Birmingham, UK

A Genealogy of Fashion Jokes: Graphic Satires of Aesthetic Fashion and their Legacy

 This paper examines the well-known Punch satires of aesthetic modes and manners by George du Maurier and others (1973-1881), adopting a cross-disciplinary approach to positioning them within a lineage of graphic satires that lampoon fashionable identities.

 The significance of the Aesthetic Movement with regards to patterns of fashionable consumption and “artistic” self-presentation will be considered in relation to how fashionable dress and lifestyles were in turn lampooned in the popular media. While recognising similarities between the Punch cartoons and eighteenth-century British satirical prints (most significantly the Darly “Macaroni” prints of the 1770s), the paper will focus on drawing parallels between caricatures of the Aesthetic mien and later satires that similarly derive humour from the dress and demeanour of artistic and/or subcultural groups.

 By interrogating the hallmarks of these satires in tandem, this paper demonstrates how fashion satires act as what humour theorist Simon Critchley calls ‘small anthropological essays’ (Critchley, 2002, p. 65), encapsulating societal anxieties around alterity expressed in dress. By placing satires of the Aesthetic Movement as central to this examination, the paper suggests that Aesthetic dress has been a ‘starting point for a trajectory of artistic provocation’ (Breward, 2011, p. 203) that extends to the lampoon of these lifestyles as expressed in their alternative expressions of beauty and style.