There is no collective noun for flaneur.
It is not surprising. The archetype flaneur is a solitary observer of the human condition.
What would happen if two flaneur dressed so similarly that they might be twins, and then met by chance?
Would they bridle? Would they laugh at the unlikeliness of it? I can almost guarantee that they would laugh together because that is part and parcel of being a flaneur.
The detached observer has a sense of humour. If he or she were to find the proceedings too meaningful, then they might become involved.
Theodor Herzl wrote for a newspaper – elegant essays observing society – until the antisemitism that began in France and spread to Germany took him on a different course.
Oscar Wilde was a flaneur (as Tamara told me when we were discussing the archetype). I said I thought differently because of x and y.
She is right; at one time Wilde was the quintessential flaneur in his observations and in his dress. And he says so himself.
When he was sentenced to two years hard labour for gross indecency, and was transferred to Reading Gaol, he wrote De Profundis, a letter to the young man who was a trigger to his downfall.
…The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flâneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion.
Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it…
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