Before Lady Gaga, there was Sigue Sigue Sputnik, then Mike Monroe, New York Dolls, Marc Bolan and we finally get to the glam overlord David Bowie.
But way way before these famed glamsters there was Stephen Tennant.
The son of Scots peer, Lord Glenconner and Pamela Wyndham, one of The Souls.
His mother was also a cousin of Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde's lover and a sonneteer.
Tennant's androgynous looks and flamboyant style led sculptor Jacob Epstein to describe him as the most beautiful creature he had ever seen and I have to partly agree with this.
His looks are very charismatic and was known to decorate himself with sprinkling gold dust into his hair and to out line his lips... he could be described as if Brian Jones and David Bowie had an unholy love child?
THIS would be the guy!!
The Bright Young Things of the social set were all about attention-grabbing antics, wild partying and competitively outlandish fashion.
The week long themed parties were raved about... fueled with alcohol and cocaine.
They were the 1920s and 30s London prototype celebrities.
Before them, the British press’s gossip columns amounted to nothing more than society announcements.
The young and privileged people changed this with scandalous outfits and behaviour, and the papers’ fascination with them and their intrinsic link to fashion has grown and grown.
Tennant’s outfits ranged from indulgently luxe over-the-top opulence to theatrical, gender-blurring fancy dress.
The gossip column from a 1927 edition of The Daily Express described Tennant’s headline-making style in this way:
“The Honourable Stephen Tennant arrived in an electric brougham wearing a football jersey and earrings."
Like any self-respecting tabloid darling, Tennant made it his business to be photographed as much as possible, and quickly became a muse to British photographer Cecil Beaton.
Beaton’s portrait of Tennant in fancy dress as Prince Charming is currently on show at the National Portrait Gallery.
The rest of Beaton’s extensive photographs of the bright young set are archived at Sotheby's.
Stephen Tennant was known as the "Brightest", within the "Bright Young People."
Friends included Rex Whistler, Cecil Beaton, the Sitwells, Lady Diana Manners and the dubious Mitford girls – part of the set that made the Nordstrom Sisters popular at The Ritz in 1939.
He is widely considered to be the model for Cedric Hampton in Nancy Mitford's novel Love in a Cold Climate; one of the inspirations for Lord Sebastian Flyte in Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, and a model for Hon. Miles Malpractice in some of his other novels.
During the 1920s and 1930s, he had an affair with the poet Siegfried Sassoon.
Before this he had proposed to friend, Elizabeth Lowndes, but had been rejected as he insisted his nanny would have to be with them including their honeymoon.
His relationship with Siegfried Sassoon, was to be thought his most important: it lasted some four years before Tennant put an abrupt end to it.
It was reported that Sassoon was depressed for months after, until Sassoon married in 1933 and became a father in 1936.
For most of his life, Tennant considered himself a writer he tried to start or finish a novel - Lascar.
It is believed that he spent the last 17 years of his life in bed at his family manor at Wilsford, Wiltshire, which he had redecorated by Syrie Maugham.
Though being idle, he was not truly lethargic: he made several visits to the United States and Italy, and struck up many new friendships, despite his later reputation as a recluse.
This only became increasingly true towards the last years of his life until his death in 1987.
Yet even then, his life was not uneventful: he became landlord to V. S. Naipaul who immortalised Tennant in his novel The Enigma of Arrival.
There appears to be only one book about the life of this charismatic Lothario: Serious Pleasures by Phillip Hoare and one I shall be most certainly be tracking down.
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