Poseur

"Poseur" (or "poser") refers to someone who “poses for effect, or behaves affectedly”, who “affects a particular attitude, character or manner to impress others,” or who pretends to belong to a particular group. It may refer to a "person who pretends to be what he or she is not" or an "insincere person". A "poseur" may be a person whose personal style has a flair for drama, or one who behaves as if they are onstage in daily life. Sometimes “poseuse”, a feminine version of the word, is used.

“Poseur” or “poseuse" is also used to mean a person who poses for an artist — a painter’s model.

The playwright Oscar Wilde has been described as a “poseur”. The novelist, Thomas Hardy, describing Wilde said, “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.”

The painter James A. Whistler has been sometimes described as a "poseur" for his manner and personal style. It has been suggested that Whistler’s genius was in part 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.

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.”

In the ancient Greek comedy, The Clouds, the playwright Aristophanes portrays Socrates as a “poseur”.

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.”

...
Wikipedia