Exposed: the follies of following the fashion!

Exposed: the follies of following the fashion!

The Hatton Gallery at Newcastle University is the first venue for a major new National Touring Exhibition from the Hayward Gallery which views the outrageous – often downright ridiculous – world of high fashion as seen through the eyes of late 18th- and early 19th century satirical artists such as Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray and Richard Newton.

The exhibition consists of almost 100 hand-coloured etchings and mezzotints from the British Museum, curated by Professor Diana Donald.

You could be forgiven for thinking that exaggerating high fashion to the point where it becomes impractical, even unwearable – who can forget Naomi Campbell’s famous catwalk stumble on her enormous platform shoes – is a modern phenomenon to showcase the designers whose creations grace the catwalks of the world’s fashion capitals.

But in fact, when it comes to the idiosyncrasies of high fashion, not much has changed since the late 18th century. The Hatton Gallery’s curator, Lucy Whetstone, says: ‘In the same way that the catwalk creations found on the pages of glossy magazines show the extremes of fashion so, in an age before there was fashion photography, cartoonists would satirise the fashions of the day. Trends in women’s fashions in particular – gigantic hats, towering wigs, huge bustles that made it impossible to sit down – were extremes in exactly the same way as Vivienne Westwood’s fantastic creations.’

In the late 1700s, it wasn’t only (the) women’s fashions that fed the imagination of the satirists. Fashionable men came in for their fair share of ridicule too, from the ‘macaronies’ of the 1770s – young city ‘fops’ whose ornate, effeminate mode of dress was inspired by the Continental courts – to the ‘buxom dandies’ of the early Ninteenth Century with their flamboyant extremes of pre-Victorian dress and manners.

Lucy Whetstone continues: ‘Although these images show fashion in extremes, they also allow us an insight into how fashion was perceived in terms of morality. The widely-held opinion was that ‘high fashion equals low morals’, as though a desire to follow the fashion in some way lured an individual away from a more wholesome lifestyle.’

At a time when fashion plates and magazines were beginning to promote style-consciousness and ‘good taste’, caricatures like those in this exhibition provided an ironic contrast. ‘The exhibition also caricatures the social importance of fashion and points to the way in which the fashion-conscious see the way they dress as a tool to project a particular image of themselves, or to convey a message about who and what they are’, she added.

Followers of Fashion has been organised by the Hayward Gallery in collaboration with the British Museum, curated by Diana Donald, Professor of the History of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University and author of ‘The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III’.

The prints are mainly caricatures of fashion, (hand-coloured etchings and mezzotints) dating from the 1770s to the 1820s, by well-known artists as well as a number of amateur and anonymous draughtsmen. The exhibition also includes some contemporary drawings by Guardian cartoonist Posy Simmonds, and examples of fashion plates, portraits and crowd scenes which further illustrate the fashion phenomenon.

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