"AngloMania" British Fashion Exhibition at Metropolitan Museum

Friday, 19 May 2006 11:52

London - AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion, on exhibit until 4 September, presents a wide range of works by British designers in The Metropolitan Museum’s English Period Rooms – The Annie Laurie Aitken Galleries.  A pendant to the acclaimed 2004 Costume Institute exhibition Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century, AngloMania examines ideals, stereotypes, and representations of Englishness by juxtaposing historical costume with late 20th- and early 21st-century fashion.

Anglomania, the craze for all things English, gripped Europe during the mid-to-late 18th century.  As perceived by Anglophiles such as Voltaire and Montesquieu, England was a land of reason, freedom, and tolerance, a land where the Enlightenment found its greatest expression.  But what began as an intellectual phenomenon became and has remained a matter of style.  Through the lens of fashion, AngloMania examines aspects of English culture – such as class, sport, royalty, eccentricity, the English gentleman, and the English country garden – that have fuelled the European and American imagination.

To reveal a conceptual continuum of the “English imaginary,” costumes from the 18th and 19th centuries will be placed alongside the work of designers Christopher Bailey, Hussein Chalayan, John Galliano, Stella McCartney, Alexander McQueen, Paul Smith, and Vivienne Westwood; the work of milliners Stephen Jones and Philip Treacy; the work of the shoe designer Manolo Blahnik; the work of jewelers Simon Costin and Shaun Leane; and the work of tailors Anderson & Sheppard Ltd, Richard Anderson, Ozwald Boateng, Timothy Everest, H. Huntsman & Sons, Richard James, Kilgour, and Henry Poole & Co. As with Dangerous Liaisons, the clothing will be styled as a series of thematic vignettes that reflect the history, function, and decoration of the Museum’s English Period Rooms.