In Memory of St Sebastian

The artist and punk-dandy Sebastian Horsley may no longer cruise the streets of Soho, but he continues to haunt my imagination and memory. I miss seeing him sat outside a cafe on Old Compton Street, or strolling along the Charing Cross Road in one of his lurid and ludicrous suits, stovepipe hat, and wide-collared Turnbull & Asser shirts. He was one of the most beautiful and courageous men alive. And he remains so in death. 

For whilst Sebastian never quite mastered the art of painting, he certainly mastered the far more difficult art of dying at the right time. Some die too soon: most die too late. Or so Zarathustra says. But the individual of genius always times their exit to perfection. Thus at the very moment his life became dramatized on stage, Horsely took his leave. He knew that once his persona had become a pure piece of fiction - a role that could be performed just as well, if not better, by actors other than himself - then there was really no need to hang around. It was time to get his coat.

To scorn the thought of one's mortality in this manner - to insist, as Sebastian always insisted, that death doesn't really matter (that it's not the end of the world) - is also to refuse to take seriously all those other judgements of God that weigh down and make gloomy.

And it is precisely this refusal of moral seriousness which so irritates the ascetic idealists who hate dandyism and have no patience with characters such as Horsley. For as long as fashion is concerned only with clothes, bodies, and hairstyles, then there's no problem. But once its playful and perverse indeterminacy begins to affect (and infect) the essential world of values, then there's panic on behalf of those who take these things and themselves very seriously indeed.  

Horsley recognised that what most alarms about dandyism is the fact that it repudiates models of depth. That it is, as he once wrote, a lie which reveals the truth and the truth is we are what we pretend to be. He also knew he was a preposterous and vulgar figure with no social status or role whatsoever: just a futile blast of colour, in a futile colourless world. One of the damned, if you like: but it's better to go to hell well-tailored, than to heaven in rags.