“Strange, that a pair of silk stockings should so upset a nation.”

— Oscar Wilde, quoted in Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde

TODAY, WE TEND TO ENVISION the male Aesthete as a lanky, long-haired swain outfitted in velveteen pantaloons and clutching an outsize sunflower, an image straight from George du Maurier’s Punch cartoons or Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience. Serious scholars of Aestheticism often prefer to resist this parodic image, insisting on the movement’s significant philosophical development in Ruskin’s and Pater’s work.1 Yet Aesthetic fashion was not just a frivolous side effect of the movement. In fact, Aesthetic fashion was the focus of late-Victorian attention because it so clearly displayed the anxieties, stresses, and formulations of the movement. It was a battlefield for competing voices within Aestheticism; it was a stage whereon the various gender notions of the movement could be displayed; and it functioned as both a critique and a form of art. This article examines the theoretical rationales for Aesthetic fashion, focusing on the paradigmatic figures of Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, and George du Maurier. They demonstrate how Aesthetic men developed new visual codes to reconfigure their fear of feminization, creating a new kind of body which could be read as an essential, unchanging, scholarly, and artistic icon.