Jorgensen’s dream is an equal opportunity one, and the remarkable thing is that the general population is making an effort at all – possibly for the first time in some of their lives. Of course, typical civilians lack the sartorial acumen of the average Chap reader, so clip-on braces, pre-tied bow ties and cheap Fedoras were abundant, and those who fully understand the difference between dressing up and dressing well were probably only slightly better represented than they are in the general population.
#T DAPPER CHAP PROFESSIONAL#
Add to this mix of professional princesses, forced-perspective architecture and hour-long queues, 20,000 people who have been encouraged to express their definition of ‘dapper’, and you’ve made a weird place even weirder. The newer park, Disney California Adventure, benefits mainly from the fact that alcohol is served on the premises.
Disneyland Park, the older of the two parks, benefits from a combination of classic, recognizable attractions like The Haunted Mansion and Sleeping Beauty’s Castle and newer, effects-heavy rides like the Indiana Jones Adventure. The dream-compound consists of three hotels bordering two parks bisected by an outdoor shopping mall called Downtown Disney. You see, the Disneyland Resort is already the most surreal part of a very surreal city in an altogether unbelievable state in an often implausible country. The event to which we were invited marked the first time the celebration was extended over two days: on Saturday a Dapper Day Boutique selling new and vintage clothes and accessories was set up in the Disney Grand Californian Hotel, there was a slideshow of vintage photos from the park in the afternoon and our presentation in the evening, followed by a book signing and cocktail reception, all of which was reasonably well-attended and fairly ordinary (with the exception of the attendance of New York style icon Tziporah Salomon.) None of which went any way towards preparing me and photographer Rose for the surreality of Dapper Day at Disneyland. Dapper Days are now held twice a year at both Disneyland in California and Walt Disney World in Florida, as well as every autumn at the Disneyland Parc in Paris. Weekly estimated the number of participating park-goers at the last event was close to 20,000. The first Dapper Day was in 2011and about 100 people showed up. A day out in Disneyland was an occasion and Jorgensen, looking around at the legions of tourists in T-Shirts, flip-flops and sweatpants, was sorry that the “hyper-idealized clientele” of the illustrations never really made it off the page. Walt Disney’s dream of an immersive wonderland for children and adults was limned in vivid colors on page after page of concept art, and Jorgensen noticed something: “The parks always turned out better than the illustrations, but the guests never did.” In the drawings, families visited the park’s attractions invariably dressed in their Sunday best: mom in a colorful A-line dress, dad in a sack suit, narrow tie and trilby, the boys in shorts and the girls in frocks. While working as a designer for the parks, Jorgensen came across many of the original design sketches and concept illustrations of the park from the 1950s.
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in the autumn of 1993, he fell in love with the staggering level of detail and interactivity at Disneyland, and decided that designing for Disney theme parks was his calling. Jorgensen was a theatre-loving kid, obsessed with the diorama-like qualities of cutout flat scenery and coloured lights.
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Dapper Day is the inspired invention of Justin Jorgensen, an L.A.-based artist and designer. Why am I writing about Disneyland in The Chap, you ask? Because, for the past four years, Disneyland in Anaheim California been the epicentre (not Epcot Center – that one’s in Florida,) of Dapper Day, and Rose Callahan and I had been invited by the event’s organizer to give a presentation about our book I am Dandy: The Return of the Elegant Gentleman.
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