Buckingham Palace Spotlights the Gorgeous Georgians’ Clothing, Jewelry
LONDON — A new Carolean era may be unfolding with the coronation of King Charles III in two weeks’ time. Despite that, royal curators can’t seem to get enough of Georgian Britain.
Three weeks after the opening of “Crown to Couture,” an exhibition at Kensington Palace that examines the status-obsessed Georgians and how they used fashion to climb the social ladder, yet another show is taking place a few miles away.
More from WWD
“Style & Society: Dressing the Georgians,” opened this week at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace. The show looks at Georgian Britain through a fashion lens, with more than 200 works from The Royal Collection on display.
The Royal Collection is among the largest and most important art collections in the world, and is one of the last great European royal collections to remain intact.
The show at The Queen’s Gallery features paintings, prints and drawings by artists including Thomas Gainsborough, Johan Joseph Zoffany and William Hogarth, as well as rare examples of clothing, jewelry and accessories from the period.
Unlike the Kensington Palace show, which draws parallels between Georgian court style and modern red carpet fashion, this display looks at what the different classes wore, from laundry maids to aristocrats.
Among the highlights is the wedding dress of George IV’s daughter (and only legitimate child) Princess Charlotte of Wales, which is on display for the first time in more than a decade.
Charlotte’s marriage to Prince Leopold was considered one of the most important royal weddings of the era, and her silk-embroidered bridal gown is the only royal wedding dress that survives from the Georgian period.
Anna Reynolds, curator of Style & Society, said “visitors might be surprised to learn how much the Georgian period has in common with the fashion landscape we know today, from influencers and fashion magazines, to ideas about the value of clothes, and how they can be recycled and repurposed.”
The clothing and paintings speak volumes about how the Georgians lived.
Allan Ramsay’s life-size coronation portraits of King George III and Queen Charlotte are meant to show how ceremonial clothing was chosen to emphasize themes of continuity, tradition, spectacle and wealth.
Queen Charlotte wears a gown that’s heavily embroidered with gold thread, and a stomacher panel covered with diamonds. Today it would have been worth almost 10 million pounds.
The show looks at the fashion that the middle and upper classes wore — and showed off — at the pleasure gardens, theaters and coffee houses of the era.
On display are pages from the influential French fashion periodicals, which recommended women’s looks inspired by men’s riding dress and military uniforms.
There is also jewelry, which Reyonlds described as “highly personal and sentimental.”
Items include diamond rings given to Queen Charlotte on her wedding day, and a bracelet with nine lockets. Six contain locks of hair and one holds a miniature painting of the left eye of Princess Charlotte of Wales.
There are also jewel-encrusted snuffboxes and chatelaines, which were attached to the waist and used to carry items ranging from pocket watches to perfume bottles.
The exhibition also explores the hair, cosmetics and grooming tools used by Georgian men and women to achieve their elaborate, towering styles, as well as 18th century developments in eyewear and dentistry.
On show for the first time is a silver-gilt traveling toilet service, acquired by the future George IV as a gift for his private secretary at a cost of 300 pounds, the equivalent of more than 20,000 pounds today.
The service contains more than 100 objects including razors, combs, ear spoons and tongue scrapers — as well as tools for cleaning guns and making hot chocolate.
But those days of excess are gone, and it’s safe to say that King Charles III, despite his massive wealth and soft power, travels lighter than his Georgian predecessors.
An illustration of a woman’s coat dress in the French fashion periodical Magasin des modes nouvelles, from 1787.
Best of WWD
