Piccadilly Arcade

Jermyn Street Entrance to Piccadilly Arcade

To be truly elegant one should not be noticed.

          ~ Beau Brummell

He atones for being occasionally somewhat over-dressed, by being always absolutely over-educated.

          ~ Oscar Wilde

                    Piccadilly Arcade is an Edwardian Era shopping gallery in London that connects Jermyn Street with Piccadilly. It is home to elegant men's clothing shops that harken back to rakish British gentlemen of the fin de siècle. At the Jermyn Street entrance stands the statue of Beau Brummell who perfected the dandy style with his manner, wit, and elegance that charmed even the Prince Regent. He brought the influence of military uniforms and English country attire to gentlemen's clothing, which became the precursor to the modern suit. After his falling out with the Prince, Brummell fled to France to escape gambling debts, where in his old age he grew slovenly in appearance, and died of syphilis. It is interesting that Oscar Wilde, the dandy of the Decadent Movement, suffered a similar fate after his disgrace, also fleeing to France and dying there in poverty, possibly from the same “French disease.” 

Finally, he rushes into the crowd in search of an unknown person whose face, glimpsed momentarily, had fascinated him. Curiosity has become a fatal, irresistible passion.

          ~ Charles Baudelaire

                    In Paris, arcades, along with cafés and boulevards, became the haunts of that French fin de siècle creature of the city, the flâneur. Charles Baudelaire describes the flâneur as a passionate spectator, after Edgar Allan Poe's anonymous “man of the crowd,” drunk with the kaleidoscope of urban life. The elegant galleries of fin de siècle arcades, the shoppers and the goods displayed, indulge the decadent disease of the eye. Decadence, above all else, is the over-gratification of the aesthetic vision to the point of ennui. Piccadilly Arcade connects the worlds of fin de siècle British Decadence and French Symbolism, the flâneur's “gastronomy of the eye” (Balzac) and the syphilitic end of the haughty dandy. 

(Cambridge, MA, February 2022)