Philip Mann chronicles the relationship of dandyism and the emerging cultural landscape of modernity via portraits of Regency England's Beau Brummel – the first dandy – and six twentieth-century figures: Austrian architect Adolf Loos, the Duke of Windsor, neo-Edwardian courtier Bunny Roger, writer and raconteur Quentin Crisp, French film producer Jean-Pierre Melville, and New German Cinema enfant terrible and inverted dandy Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

He blends memorable anecdotes with acute analysis to explore their style, identity and influence and interweaves their stories with an entertaining history of tailoring and men's fashion. The Dandy at Dusk contextualizes the relationship between dandyism, decadence and modernism, against the background of a century punctuated by global conflict and social upheaval.