In an essay for the September 2005 issue of the magazine Fashion Theory Philip Hoare wrote of Dirk’s ‘wartime status as dandy officer-aesthete’ and of his ‘postwar role as a posh, well-spoken version of the Teddy Boy, a teen idol for a new generation.’ By the time he made Death in Venice in 1970 he had moved, Hoare considered, from being the ‘heterosexual focus of bobby-soxers to the very embodiment of decadent, homoerotic transgression’. However it was at the end of the decade that Dirk, much to his own astonishment, became a true style icon. << >>