members of the British aristocracy who stayed loyal. And they're thinking...

Are we about to have an uprising of the common people, right? Are we on the verge of a revolution, you know? Right. Yeah. Part of what they are aware of is that a lot of the men and women who had faced the guillotine during this era had been identified by the crowd as aristocrats because they were dressed very well, right? They are wearing the clothes of incredibly rich people. And this starts to accelerate a change that had already begun to sweep British fashion earlier in the 1780s.

Wool replaces silk. Gold and silver seems less desirable than flat colors in an age where you never know is a mob about to come for us. So this is starting to happen. Parts of this had started before the French Revolution, but that really accelerates this like, I don't know if I want to be wearing...

the equivalent of like $200,000 in silk at all times. And like gold braid, literal gold braid. I shouldn't carry my purse in this neighborhood. Yeah. And one of the things I think that

is an aspect of this. You know, we're dealing with this weird thing where you've got a chunk of people who believe that guys like Donald Trump, literal billionaires, guys like Elon Musk are basically working class because they seem common and coarse in a way that like, well, I, he's saying what I feel like. So maybe he's not one of like the ruling class and they are. Right. But part of what lets people get away with this is that suits are

are a thing that rich people wear, but also a lot of people wear. I would say 99% of people I have seen wearing tailored suits were not wealthy. Most of them are working class, right? Because for a lot of working class people, like you just wear a suit to work, right? Like, or at least a casual suit or something. Right. And that has allowed people

I think it's as opposed to in this kind of pre-Regency period, early Regency period. If you see a rich person, you immediately know by their dress that they're rich. Right. Right. And part of what's going to happen, this change in fashion is going to change that. It's never again going to be.

as easy to tell how rich the rich are just by their clothes, unless you really know your fashion shit, right? Right. It's kind of like how, like when the Silicon Valley tech bros came up and they were wearing like sweatpants and just really casual, like athleisure, but very expensive watches. Right.

And so like accessories became the new indicator of stuff, not necessarily the clothes you were wearing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's part because like those are a little easier to take off. They're a little less immediately obvious. You know, Bo is going to be part of why that becomes how people look at fashion. We're getting to all that. So he only spends a couple of months at Oxford. He gives it up in like a semester as a useless waste of money. And he comes to his guardian and is like, look,

I don't think Oxford's going to help me get where I want to get. I want some of my money released now because I need to buy a commission in the Royal Army. I want to pay to become an officer in the army. Word. If you join the army today, number one, you never pay because that would be very sketchy to pay to join the army. Yeah.

You will start. There's two tracks. And the British are actually part of why. Because the British helped to invent. And they're kind of cribbing from the Romans. We crib in part from the Romans, from the French, from the British, how we organize our army. There's two tracks in the military. And this is true then and it's true this day. There's non-commissioned officers, privates, sergeants, corporals, right? That's not the order it goes in, but whatever. And then there's officers, right? That's your lieutenants, your captains, your majors, your colonels, yada, yada, yada, yada.

On and up. They do slightly different things. And they're different social classes historically. This is a little bit less the case in the United States, but not really that much because officers have to have a college degree, right? Generally. Not always. My grandpa never graduated eighth grade, but he became an officer because everyone above him got shot to death in Korea. You know? Does happen occasionally. There you go. But as a general rule, officers are...

people who have an education, right? And in this period, officers are usually the aristocracy or gentlemen commoners, right? Like Beau. And in the modern militaries, there's no way to start out as a higher rank. You start out at the bottom of your respective rung, usually either like a private or a second lieutenant if you're an officer, right? Because modern militaries have found that if you can bribe people for better jobs, you

What happens is all of your officers suck and they get everyone killed all the time. This is a problem in a lot of different militaries, right? It's always a problem. Sounds about right. Yeah, yeah. You look at a lot of these to go into kind of some contemporary history. There's been a lot written about like you have these wars between Israel and a lot of its neighbors. And a lot of these armies like Egypt and Syria perform really badly. And part of it is because –

If you're a dictator, if you're a strong man in power, you don't necessarily want an army that makes it easy for good officers to gain power because those are the people who might overthrow you. Right. So you want toadies and stuff. People are effectively buying. And that's how a lot of shit works in the British army, kind of, for quite a while and especially during this period. Right.

Back in the late 1700s and early 1800s, rank is not something a rich man earned. It was something he bought. And this practice had started in the reign of Charles II. Being able to buy a commission actually had a reasonable origin. It was trying to deal with the fact that you had a lot of rich guys who wanted to be officers. They would join. They would get everybody killed. Or if a battle would go badly, they would run away. And they would kind of like fuck over the army. So they were trying to establish accountability.

And initially, the way buying a commission worked is it was like pay up. Well, it was like bonding out of jail. It was in order to become an officer, you give us a chunk of money. And when you're done, we'll give it to you back unless you run away and battle or get everybody killed. If you fuck up, you don't get this money back. Right. So it starts from a good, an intelligent perspective.

uh, desire to like, we need to have some accountability. Right. But by the time Bo is there, it has turned into a way for, if you're an asshole with a lot of money, you can pay to have a cool sounding rank. Like I would like it. If people called me captain, I would like to be called Colonel. Right. Here's a pile of money. Now I'm a Colonel. Right. Um,

But it did lead to people who didn't know their shit being in command of military units. And British defeat in the Revolutionary War is going to be blamed by a lot of people at home on these officers who have paid for their commissions. Now, I think historians have largely agreed that that's not a primary cause. It wasn't 0% of why things go badly for them, but it's not the main reason things do, right? But a lot of people do blame that for the defeat at the time, right? It's also worth noting that

The army does this because the army is the second tier British military thing. The Royal Navy, you're never able to do this. It's got some corruption of its own, but that's part of why the Navy always wins, you know, is they don't do stupid shit. Yeah, they're like, this is going to be sick.

Yeah, we don't have any. We have no flex with the Navy. The Navy's look at us and everyone we're picking fights with. Right. Right. Otherwise, we're just getting we're an island nation. We need this shit to work. We cannot fuck around with the Navy. And you shouldn't fuck around with the Navy either, which is why this podcast is sponsored entirely by the British Royal Navy Circus 1790.

Was it easy to get a sponsorship from a bunch of men who have been dead for 200 years? Actually, yes. But that's because we at CoolZone employ only the finest oracles for our ad sales team. So thank you, oracles.

With big wireless providers, what you see is never what you get. Somewhere between the store and your first month's bill, the price you thought you were paying magically skyrockets. With Mint Mobile, you'll never have to worry about gotchas ever again. When Mint Mobile says $15 a month when you purchase a three-month plan, they mean it. All plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network.

Use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with all your existing contacts. Ditch overpriced wireless with Mint Mobile's deal and get three months of premium wireless service for $15 a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three-month premium wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to mintmobile.com slash behind. That's mintmobile.com slash behind. Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at mintmobile.com slash behind.

$45 upfront payment required, equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details.

Wouldn't it be nice if making decisions was easier? With Xfinity, you have one less decision to worry about. Just say what to watch into your Xfinity voice remote to see editors' picks and find what's new. You can even search by genre or mood. You can also find the ultimate dance soundtrack and play all your favorite music and artists on iHeartRadio to get the party started right in your living room. So you can skip the endless scroll and get right to the good stuff.

Nothing will fit into your day better than a Fit Crunch bar. Fit Crunch baked bars are chef-inspired from Robert Irvine and made with six layers of deliciousness. With 16 grams of protein and 3 grams of sugar, Fit Crunch is the perfect snack, whether it's at school, midday at work, or when you're on the go. Visit FitCrunch.com and use promo code RADIO15 for 15% off your FitCrunch.com order or find a retailer near you. Check out FitCrunch.com today. That's FitCrunch.com, promo code RADIO15.

We're back. Princess, is there a dead person you'd like our oracles to get you in contact with? Oh, man. Yes, please. I want to talk to Catherine of Aragon. Oh, hell yeah. Just for like five minutes. Yeah.

I have questions. Yeah. I got a couple of those. You know, honestly, it's not a person for me, but I would like to let Hitler's dog know that we don't blame him. That's good. Yeah. Like none of it's on you, buddy. Like it's not on you, man. Like we know you didn't have any choice. You're a German shepherd. Like it's not on you, man. Nobody blames you. Right. We're all we're all in agreement.

I just feel like he might be holding on to some trauma. One innocent. Yeah. The only person in that bunker who didn't deserve what happened to him. So...

By the late 1790s, only some cavalry and infantry regiments let people purchase commissions. And a lot of these are show units meant for parade duty rather than like fighting Napoleon, which is happening at this time. And Napoleon, pretty good at fighting. You don't want to send some asshole who bought a thousand men. You need a guy who's going to be named after a steak. Right, right. Exactly. Yes, exactly. The man who's going to have boots named after him is the one we can trust to do this shit.

And of all of the fake regiments in the British Royal Army, the fakest of the fake was the elite 10th Light Dragoons, which had been christened the Prince of Wales's own, right? It's supposed to be an honorific. You know, this is the specific unit, the elite, you know, in the Tsarist Russia, you get the elite horse guards, which are like the crown prince's own or whatever. And here, that equivalent is the 10th Light Dragoons.

Now, the Prince of Wales at this point is George Augustus Frederick. Born in 1762, he is in his early 30s when 16-year-old George Brummel pays to join his unit. Now, in the future, he is going to be King George IV, one of all of the dog shit kings kingdom has ever had, near the bottom of the pile.

He is famous for being a selfish asshole to everyone around him. He's famous for like among the standards of the kings of England, people being like, yeah, this guy was really addicted to people. Just didn't seem to care about anyone else. Yeah. Especially his wife. Like horrible marriage. Yeah. Terrible marriage. He was like, you're not.

coming to the funeral. His wife, Queen Charlotte, Princess Charlotte, doesn't like George, but George actually feels sorry for her because he sees how she's treated. He is there for the wedding. We're getting to this. The Tenth Light Dragoons and how they worked and why they came about are a testament to the kind of lifestyle the future king lived.

Because he was heir, his dad – and some of this isn't his fault – his dad won't let him do anything. He doesn't want him to have a real job because the prince – the only real job that's fit for a prince is to be a soldier. And that's dangerous, right? Your heir is the future of the dynasty. Dad wants you safe at home, not getting into any trouble.

And so you can't actually learn to be good at anything. There's nothing for you. And so the prince, he grows past his 20s to his 30s. The only thing his wife will say, the only thing he was ever good at was fashion. He knew fabric. He knew good cuts of clothing. He was even he could have been a great tailor, you know, if he had come about in a different time where he was actually allowed and needed to do something. He might have actually been a person with a skill and it would have been better for him because he is miserable his whole life.

Because he has no talent, like most people, we have these guys today, a lot of people who are not good for anything, fetishize military uniforms and dressing and looking and pretending to be militant as a way to hide the fact that they have no talent, right? He is...

He's like one of these guys who marches around city streets and fucking soldier get up and whatnot, waving a flag or whatever. Like he is. He has a lot of that in him. Yeah. Fucking LARPers. Military LARPers. Yeah. He is a LARPer and he is deeply insecure about it.

He collected replicas of every kind of uniform in the Royal Army. When his brother, his brother goes, his brother who, his younger brother, who has a real job doing actual statesmanship, visits Berlin in 1791 as part of like, you know, they're fighting Napoleon, right? The Prussians are our allies and whatnot. So he's there for diplomatic reasons. And when he goes, his eldest brother, the failest of fail sons, he's not allowed to do anything, is like,

If you go, this is what he writes in the letter, being like, I want you to bring me these back, the complete uniforms, accoutrements, saddle and bridle, etc., of one of the Zaytans, Hussars, as well as one of the officers' complete uniforms, clothing, sword, cap, saddle, bridle, chabrek, pistols, in short, everything complete.

I want the whole, all of the uniform, all of the bits, all of the dresses. He's like, you know, this is a guy, today he might have wound up like in a nerdier thing being one of those rich dudes who has like all of the fucking Imperial officer, you know, every stormtrooper uniform, a great Darth Vader costume. He's that kind of guy.

Only he's not making his brother buy it for it. This is this kind of Vader costume. This is from the video game. Yeah. Yeah. But he's also he's not. There's something respect if you're the kind to do, especially I've known some people who like buy all the equipment to like make their own custom uniforms and shit like that's a skill. You have to learn a lot about tailoring. I have cosplay friends who do that. A lot of respect for that. He is the kind of guy who pays to have all that made for him. Yeah.

The specific uniform that he's most obsessed with is the uniform of the Prussian hussars. And a hussar is a kind of cavalry. These guys are the Navy SEALs of their day. They are special forces. They are the best of the best, right? Not only are these hussars, they have a pretty good combat record, but they look really cool. If you look up the Death's Head hussars...

These guys, they wear these huge shakos, these like big bear skin hats that have like bear fur on them. These like huge round hats. And it has a skull and crossbones. Do you see the death's head? That is where the Nazis get the death's head from, right? It comes from these units, these elite units of hussars.

Now, these guys aren't Nazis, right? They don't exist yet, right? This is just, it looks cool to have a skull and crossbones on your helmet, right? No, no, no, for sure. It's just like Hitler is just such a like, he's such a Pinterest artist of like, I like this, I like this, I like this, I like this. I'm just going to ruin it retroactively. The guy who makes the SS what they are, Heinrich Himmler, is...

Exactly the same kind of nerd about this stuff that the future king of England is going to be. And he's also obsessed with these hussars and their great uniforms and whatnot. So that's what the Prince of Wales wants. What he covets about these guys, because he is never going to see anything close to a fight, is their reputation for being deadly skilled professionals. He wants respect and people respect these men, right? Mm-hmm.

In Beau Brumble's biography, Ian Kelly writes, Right.

He put it more eloquently to his father. "'I have no option but to lead a life which must to the public eye wear the color of idleness, which, from the sense of it so appearing, must sit irksomely upon me.' A uniform would make him appear properly royal, a soldier prince leading his people. In letters to his father, he likened himself to the Black Prince, and in the portraits he commissioned and poised himself as a man of action, a military prince.'

He wants to be seen as this great warrior. He's never going to get a chance to do that. Right. He would have gotten killed immediately. He would have gotten the whole British Army. The whole army would have won the shit out of this war if anyone had let this son of a bitch near a battlefield. Absolutely. Yeah. And his dad knows this. The most the princes. Yeah. These guys are so funny.

His dad knows this. The most the prince is ever going to get is a single regiment created just for him in 1793. The 10th Regiment of Light Dragoons, the Prince of Wales' own, never does anything. They are not a real military unit. They exist. This is...

Today, people who have this desire and a little bit more inside themselves, if they've got some money, they just start playing Warhammer, right? But this is his equivalent of playing one of these like Toy Soldier games, right? Instead of he doesn't have to buy models and build and paint them, he just gets a body of men. He designs their uniform from the ground up. He is kind of like painting these guys and assembling them. He wants some men, sweetie. He's like...

Yeah. Give him some men, some men we don't need. Let him dress them up however he wants. He can march them around on a field and pretend he's a generous. Now, to give you an idea of like how little his father trusts him, he gets this unit gets made early on. And like, I think the yeah, in the in 1793, he doesn't get or in 1783.

or something like that, but he doesn't get command of it until 1793 when war with France starts. So at first other people are running this because his dad doesn't even trust him to run a fake unit designed for him to like look fancy in. But when war with France starts, they're like, we're going to need to get a lot of soldiers. And if we show the Prince Regent the,

trotting around with his fake army, it might make the royalty look like we're more invested in this fight and maybe more commoners will join up to die for us, right? So he makes his son, he gives him proper command of the unit in 1793, but he backed

dates his rank to 1782. He like retcons his son being a colonel in the army. So he's not the most junior officer because you can't have that, right? Yeah. Right. That would be embarrassing. Now, the king does make it clear to everyone involved in running the military under no circumstances will my son ever leave the country. We are not using him or this unit for anything.

So the prince's only job is to design the uniforms, which are the most elaborate and expensive military outfits in all of Europe. George Brumble joins the 10th for two reasons. First off, the guy who stole his first girlfriend had been their old colonel. And second, it's a way to get close to the prince. Social and professional advancement in Regency England is tied entirely to who you know. And the prince is basically the best man to know.

He had met the prince once earlier at Windsor Castle, and the future king had expressed an interest. George comes to the castle dressed differently from everyone else, dressed really down. He's kind of dressed casually, but it's sort of...

He looks like he just rolled out of bed, but he spent four hours setting himself up to look like he just rolled out of bed. And he looks like he's dressed down, but in the... Because he's wearing this outfit that's like a costume, right? That's like a casual costume, but he is perfectly tailored. He has every single measurement he has set out to show off his body to the best degree. And the king is like, oh, dude, you look fucking dope. Sick, yeah. And the prince...

You know, not to body shame a dead man. He is known for being corpulent. Right. And so he he he is insecure about this. He gets made fun of for this. And Bo is thin and muscular and handsome. Right. So the prince is like, how can I dress like you? And he listens to everything the 16 year old boy has to say. Right. Oh, my God. He's desperate to be this kid. He's just because he's cool. Right.

One of the criticisms I might have of Ian Kelly is a very good and a very serious biographer. He jumps around this fact like because he Kelly kind of leans into this. It's a little bit of a mystery why everyone likes him so much. Some of it was this was charming. He was like what he doesn't because he's a little bit too, I think, professional to say this is like Bo's just cool. Right. Yeah. He looks like Timothy Chalamet. Like, yeah, exactly. Right. Like people just want to be like him.

So, yeah, and the Prince of Wales, who is 30-something, kind of falls for him. So when George applies for entry into the regiment, the Prince of Wales says yes. Now, George has to pay, and he has to pay out the ass for these uniforms. But he quickly becomes one of the most popular men in the unit, despite being a literal child –

A lot of these guys are in their 20s and 30s. He is 16, and they all look up to him, right? Now, he can drink with the best of them. He's very funny. And pretty soon, the prince is dressing like him, which means everyone else starts dressing like him, right? Oh, yeah. What an influencer. Yeah, he is an influencer. And to be fair, the prince is not bad at fashion, and the 10th's elaborate uniform has an influence on George and is going to play a part in the creation of the modern suit.

The cavalry officers, like all cavalry officers, were these skin-tight breeches. Theirs are made of wool, and they're so thin that the wearer almost looks naked or a lot of – because it's a pale kind of whitish-blue color a lot of times, you look like a marble statue, like these ancient Greek statues, right? That everybody worships, right? Mm-hmm.

English writing breeches had become popular by this point in post-revolutionary France because they're athleisure, right? They're a little more like blue jeans, a lot of people see them as, right? They're egalitarian, you know? But these were the most popular writing breeches, and the writing breeches Beau wears before he joins this unit are usually knee-high because you're wearing them with cavalry boots, which go up very high.

The 10th, just because the Prince likes them, their breeches go down low, low enough that you can actually wear them with regular shoes. They're close to trousers, right? Modern slacks in a lot of ways, other than how tight they are. George Brumble appreciates these pants, right? And he's going to integrate them into his uniform. And the pants that he starts wearing when he's in the 10th are seen by people as one of the precursors to modern slacks.

George Brummel appreciated these pants, but the rest of the uniform he considered a pain because it was so intricate and expensive. It cost about 350 pounds to buy your own uniform. Damn. Right? That's not cheap today, but a housekeeper back then makes 15 a year. You're already paying to play because you already put up money to be here in the first place. Now I have to go buy extra clothes?

Yeah, it's just a disaster. Like a footman is making 17 pounds a year. A French chef, you know, they live pretty well as making 60 pounds. So this is a crazy amount of money to spend on your outfit. Yeah. Even for a rich kid.

Now, the primary occupation of the Prince's own hussars, because they're not allowed to fight, is alcoholism. They did do some drills and war games, but those are mostly you spend the day riding around doing a war game and then you spend several days drunk off your ass. Just. And Bo is like, I've been training my whole life for this. All that. Yeah.

I have been the kind of alcoholic that doesn't exist on the planet anymore since age 13. I'm ready, coach. Put my ass in. And they have a lot of terms for this. Like they'll call certain songs like two bottle songs and three bottle songs where like you can sing this kind of song when you've had two bottles of wine. This kind of song you're going to need three bottles for, right? And there's also a term like a three bottle man, a man who can easily put away three bottles of wine in the night and like still keep his head about him, be ready the next day to go ride around and do whatever kind of

bullshit, right? And that's all you're doing is drinking and riding around. The prince described his ideal soldiers as men of fashion and gentlemen. And he spent most of his time forcing bottles of wine down their throats and doing his basically they're all doing karaoke. That's what partying is then is you all sing together while you get recklessly drunk.

One veteran of the unit later recalled, "...the officers of those days were thrown headlong into a vicious school, where at times they were expected to act as if in reality they were thinking beings, and at others chastised for merely thinking. The officers were suffered to get drunk, swear, gamble, seduce, and run into debt at pleasure. That such a school produced many scamps, many incorrigible bad characters, is but little surprising. It is indeed truly wonderful that it produced anything else."

He's like, Jesus Christ. Most of us turned into pieces of shit. But that's not what's amazing. What's amazing is that any of us didn't. Right. It's like some of us actually became members of society. They died two years after because their livers were completely destroyed. But good for them. They were melting from the inside out.

George Brummell does extremely well in this world. Brummell is noted as being, quote, the life and soul of the mess with his regiment for his original wit and collection of good stories were inexhaustible. And at the dinner table, he always kept his brother officers in roars of laughter.

Every regiment in those days had a practiced and privileged jester whose province it was to put an immediate stop to serious conversation by pun or joke and return to, quote, the hilarity which usually pervades our military society. So he is seen as the guy who can stop anyone from –

He's making dark jokes. He's making jokes, you know, lewd jokes about women. And his goal is to redirect conversation, to keep everybody in high spirits, right? Especially when they start losing money as they're all going into debt, trying to afford to be in this unit. That's part of his job. And he's good at it.

He does so well at this side of army life that after a year in the regiment at age 17, he is picked to be the best man at the royal wedding, or at least one of a couple of them. He's the best man at Charles IV's royal wedding. That's crazy. Now, the wedding itself is a disaster. The prince and the princess know each other from paintings.

That's what they have and letters where they describe each other and they both lie. Neither of them is honest. They were not pleased. You? Tinder taken to its natural place.

And the princess is like, well, he really did not accurately describe his weight, you know, when he talked to me. And his issue with her is that, like, this is a thing I think is common among German princesses. She doesn't bathe and he doesn't love that. Nobody does. A lot of people try to talk to her about this, about like, hey, I got bath might help. But.

But they don't really, that's not the style at the time. So because he's such a piece of shit, the prince is going to spend their wedding night and honeymoon mostly mocking his new bride. And George, he tries to redirect, he feels like bad for her. Yeah, she's a little like weird and foreign, but she just like left her home to come here. And she seems really lonely and like you're being very shitty to her.

The future, he does, however, get incredibly, absolutely housed with the prince. They are just drunk as shit. The prince is too drunk to fuck, right? When they come in on their honeymoon, she blames Bo for that. Honestly, that might have been the best thing for everybody. But she blames Bo for like, you got him too drunk to even do the one thing he's supposed to do, right? Tomorrow. Tomorrow, honey.

George buys a promotion to lieutenant in 1795 and then captain in 1796. His only injury came when he fell off a horse and broke his nose, thus ruining his profile. In 1798, yeah, some people say it makes him more handsome, like Harrison Ford's little chin scar. It probably does. Yeah.

Yeah, that's going to be my guess because he still does pretty well. In 1798, the regiment moves to Manchester and George is like, it's the end of my military career. I don't want to go to Manchester because that's not London. London is the city that matters. And here's how his earliest biographer, William Jesse, describes him going to the prince to talk about leaving.

Well, the fact is, your Royal Highness, I have heard that we are ordered to Manchester. Now, you must be aware how disagreeable this would be to me. I really could not go. Think, your Royal Highness. Manchester. Besides, you would not be there. I have therefore, with your Royal Highness's permission, determined to sell out. Like, why would I go there? You're not there. What kind of a place is it without you? Like, babe, it's you and me. Yeah, you and me, bro. And

And the prince is like, well, yeah, of course. You know, I don't want to be not around you. Without you. Yeah. I love you, dog. Yeah, exactly. So Beau cashes out and he moves to London. He takes possession of his inheritance at this point. He's a full adult. He buys a house in the most fashionable part of town. He is very close to Saffel Row.

You may have heard of Savile Row. It's generally – it's like where you get your nicest tailored suit today. Bo is going to make Savile Row Savile Row. He is where that – why that starts because that's where he goes and a lot of his tailors are, right? He starts buying clothes. He starts building relationships with a bunch of different tailors. One of his things is he will talk shit about people who are like, oh, you go to the same tailor for your waistcoat and your jacket, right?

There's no good vest man who's a good jacket man. You bought your hat and shoes from the same tailor. Oh, okay. They look like it. Those look like the hats of a shoe man. Oh my God. Like those Muppets who are like, look at them. Oh, oh.

Oh, oh, oh, oh. Like he is. Yeah. Just totally a troll. Yeah. That's exactly what he's doing. So he picks a different guy for each thing and he, he designs a series of suits for himself. They are based off of the stripped down suit that he had started wearing at Eaton a little bit. You know, he takes the breaches kind of from his, his uniform in the 10th and this becomes the prototype of the Western suit. This is where it has its origin point. Hmm.

Beau finalizes his sartorial experiments just as fashion in England is hitting a turning point. The term dandy had first entered the lexicon in 1780, and it means basically a person who studies who is obsessed with fashion, kind of, right?

Beau is going to be the man, he doesn't originate that term, but he defines it. When people write about dandies in this period, most of them are writing about Beau. Most of his contemporaries see him as the first of the dandies. In 1795, the prime minister has introduced a new tax on wig powder. This is part of the war against Napoleon and it accelerated the demise of the old style of fashion, which had been on its way out since the French Revolution at least.

Bo is going to be one of the first people and a lot of the prince and a lot of other people follow him who stops wearing a wig. And he kind of does. If you look at the way Napoleon looked, that kind of almost Greek statue hairstyle. That's how Bo wears his hair. And it's how everybody starts to wear their hair. An improvement because I've seen those other hairstyles. Yeah, not it. Yeah, it's a step forward. We can agree on that.

In National Geographic, Ignacio Pero writes, the growth of a new British style, one that embraced simplicity, structure, and understatement with monochrome and military fabrics, abandoned such pre-revolutionary fashions. Psychologist John Carl Flugel later dubbed this gradual process of simplification in men's dress as the great masculine renunciation, whereby men's fashion became inspired by social equality. It turned its back on extravagance and excessive grooming became regarded as a feminine trait.

Right. And that's weird because in part, Bo is going to advocate much more grooming than had been. I was going to say he loves to groom. He loves to groom, but his kind of grooming is you should be clean. You should wear good clothing. You should have good skin. And as a result, you won't need to wear cosmetics as much. So it is people see it as less grooming because he's saying, no, you should actually take care of your body rather than getting obsessed with all ways to hide the fact that you're filthy and gross. You know?

That's the kind of fashionista he is. A lot of these changes in style had started before Bo and would have happened without him. He doesn't kill the old style of fashion entirely on its own, but it dies as he comes into his own as like a popular man in high society. And he is the first person with a vision of what's going to come next. Right. And that's why he's able to make this change. He's able to make it because the prince himself.

is the king of high society in London, and he is dressing like Beau. He is telling everyone else to dress like Beau. Beau is going around to all these tailors, and when people realize this is who the king follows for fashion advice, they will go to the same tailors that Beau is, and they will ask them, what is he wearing? What does he say is the best fabrics? What does he say is the best way to dress? Right.

And part of why he gets credit for inventing the suit is he doesn't have one tailor. There's not one guy who makes an outfit that he wears because he picks all these tailors. It's them who are kind of coming up with these alterations and innovations on new styles.

but he is the one putting them all together. So he gets all the credit for creating the suit, even though he's using a bunch of people for it. Right? Yeah. Within months of arriving in London, flocks of aristocrats are following Bo around. They will come to his house in the morning. And this starts with the prince and some of his hangers-on. They will go to see Bo in the morning and watch him dress.

Because they want to know, like, how do you look like you just rolled out of bed? What is it you do? And it takes them hours. And it becomes like one of the most fashionable things to do. Because, again, part of what this guy is doing, he is living the life of a TikTok influencer. But we're like a TikTok fashion influencer. You take in videos of you putting on your makeup.

videos of you dressing up. Yeah, get ready with me. Yeah. Yeah. Just IRL. They're like, we're going to see this live in person. They're literally at his house watching him do this, right? Like, but it's no different, you know, it's just like, it's actually in his home because that's the way it's got to be back then.

then. Once he has, the prince kind of acts like the algorithm, right, that boosts his content into everybody's feed. Once he's got this everyone's attention because of the prince, he keeps it because he understands how fame works. He understands how to keep his name on everybody's lip, and he does it very intentionally. Some of why is because he's got a great eye for style.

Bo is probably the first fashionable man of influence to insist that what matters is not how expensive your clothing looks. It's not having all these layers. It's not having all this jewelry. It's not having all this paint on your face. It's having really quality fabrics, particularly fine linen. And it's cut in a way to show off your natural attributes, right? You don't want to wear too much. You want to show off your body because you're showing off

I have the time and money to spend all my time thinking about how I look and how I present myself. Right. Right. Rather than I paid somebody to buy me the fanciest clothing, you know? Right.

And that's so interesting because like how you're explaining him is not how it was framed in that opening article. So because it's so specific and it's so funny because we talk so much about the downside of like fast fashion and Bo would have been the first one being like, yeah, we don't buy from Sheehan. We get ourselves custom made and like spend the actual money. And instead of like...

So in a lot of ways, it is like this revolution of like, because even that macaroni thing, it just sounds like a bunch of like kids that went to the continent, like went to Ibiza for a weekend and were like, this is my personality now. This is my personality. Dick wigs. I paid a servant to buy whatever they wear over there and I just put on what they bring me. Right. But I was like, no, no, no. Your entire life is about thinking about how you what you're wearing and how you look. That's that's all you. And that's what means you're at. You're an actual fashionable gentleman. Right.

Now, part of what helps Bo in this, another thing that helps is that he's gorgeous. He is like six foot five and 190 pounds. He's built like a Greek statue, right? Part of like Bo is one of the men like that phrase, the turning of the leg or something like that comes from the fact that he wore these very tight pants over his extremely muscular legs and he looks like a statue, right? He looks like a Greek statue. He's deliberately cultivating that.

look. He wants people to see him as a piece of meat. You know, part of the point of these pants is you can see the outline of his dick. You know, he's got those like gray fucking gray, gray, gray pants. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. This becomes and he

He's 6'5". He's 6'5". He's probably around. Blue eyes, finance. Yeah, yeah. We don't know exactly. Weirdly enough, Ian Kelly is the one who calculates how tall he probably was because his wine merchants kept track of his weight. And we know some of his measurements. So you can kind of triangulate about. But he's tall and he's reasonably muscular and thin, right? Like he's got that kind of build, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

The last ingredient to Beau's success was that he had a modern understanding of how to manage and cultivate celebrity. He kind of invents Western celebrity in a very real way.

Part of it is that he's very witty. He's very funny. People copy him and quote him, right, which spreads his fame. He also – he develops an affectation of carrying around – it's basically like a magnifying glass that he will look at people as they walk in at parties and judge their outfits and be like, oh, you must have gotten your boots from a shirt man, like that.

And he's being a bitch, but he's also, he's really funny with it. And that's part of the entertainment is Bo's going in and he's going to talk some shit at you. But in the way that like a standup comedian, it's going to maybe pick random people from the audience and give them some shit. And like you, you come into the experience knowing that's going to happen. Part of what he's doing is he's like, he's part standup comedy, right? He would have loved fashion. Oh my God. He'd been like, I want to watch. He would. Yeah. Bravo is his favorite show. Absolutely. Um,

His jokes become reported on in newspapers and magazines. There's going to be at least one newspaper at the time that's devoted just to Bo. His name is in the title. It's not just about him, but it's like it's following fashion and he's fashion, right? Yeah. He's got his own. He's got a fanzine, you know? Oh, my God. The fan edits. There's fan cams of him, but they're just all text. Yeah.

His first biographer, William Jesse, gives one example of this from when the Duke of Bedford came calling to ask Bo's opinion on his new coat. So this Duke comes in and is like, I've got a fine new coat and I want you to tell me, is this a good fit? Is this work? Should I go to the party in this? And Bo, quote, Bo examined him from head to toe with as much attention as an adjutant of the lifeguards would the sentries on a drawing room day.

Turn around, said the bow. His grace did so, and the examination was continued in front. When it was concluded, Brummel stepped forward and, feeling the lapel delicately with his thumb and fingers, said in the most earnest and amusing manner, Bedford, do you call this thing a coat? This really a coat? This is a coat, huh? You think this is a coat? This is a coat to you, huh? So you came outside and you thought, this is it.

This is what I'm doing. He literally is doing like, what are those? And this is, I get why, like Alexandra, like we started with, I get why she says like, oh, he's just being cruel. He's just being mean to people. This is bitchy. You can take that from this. It is a bit bitchy. But what I get from that quote, what you have to interpret is that it's not about what he's saying. Part of it is about...

There's a bunch of people around. Everyone's crowded into his salon to watch him dress. This guy comes in, this duke, asks for his dress. And Bo is, he's putting on a show. He's pantomiming. He's going up to him with a spyglass and looking around. People are not just laughing at the duke who's getting a little bit of shit talked about his fashion sense. They're laughing at Bo being this parody of himself.

this really like obsessive, like, like ridiculous fashion. I like, that's part of the joke. The joke is on him. And that's why no one ever gets too angry at Bo. Cause part of it is that like, he's funny, you know, like he's, yeah. And this is what he knows how to do. Like, this is how he's always diffuse situations. Like I'm just going to be funny and cute.

That's going to carry me throughout life. So far, so good. And it's, you know, what's happening. I'm going to talk shit about you. I'm also going to like make a little fun of myself. And by making that, by taking the piss out of both of us, we can all relax a little. I made a joke about the prince. I made a joke about the Duke. I made a joke about me. Everybody can kind of be okay now, right? Like we're all a little bit in a more casual air now.

So, Beau is, you know, yeah, interesting fella. He leans into the absurdity of his reputation, his reputation for incredible excess, usually by lying. He spreads myths about himself. He starts telling everyone, they ask him, wow, you have the shiniest, the blackest boots. How do you black your boots? And he's like, oh, I only shine them with fine champagne. I use champagne to shine my boots. Champagne is not a great way to shine your boots. Obviously.

This is a lie. He's poking fun at his image. He's like, obviously, I, the beau, I wax my boots with fine champagne, of course, you know? And people know this is a bit, right? In modern era, a lot of people were like, wow, this guy was like such a wasteful, rich asshole. He's whacked. No, no, no. People at the time know he's fucking around, right? Yeah. He claims, because it's, again, a sign of wealth to be able to eat meat for every meal. He claims he doesn't even eat vegetables.

when one highborn lady at a party is like do you really not eat vegetables he's like well madam once i ate a pea you know i had a single pea once right again he's fucking around you know oh my god i could just see like if he had thank god he didn't have a microphone because his podcast would be yeah so hot in the streets oh my god this guy he would have been a great podcaster yeah

Yeah. The only thing is he would have had to be focused on YouTube because a podcast is he I think he would have said would have denied everyone looking at me. Right. They can't see me. What's half the point? Yeah. He would do the Joe Rogan do both. Just, you know, film, have his little like his pee, his one pee that he has just sitting there. His female friends who get closer to him than most of the men are able to get glimpses of the real man.

carefully weaving an illusion to keep himself protected in the object of desire. One of his good friends, one of the few people he's able to be himself around, is Lady Hester Stanhope. And she writes memoirs of her time as a woman in high society. And she says that he once admitted to her, quote,

Right?

If the world wants me to be this ridiculous parody of a rich man, and they're going to reward me for that, you and I may know I'm more than that. I could be better than that. But why bother? Right. You know?

And it's like this has been him from childhood. So it's like there's like one of his first childhood moments posing for that cute little pic that we talked about in part one. We are in this deeply shallow, image obsessed, cruel culture. I can succeed around you amongst some of the people that I could be a person around. You know, there's more to me than that. You know that this is an act, but the act is good enough for these people that like, why should we respect them? We just need to get better.

bot. We need to survive among them and that's what I'm doing. You know, I have found a way to protect myself. Exactly. Since TikTok and Instagram didn't exist then, Bo was a poster, but he had to do his posting analog style. And the way he did this

since he can't make a bunch of different videos, he goes one-on-one to every tailor in the city. He tells them his thoughts on the different dresses and fabric of the day, and they tell everyone what he thinks. You go around, you follow the beau route on Savile Row and these other fashionable streets, and everybody's quoting him, right? His presence, and they give him a lot of shit for free and shit on credit.

because the fact that Bo shops somewhere will get out and then you can use this. You can just tell people that Bo says you should buy this or that. Right. And that'll sell it. Time is a flat circle. Like, that's just so like, he like, just like Keith Lee, like I'm outside the tailor and he doesn't know I'm coming, but my waistcoat's got a little tear in it. So we're going to see if he can fix it up today. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. That's exactly it. Now, through this method, he spent years as the most viral man in the London scene. Jane Austen is, again, very likely to have based a number of characters partly on him, and so did Catherine Gore, a Regency satire author who described a dandy in the image of Bo as a nobody who made himself somebody and gave the law to everybody.

Right. In the making of himself, he creates rules that others begin to follow, you know? Right. And that's where a lot of the shit to Bo gets because he does. He locks down men's fashion for some would argue centuries because of how dominant he is. But he doesn't do that because he's against men expressing themselves. He is expressing himself as a man and how he thinks he likes to look. It's it's this culture that he understands how fucked up it is.

that takes that to an extreme, right? It becomes law. I don't know how much you want to blame him for that because he is just trying to get by. No one said you had to throw away your wigs. No one said you had to shop wearing your weird dune hats. But like, I'm going to do me over here with my dick out. Yeah, I'm dicks out over here. And like, I can't be blamed if everybody, nobody has a good idea after I'm gone.

His chief innovation involved the cravat, which is a net garment that is a precursor to the modern tie. And Beau is, if not the father, then the grandfather of the tie. Cravats had existed before him, but he makes them because he crafts a way of tying them

That is meant to look haphazard. If someone had rolled out of bed, hung over and tossed it on, he could sometimes hours getting it right. Right. And again, everyone's watching him. He'll cut during the day and he has, it's an act too. He's got his manservant when people are like waiting in the salon, having their tea or whatnot, waiting for him to be ready to come out. His manservant walk back and forth with these blunders.

with dozens of crumpled cravats in them. And he'll be like, "These are our failures today. We've been trying for hours to get it just right." You know? Oh my gosh. But he might be ready for you now. He's close. I love him. Yeah, exactly, right? Oh my gosh. We know a lot about his daily routine because it's the number one show in town. The Prince of Wales will show up a lot of the time 'cause he wants some of Beau's cool to rub off on him. Highborn men come by every day just to watch Beau dress.

Ian Kelly writes,

Quiet, reasonable, and beautiful, free from folly or affection, yet susceptible to exquisite ordering, plastic, austere, economical. It appeared post-revolutionary, neoclassical, ordered, and enlightened, and in this it did seem democratic. It did not shout wealth or privilege. It quietly insisted the point. It celebrated, not at least in the sheer time it took to achieve the look, wealth, privilege, and elegant indolence.

Brummel's revolutionary fetishizing of detail was later described by Baudelaire as defining the man who is rich and idle and who has no other occupation than the perpetual pursuit of happiness, whose solitary vice is elegance. Sounds like a hater to me. Baudelaire was a famous hater. Yeah. Speaking of the pursuit of elegance, our sponsors, Elegant as Hell.

Wouldn't it be nice if making decisions was easier? With Xfinity, you have one less decision to worry about. Just say what to watch into your Xfinity voice remote to see editors' picks and find what's new. You can even search by genre or mood. You can also find the ultimate dance soundtrack and play all your favorite music and artists on iHeartRadio to get the party started right in your living room. So you can skip the endless scroll and get right to the good stuff.

Nothing will fit into your day better than a Fit Crunch bar. Fit Crunch baked bars are chef-inspired from Robert Irvine and made with six layers of deliciousness. With 16 grams of protein and 3 grams of sugar, Fit Crunch is the perfect snack, whether it's at school, midday at work, or when you're on the go. Visit FitCrunch.com and use promo code RADIO15 for 15% off your FitCrunch.com order or find a retailer near you. Check out FitCrunch.com today. That's FitCrunch.com, promo code RADIO15.

You're probably careful with your personal information, but what about the other places that have it? Like the doctor's office that mixed up your files. They have your social security number. The power company that mistakenly cut your service has your payment info and last three addresses. And the hotel that lost your reservation has your passport info.

Thank you.

We're back. Now...

The author of that Esquire piece was correct in that Beau's dominance in fashion leads to a growing homogeneity of men's dress in London, which spreads through the Western world. His proto-suit becomes the norm in men's fashion with shocking speed, maybe faster than any other fashion so influential had ever been before, thanks to the new mass media of the day and Beau's modern molding of his own celebrity.

He largely gets credit for this development, despite not making any of the clothes himself. And this also stops the fact that he uses all these tailors. No one else shares credit with him. He gets the nickname Bo around 1799. And previously, it meant beautiful. It's like calling a boy a pretty little man or something like that. Initially, it becomes with him, it goes from being an insult to actually like a compliment, right? Because it means that you're beautiful. Yeah.

He's going to reclaim it. Yeah. He's like, yes, I am. Ian Kelly continues. People copied what he wore, how he spoke, even how he shaved. Tobacconists sold out of his favorite ranges of snuff and clubs and dances were judged on his attendance or participation. Tailors gave him their goods simply for the honor or publicity of his wearing them in a manner immediately familiar in our own celebrity and fashion obsessed aged.

The decimation of the beaver population of North America in the 19th century was set in motion by his sudden taste for beavers, beaver skin top hats. Like he carries it. He causes inadvertently a beaver genocide because he wears a hat one day that's made out of beaver skin and people just wipe them out. Oh, my gosh. Mm hmm.

We're still dealing with the part of our wildfire problem comes from this, to be honest. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like the destruction of beaver populations in North America is actually still catastrophic to this day. And Bo Brummel has a lot to do with it. Now, could he have known? One bastard count. Yeah, right. Yeah. Accidental bastard count. Yeah.

Although I will say he's not innocent here too because he is – he's not a fast fashion guy, but he is a disposable fashion guy. Part of it is because he loves white. He insists on the thinnest gloves, the whitest shirts, the whitest thin often leather pants, right? And these –

thin white things don't last. You know, they get stained. They get holes in them. So he is throwing shit out constantly, which, and so he inaugurates the cycle of like, you are replacing everything rapidly, right? You are having it tailored every day and you are having it cleaned every day and you are running through your clothes. That's so expensive. Right, it's expensive.

It builds an industry for fashion, but it is deeply wasteful, right? And that is on him, right? That is something he has a major factor in, right? And he is also, he's an avatar of conspicuous consumption, right? And he's an avatar of it in a way that is democratic. Conspicuous consumption had been limited in part because there were only so many rich people, but in part because

Only rich people could afford it. And he makes looking good more affordable, which makes more people spend money to do it. So he increases the number of people who are focused on fashion as a luxury as a result of making it a little more democratic.

He also lays down his fashion diktats in a way that does not brook disagreement, because that's kind of the humor of the time. Fashion historian Anne Hollander argues, "It is possible to make the case that masculine formal dress of today is directly Brummel's responsibility."

He's a little bit of a cult leader at his height and that he will make things that are kind of seen as jokes and people will follow them to the letter. One of his bits was he would say, if John Bull, which is like Joe Schmo, right, turns around to look at you, you are not well dressed, but either too stiff, too tight or too fashionable. Right. You don't want to be noticed by the commoners. Only rich men who understand the quality of your cut should notice you. Common people, you should blend into the crowd, you know.

Right. It's the same. It's like with Silicon Valley fashion of the day. Again, how much you want to blame him morally for that, right? But one thing that is interesting to me is that he is not interested in gaining power. Given his standing with the prince and his status in culture, he should have been a powerful man. He should have wound up in government, right?

And he had the opportunity, but he never tries. He has no ambition. Maybe it's he was just lazy. Maybe it's that he recognized doing that, you're going to have to do awful things. And he really didn't want to. His life was fine as it was. He was happy with the things that he had.

I don't know. But this is part of the problem it's going to cause for him is that he rapidly runs out of money. Everything he has is on credit. The prince is able to keep his creditors at bay by saying, hey, man, I'm going to be the king. This guy is my friend. Don't call in his debts. And a lot of people are willing to extend him credit because they're like, well, he's going to be running the empire. Right.

pretty soon, right? He's going to have some kind of job. That's bestie. Yeah, yeah. But he never quite does. And so this is eventually going to create an unsustainable situation. But before it does, he launches one more trend among the high society in London, one we're all grateful for. He gets them to stop smelling like shit.

He is an advocate of daily baths. He's an advocate. Uniquely, people who do shower and bathe regularly, it's often cold because that's viewed as being healthier, right? That you want a bracing cold plunge or whatnot. He likes hot baths because he... Love that. He makes it a luxury, right? And he also... The wisdom of the day is that sweating and like chafing or whatnot is it gets out the toxins. It's good for you. And he's like...

nah, man, I'd rather just like get and clean myself off in a bath and get rid of the gross stuff that way. That's a lot nicer to me. Amen. Yeah. And he also avoids a lot of the cosmetics of the day, which is good for everyone's health because most of them are like made out of poison. Yeah. Yeah. So he helps out with the health of the upper class to a significant degree in that manner. He spends more than a decade as the it person in London society, which is a long time to be that kind of guy.

In addition to the prototypical suit, he also starts the tradition of rich people dressing like farmers. He wears hunting jackets and outdoor clothing that's not actually meant to be worn outdoors. It's meant to walk around the park, but it imitates outdoor clothing. So we have fashionable Carhartts thanks to Beau Brummel, too. He helped start that. His downfall comes in part due to his refusal to get a real job.

Well, Beau pioneers modern celebrity. He doesn't know how to make, you can't make money off it. There's no, there's no like Patreon, right? Monetization. Yeah. And he, he gets some stuff for free and on credit, but nobody's like paying you to advertise really at this point.

And he's also gambling, starting in his late 20s and early 30s, which quickly fucks him over. You know, all this might have been survival if he had stayed in the king's good graces. But Bo nursed a contempt for the prince. He never thinks he's a good man. He doesn't like the way he treats his wife. He doesn't like the way he treats anyone. And he loves making fun of him.

This story is probably not true, but it gives you a hint of the kind of shit he would talk about the prince. There's a story. They're all hung over. He's at the palace one day with the prince, and he keeps being like, hey, hey, princey, go fetch me some champagne. Go get me some champagne, future king. Pick me up a fucking bottle. Get your manservant to bring me a bottle, and gets kicked out. That probably didn't literally happen, but stuff like it did because we have a lot of stories about them having fights, and it's often because they're

Bo, he's usually good at taking the piss out of people and not making them angry. But the prince is really fragile and doesn't like it. Sometimes Bo goes too far for him. And when he's in his late 30s, he's going to blow up their relationship entirely. I'm going to quote from the New York Times here. A version of the story goes that one afternoon after another of Brummel's and the heir to the throne's frequent fallouts, he bumped into the prince while strolling with his fellow dandy Lord Alvin Lee.

When the prince warmly acknowledged Alvin Lee but ignored him, Brummel is said to have coolly inquired, Alvin Lee, who's your fat friend? The prince never spoke to him again. Ha ha ha.

Yeah. Yeah, that's going to fuck you, buddy. That's not nice, Beau. Yeah, yeah. And like, I don't got much sympathy for the prince here, but like, yeah, you're not going to keep his friendship there. He is never going to forgive this. Yeah, he's sensitive about his shit, you know. And he originates another great phrase during this because people are like, when the prince drops him, people are like, are you worried that you're going to like fall out of your standing in society? And Brummel says, I made him what he is.

I can unmake him. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's that guy. That guy. Unfortunately, he has gone a little too far here. Some of it may be he is in his 30s. He is no longer as handsome as he used to be. He is no longer as thin and muscular as he used to be. He's pushing 40 now, right? You know, they...

Just like Capote. It's like when you're not a twink anymore. He's not a twink anymore. It's really rough out there. They don't have Ozimic. They don't have the really good. He can't do that kind of like modern Hollywood steroids. You know, they just don't have it yet. Right. Mm hmm.

So, by middle age, he is flat broke. He's worse because he's in horrible debt. And once the prince withdraws his protection, his creditors are like, well, this guy's never actually going to be powerful. We should try to get some money out of him, right? So, his life falls apart in 1816 after a horrible losing streak at one of the clubs where he kept a permanent table. He flees permanently from London to Calais on the French coast because his

Creditors won't follow him there. He has some investments. He's got some annuities. And Calais is a – France is a war-torn country at this point. So it's like the third world to people in London. And he can live off of what he's got there.

Right. Right.

I can see that. Yeah, very similar guys. Dandy on dandy, for sure. The Duke of Wellington, the destroyer of Napoleon, also worships his style, right? Like he dresses based on how Bo dressed. And the playwright Lord Byron intentionally is also, he is one of these guys who is dressing in the image. And these guys are, you shouldn't think of it as copying him as much as the way that like men today, if you want to look good, you can still look at pictures of how Cary Grant dressed and go like,

Well, shit, that guy knew how to put together an outfit, right? You can do a lot worse than trying to dress like Cary Grant did, right? Like that's the kind of thing. For sure. He's just this immortal icon of cool for people who grow up anywhere near that era. But his older life is not going to be a happy one. One by one, his good friends died and he grows lonelier and lonelier. And as he grows lonelier and lonelier, something grows inside him.

Syphilis. He is. Of course. Of course he's got syphilis. There's no way this man, all of his friends are high class prostitutes. There's no way this man isn't more syphilis than human by the time he's 60. Right. Like he is. He is 80 percent syphilis by body weight. You know, you are catching the pox if you're in a room with Bo Brummel.

Over the course of like 20 or 30 years, it reaches the tertiary stages, which brings about hallucinations, madness. You go crazy. There's a worm eating holes in your brain, basically. His last friend and fan in his dying years is a young man named Fichet, who is the son of the owner of the hotel. And Fichet wants to be a valet and Brummel's like –

If you follow me around, I'll teach you how to introduce royalty. I'll teach you how to be a high society man. And he does. And in return, Fichet spends Bo's final years humoring him. And because Bo is losing his mind, his primary occupation in his last years is he has Fichet escort him to balls and galas that exist only in his head. Right? Right.

Yeah, it's like a, it's bleak. I'm going to quote from Ian Kelly here because he writes very evocatively about this end period in Beau's life. Brummel had taught him how to announce royalty and how much obeisance was expected by the Victor of Waterloo. And Monsieur Brummel taught Fichet about clothes. It was Fichet also who acted as valet to the hotel celebrated dandy and wit, helping him into his evening coat and handing him the whitest of cravats with the reverence of a sacristan.

yet these soires would end suddenly and in the same way one moment brummel would hold out his arm to escort the duchess of devonshire across the room the next his eyes were opened to the reality around him the room was empty there was nothing in front of him but the candles the flowers and the young frenchman with pity in his eyes

"Fichet eventually became inured," he said, "to the dark pantomime of announcing Brummel's ghosts, the long-dead duchesses and courtesans, the regency celebrities who had been Monchaux's friends. But he dreaded the moment when Brummel woke from his masquerade and saw the reality around him, the ruination of his fame and fortune and of his mind.

Babylon and all its desolation, as one friend of Brummel's said, was a sight less awful. The Frenchman would then blow out the candles, shut the windows, and leave Beau Brummel, the most sociable man in London, to the complete privacy and utter silence of his ruined mind. Damn.

Yeah. That's so sad. That's a fucking storybook ending, like a sad one. But wow, what an ending, right? That's so gangster. But like none of I know about him. I'm like, I like I just want to pretend the other day. Like, that's all. Yes. Yes. Like he did that. He is the making. One thing I've read in that Jane Austen Society article is that.

He, in the Regency era, Bo Brummel created the style and Jane Austen created the substance, right? And I think there's a lot to that. Yeah. People who are Regency nerds say that, and I'm not, so who am I to argue with them? For sure. Yeah, he dies at age 62 in an insane asylum, destitute and reduced to incoherence, which is a bummer. Aww.

That's sad. He wasn't a bastard. Little capitalist troll. Yeah, little capitalist troll, but hard to blame him. What options did he have in the culture he was born into, you know?

And you see what happens when you mommy blog your children in portraits? You see what happens now? Yeah, exactly. Don't put your kids in your fucking YouTube videos, right? They'll grow up syphilitic and insane. That's how they'll die in Calais at a Madden house. Oh, man. They'll run out of penicillin. He was a bastard. I definitely think he bred...

culture. Yes. He bred bad culture. Bastardry grew in his image. Yeah. But

But he was, I think, fundamentally a sensitive and intelligent and basically attempted to be a decent soul most of the time living in an evil culture. And he got to roast a king. That's Joe. And he got to roast a king, right? Good for him. That's how you get your downfall. That's pretty damn good. And also, like, from what I've heard is, like, they didn't like the reason why they also preserved that fashion because it was seen as less feminine. I don't feel like that's what both thought about it anyway. I don't think of him as thinking, like, there's anything wrong if it was feminine. No.

he just was kind of not he was just not as rich so he was like I can't go to Ibiza and bring back a fucking big ass wig I can't afford to dress like that crazy but I can't afford to spend all of my time thinking about how I look and so I'll beat you that way and then you'll become me right there you go anyway that's how we win that's Bo baby princess you got any pluggables to plug before we roll out here

Yeah. First of all, thank you so much for having me. It's been literally a pleasure. You can find me on YouTube as Princess Weeks. I'm still technically on X as Weeks Princess. And then I'm also on TikTok as Princess Pendulum, where I cannot wait to talk about House of the Dragon every single day. There we go. Well, you can find me on Twitter too much, but that's about it.

Also in a million podcasts. So just keep listening to the podcast you're listening to. You'll keep getting me. I have a novel. It's called After the Revolution. Just type that and Robert Evans into Google. You'll find places to buy it. It's from AK Press. You can also just buy it from them. Anyway, episode's done. That's it, babies.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Wouldn't it be nice if making decisions was easier? With Xfinity, you have one less decision to worry about. Just say what to watch into your Xfinity voice remote to see editors' picks and find what's new. You can even search by genre or mood. You can also find the ultimate dance soundtrack and play all your favorite music and artists on iHeartRadio to get the party started right in your living room. So you can skip the endless scroll and get right to the good stuff.

Nothing will fit into your day better than a Fit Crunch bar. Fit Crunch baked bars are chef-inspired from Robert Irvine and made with six layers of deliciousness. With 16 grams of protein and 3 grams of sugar, Fit Crunch is the perfect snack, whether it's at school, midday at work, or when you're on the go. Visit FitCrunch.com and use promo code RADIO15 for 15% off your FitCrunch.com order or find a retailer near you. Check out FitCrunch.com today. That's FitCrunch.com, promo code RADIO15.

This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. It's a simple truth. No matter who you are, mental health challenges can affect you, and how you manage them can make all the difference. That's why everyone should have access to mental health support that meets them where they are and helps them get through. BetterHelp provides online therapy on your schedule. It's flexible, simple to use, and more affordable than in-person therapy. Connect with a licensed therapist selected just for you. Learn more at BetterHelp.com.

That's BetterHELP.com.