Wealthy Georgians could put their best foot forward
With Strictly Come Dancing absent from our screens and fashion fixated with utilitarian denim and striped breton shirts, if you’re desperate for a bit of dazzle, why not check out the Style & Society: Dressing the Georgians exhibition at The King's Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse?
From a pair of 18th-century silk shoes decorated with metallic gold sequins and jewel coloured flowers to wafty muslin dresses covered in delicate metallic embroidery and hand-painted silk wallpaper, there is plenty of razzle dazzle on display in the artefacts and portraits of glamorous Georgians.
As you would expect in an exhibition organised by The Royal Collection Trust, there are paintings galore, showing the kings and queens and aristocrats who could afford to parade in the latest fabulous fashions as well as real clothing made from all the rage fabrics such as cotton, muslin, silk, fur and feathers.
Highlights include a massive portrait of George III in the Royal Stewart kilt he wore for his 1822 Edinburgh visit, in which the artist David Wilkie discreetly left out the monarch’s wind-chill defying flesh-coloured ‘trewsers’. A quartet of royal bridesmaids preen in their My Little Pony plumed wigs and ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ Lord Byron louchely champions ‘sailor’ trousers, no surprise he was one of the first to get out of breeches.
But for me it’s unknowns who really shine, those who toiled to feed the demand for newly-fashionable cotton and the skilled craftspeople who embroidered miles of gold thread, hand twisted up to 800 bobbins of linen threads into cascading spiderweb lace sleeves or sewed whale baleen into corsets using hundreds of tiny stitches – so uniform you’d swear they were done with a machine – and with shoulder straps a match for Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh’s Oscar dresses. And pity the young chimney sweep whose teeth are being extracted for transplanting into the mouth of a rich recipient in Thomas Rowlandson’s etching – there’s nothing new about bizarre beauty procedures or vanity. And best of all, it needn’t cost you a king’s ransom to gawp at the glamour of The Georgians as The Royal Collection Trust has launched a £1 ticket scheme for those receiving Universal Credit and other named benefits.
There is plenty of razzle dazzle on display in the artefacts and portraits
Style & Society: Dressing the Georgians exhibition is at The King's Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse until 22 September. www.rct.uk, +44 (0)303 123 7306.