Event details

Fashion in eighteenth-century Britain had to do with much more than what people wore, designating social class, relating to trade and industry, and being inextricable from ideas of time and change. This lecture, which emerges from an exhibition at The Frick Collection in New York, explores the sometimes extravagant attire that appears in society portraits by Gainsborough and his contemporaries, and the fashion for portraits themselves, which were one means by which artists and their subjects could reinforce, subvert, and invent identities within their social worlds.