Dandy

An Edwardian gentleman in rose-tinted spectacles steps out of time and onto the King’s Road, Chelsea, 1967. The air is heavy with incense, tambourines shake, and the sitar bends the night into a hallucination. He drifts past shops selling kipper ties, vivid shirts, and Afghan coats, his moustache still waxed, his skin still pale, his body painted into the vision. Halos ripple behind him like a transcendental aura, the street vibrating with colour. It is both London and a dream, where dandies from another century are pulled headlong into the swirl of the swinging sixties. If things seemed strange to him then, they were about to get stranger still.

The Peacock Revolution turned menswear into theatre. Shops like Mr Fish, Granny Takes a Trip, and Hung On You tore down the grey flannel order and replaced it with elaborate tailoring and flamboyant accessories. The Beatles, photographed by Richard Avedon in psychedelic solarisation, were no longer neat Mods but kaleidoscopic prophets. LSD was the catalyst, Timothy Leary the evangelist, and the street the stage. Clothing became a manifesto for freedom, self-expression, and vision. Men dressed like peacocks because the culture demanded spectacle—the Vietnam War, Krishna consciousness, the pulse of op-art, the shimmer of Mary Quant, and the conviction that another world was possible.

This project is a collision of then and now: Edwardian physiognomy meeting 1967 through the lens of artificial intelligence. Prompt engineering becomes its own seamstress—cutting, stitching, and refining until Flux paints what is asked. Each portrait is hallucinatory yet precise, painterly yet synthetic, hovering between truth and fiction. And here, on this last page, the journey closes: the final note of a Magical Mystery Tour that began elsewhere but ends in Carnaby colour. Not an ending, exactly—more like a fade-out into technicolour and the sound of Sgt. Pepper, where AI reimagines the past and the past reminds us of the futures we still dream.