A poseur is someone who poses for effect, or behaves affectedly,Allen, R.E. Fowler, H. W. The Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English. Clarendon Press. (1984). who affects a particular attitude, character or manner to impress others,Morris, William. editor. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. American Heritage Publishing. (1969) page 1022 or who pretends to belong to a particular group.Definition of poseur at Dictionary.com A poseur may be a person who pretends to be what they are not or an insincere person; they may have a flair for drama or behave as if they are onstage in daily life.Hardy, Thomas. The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, Volume 2. Lennart A Björk, ed. Springer, 2016. . page 256.Hicks, Wynford. Quite Literally: Problem Words and How to use Them. Routledge (2004) . page 174.
"Poseur" or "poseuse" is also used to mean a person who poses for a visual artist—a model.Waller, Susan. The Invention of the Model: Artists and Models in Paris, 1830-1870. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. (2006) . page 49-51Burns, Sarah, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America. Yale University Press (1996) . p 183.Madsen, Axel. Chanel: A Woman of Her Own. Macmillan (1991) . p 31
Examples
The playwright Oscar Wilde has been described as a "poseur".Ellis, Havelock, Mrs. "A Note on Oscar Wilde". The Lotus Magazine. Vol. 9, No. 4 (Jan., 1918), pp. 191-194. "When people say that Wilde was only a poser what do they mean? They forget that his 'poses' were his reality." Thomas Hardy said of him, "His early reputation as a poseur and fop – so necessary to his notoriety – recoiled upon the scholar and gentleman (as Wilde always innately was), and even upon the artist".
Lord Alfred Douglas said of Wilde, "That he had what passed for genius nobody will, I think, nowadays dispute, though it used to be the fashion to pooh-pooh him for a mere poseur and decadent."Douglas, Lord Alfred. Oscar Wilde and Myself. Duffield & Company. New York. (1914) Introduction. page 3.
The painter James A. Whistler has been sometimes described as a "poseur" for his manner and personal style.Spielmann, Marion Harry. editor. "James A. McNeil Whistler, 1834—1903; Personal Recollections" The Magazine of Art, Volume 1. Cassell, Petter & Gallpin, 1903. page 578. Alec-Tweedie, Mrs. Alec (Ethel). Thirteen Years of a Busy Woman's Life. Chapter XV. Publisher: John Lane (1912). page 168 - 175. It has been suggested that Whistler's genius lay partly in his ability to cultivate the role of the poseur, to "act as if he were always on stage", in order to stir interest, and cause people to wonder how such a poseur could create work that was so serious and authentic. His fame as an artist seemed to require that he present himself as a poseur.Burns, Sarah. Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America. Yale University Press (1996) . p 236
The playwright and critic, George Bernard Shaw, has been described as a poseur; in that context Shaw is quoted as saying, "I have never pretended that G.B.S. was real ... The whole point of the creature is that he is unique, fantastic, unrepresentative, inimitable, impossible, undesirable on any large scale, utterly unlike anybody that ever existed before, hopelessly unnatural, and void of real passion."Henderson, Archibald. George Bernard Shaw His Life and Works. Stewardt & Kidd Co. (1911). p 498
In the ancient Greek comedy The Clouds, the playwright Aristophanes portrays Socrates as a "poseur".Silk, M.S. Aristophanes and the Definition of Comedy. Oxford University Press (2002) . p 172.
Etymology The English term "poseur" is a loanword from French. The word in English use dates back to the mid 19th Century. It is from the French word poseur, and from the Old French word poser, meaning "to put, place, or set". The Online Etymology Dictionary, suggests that "poseur" is in fact the English word "poser" dressed "in French garb, and thus could itself be considered an affectation."
Use within contemporary subcultures "Poseur" is often a pejorative term, as used in the punk, heavy metal, hip hop, and goth subcultures, or the skateboarding, surfing and jazz communities, when it is used to refer to a person who copies the dress, speech, and/or mannerisms of a group or subculture, generally for attaining acceptability within the group or for popularity among various other groups, yet who is deemed not to share or understand the values or philosophy of the subculture.
Punk subculture David Marsh, in an article in Rock & Rap, speaking of "those first punk kids in London" says, "The terms in which they expressed their disdain for hangers-on and those whose post-hip credentials didn't quite make it came straight out of the authenticity movements: Poseurs was the favorite epithet". Ross Buncle argues that eventually the Australian punk scene "opened the door to a host of poseurs, who were less interested in the music than in UK-punk fancy dress and being seen to be hip". Describing a rehearsal of The Orphans, he says there "were no punk-identikit poseurs" present. A 2015 article about early punk subculture in The New Republic states that punk "...was as immersive as a motorcycle gang or membership in the Mafia; part-time participants were derided as "poseurs", while any deviation from orthodoxy was a "sellout"...; this punk militancy created "... an economic and social ghetto which was nearly impenetrable to corporate infiltration and which only adventurous or deranged souls dared enter."
In a review of The Clash film Rude Boy, a critic argued that this "film was another sign of how The Clash had sold out – a messy, vain work of punk poseurs". US music journalist Lester Bangs praised punk pioneer Richard Hell for writing the "strongest, truest rock & roll I have heard in ages" without being an "arty poseur" of the "age of artifice". Another critic argues that by the late 1970s, "punk rock had already, at this early date, shown signs of devolving into pure pose, black leather jacket and short hair required". Please Kill Me includes interviews with punks in New York and Detroit who "rip their English counterparts as a bunch of sissified poseurs".
The term poseur was used in several late-1970s punk songs, including the X-Ray Spex song "I Am a Poseur", which included the lyrics "I am a poseur and I don't care/I like to make people stare/Exhibition is the name." Another song using the term was the Television Personalities song "Part-Time Punks". The Television Personalities' song "was a reaction to the macho posturing of the English punk scene". The lyrics argue that, "while Television Personalities were not themselves punks in the orthodox sense, neither was anyone else". The song "declared that either everyone who wanted to be a punk was one or that everyone was a poseur (or both)", and it argues that "the concept of [...] punk rock authenticity, of Joe Strummer, was a fiction".
An article in Drowned in Sound argues that 1980s-era "hardcore is the true spirit of punk" because "[a]fter all the poseurs and fashionistas fucked off to the next trend of skinny pink ties with New Romantic haircuts, singing wimpy lyrics". It argued that the hardcore scene consisted only of people "completely dedicated to the DIY ethics"; punk "[l]ifers without the ambition to one day settle into the study-work-family-house-retirement-death scenario".
The Oi band Combat 84 has a song entitled "Poseur" which describes a person changing from a punk to a skinhead, and then into a Mod and a Ted. The lyrics include the lines "Poseur poseur standing there/You change your style every year."
In 1985, MTV aired a concert documentary, featuring performances by GBH and the Dickies, entitled Punks and Poseurs: A Journey Through the Los Angeles Underground.
1990s–2000s Dave Rimmer writes that with the revival of punk ideals of stripped-down music in the early 1990s, with grunge musicians like "[Kurt] Cobain, and lots of kids like him, rock & roll ... threw down a dare: Can you be pure enough, day after day, year after year, to prove your authenticity, to live up to the music [or else] live with being a poseur, a phony, a sellout?"
Refused's Dennis Lyxzén and Bad Religion's Brett Gurewitz used the term to refer to early 2000s-era pop punk fans as "kids – more specifically the new wave of punk poseurs who came to the music via bands like Good Charlotte". They argue that these young listeners want "not to have to think and [instead they] would rather use music as escapism [,] and too many bands seem willing to comply".
One writer argued that the Los Angeles punk scene was changed by the invasion of "antagonistic suburban poseurs", which bred "rising violence [...] and led to a general breakdown of the hardcore scene". A writer for The Gauntlet praised the US Bombs' politically oriented albums as "a boulder of truth and authenticity in a sea of slick poseur sewage", and called them "real punk rockers" at "a time where [sic] the genre is littered with dumb songs about cars, girls and bong hits".
Daniel S. Traber argues that attaining authenticity in the punk identity can be difficult; as the punk scene changed and re-invented itself, "[e]veryone got called a poseur". One music writer argues that the punk scene produced "...true believers who spent long days fighting the man on streets of the big city [and living in squats who] always wanted to make punk rock less a cultural movement than some kind of meritocracy: "You have to prove you're good enough to listen to our music, man."
Joe Keithley, the singer for D.O.A. said in an interview that: "For every person sporting an anarchy symbol without understanding it there’s an older punk who thinks they’re a poseur." The interviewer, Liisa Ladouceur, argued that when a group or scene's "followers grow in number, the original devotees abandon it, [...] because it is now attracting too many poseurs—people the core group does not want to be associated with".
The early 1980s hardcore punk band MDC penned a song entitled "Poseur Punk", which excoriated pretenders who copied the punk look without adopting its values. The lyrics sheet packaged with Magnus Dominus Corpus, the album on which "Poseur Punk" appears, contains a picture of the band Good Charlotte juxtaposed underneath the lyrics to "Poseur Punk". As part of MDC's 25th anniversary tour in the 2000s, frontman "Dictor's targets remain largely the same: warmongering politicians, money-grubbing punk poseurs (including Rancid, whose Tim Armstrong once worked as an M.D.C. roadie), and of course, cops".
NOFX's album The War on Errorism includes the song "Decom-poseur", part of the album's overall "critique of punk rock's 21st century incarnation of itself". In an interview, NOFX's lead singer Mike Burkett (aka "Fat Mike") "lashes out" at "an entire population of bands he deems guilty of bastardizing a once socially feared and critically infallible genre" of punk, asking "[w]hen did punk rock become so safe?"
Heavy metal subculture
Jeffrey Arnett argues that the heavy metal subculture classifies members into two categories: "acceptance as an authentic metalhead or rejection as a fake, a poseur".Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen. Metalheads: Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Alienation (1996) In a 1993 profile of heavy metal fans' "subculture of alienation", the author notes that the scene classified some members as poseurs, that is, heavy metal performers or fans who pretended to be part of the subculture but who were deemed to lack authenticity and sincerity. In 1986, SPIN magazine referred to "poseur metal".Gaines, Donna. "Biker Metal". Spin. Aug 1989. Vol. 5, No. 5 p. 27