The Endless Pleasure of Illegible Gender: Dorian Electra and the 1600s Fop
Colley Cibber’s Sir Novelty Fashion is reimagined in Dorian Electra’s hyperpop album Flamboyant
A fop is “one who is foolishly attentive to and vain of his appearance, dress, or manners; a dandy, an exquisite” (OED).
This definition stems from the archetype of the fop character on the Restoration Era British stage: a locus of gender experimentation and fluidity with an aesthetic staying power we still see today.
Performers and writers have taken up the iconography of the fop throughout history to destabilize the gender ideals of their time, reappropriating the character to fit their own social norms, while the fop’s identity retains its slipperiness in each performance. The most famous among these fops was created by Colley Cibber, one of the 15th and 16th centuries’ foremost British actors and playwrights. Cibber’s famous fop character, Sir Novelty Fashion (later dubbed Lord Foppington by John Vanbrugh in The Relapse) creates a precedent for a “gender fluid” expression of signifiers on and off the stage.
The audience becomes intimately familiar with Foppington’s wardrobe as his tailors adorn him in…
