Presents the cultural and literary history of black dandyism from the 1700s to the 1960s.

"Revising and augmenting scholarship on minstrelsy, literary representations of blackness, and black sartorial aesthetics and visual culture, "Slaves to Fashion" is an impressive and meticulously researched treatise on the history of the black dandy. It fills a gap in the scholarship on the cultural politics of black self-fashioning."--E. Patrick Johnson, author of "Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity"