AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion

Bolton, Andrew, with an essay by Ian Buruma (2006)

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Watsonline WorldCat

Graphis Gold Award (2008)

Publication Details

Description

Anglomania gripped Europe during the mid-to-late eighteenth century. Continental Anglophiles such as Voltaire and Montesquieu saw England as a land of reason, freedom, and tolerance. Yet what began as an intellectual phenomenon became and has remained, a matter of style. Through the lens of fashion, AngloMania, based on the popular exhibition of the same name held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2006, examines aspects of English culture that continue to capture the imaginations of Europeans and Americans, among them the class system, sport, royalty, pageantry, eccentricity, the gentleman, and the country garden. Englishness is a romantic construct, formed by fictive and imaginary narratives. These narratives are, however, not merely the product of European-American Anglophilia but are fostered by the English themselves. As this book reveals, they can be found in the novels of Samuel Richardson and in the paintings of George Stubbs and William Hogarth.

AngloMania presents historical costumes with clothing of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in a series of theatrical vignettes staged in the Museum's English Period Rooms. In the book, images of the Kirtlington Park Dining Room (ca. 1748), the venue for "The English Garden," teems with figures wearing eighteenth-century gowns made from Spitalfields silks and sporting twenty-first century hats by Philip Treacy. Although the gowns and hats are separated by time, they are united through their bold floral motifs that are startling in their botanical naturalism. The Lansdowne Dining Room (1776–79) becomes "The Gentlemen's Club," in which dandies, gentlemen, and punks, wearing designs by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, clash in a scene of Hogarthian intensity. Around the Hampton Court State Bed (ca. 1698), Queen Victoria in widow's weeds mourns the death of a figure wearing tartan trousers and an elaborately embroidered cape-jacket by Alexander McQueen.

The illuminating and entertaining texts, written by Andrew Bolton, are complemented by an introductory essay by Ian Buruma that traces the beginnings of the desire for all things British.

Table of contents

Sponsor's Statement

Foreword
Philippe de Montebello

Preface

Tell a Man by his Clothes
Ian Buruma

John Bull

The English Garden: Kirtlington Park Dining Room

Upstairs/Downstairs: Cassiobury Park Staircase

The Deathbed: Hampton Court State Bed

Empire and Monarchy: Elizabethan Room

Francomania: Croome Court Tapestry Room

The Gentlemen's Club: Lansdowne Dining Room

The Hunt

The Hunt Ball

Catalogue

Illustrations
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgments

About the authors

Andrew Bolton is Curator of The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ian Buruma is Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Press reviews

Publishers Weekly

"... handsome ... this impressive show catalog hits all the highlights with grace and wit."

The Art Book

"... the content pleasantly challenges the readers initial expectations ... details of some of the costumes provide the reader with a close-up view of the pieces that visitors to the exhibition would not have had. this volume becomes more than simply a visually fascinating offering; it is an amusing historical documentation of the duality of the English ... a high quality and refreshingly quirky read."

Toronto Globe & Mail

"This ravishing volume will appeal both to avant-gardist fashion lovers and anglophiles with a hankering for Georgian elegance."

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European Art in the 17th–18th Centuries

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (11)

Essays (7)

Costume in The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Eighteenth-Century European Dress

Eighteenth-Century Silhouette and Support

Haute Couture

The Kilt

Twentieth-Century Silhouette and Support

Vivienne Westwood (born 1941) and the Postmodern Legacy of Punk Style

Timelines (4)

Great Britain and Ireland, 1600–1800 A.D.

Great Britain and Ireland, 1800–1900 A.D.

Great Britain and Ireland, 1900 A.D.–present

The United States and Canada, 1900 A.D.–present

Exhibition

AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion

AngloMania focuses on British fashion from 1976 to 2006, a period of astounding creativity and experimentation. Over the past thirty years, British fashion has been defined by a knowing and self-conscious historicism. In their search for novelty, designers have looked to past styles with an appetite that is as audacious as it is rapacious. Focusing on their postmodern, historicizing tendencies, this exhibition presents a series of tableaux based on Britain's rich artistic traditions. The irony of satirical prints, the romance of landscape paintings, and the glamour and bravado of grand manner portraits are evoked through a wide spectrum of British designers. The exhibition is set in the Metropolitan Museum's English period rooms—the Annie Laurie Aitken Galleries—to create a potent dialogue between the past and the present.

Plan Ahead

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