Niagara Falls, Canada

Fashion & Folly: Developing a Site-Responsive Fashion Exhibition for Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill

Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill House is well-known for being a superlative example of the early Gothic Revival, and the inspiration for The Castle of Otranto. Today, it is an idiosyncratic museum that has been restored to its late 18th century appearance – but without the thousands of objects and artworks that Horace Walpole collected. My current doctoral research proposes a strategy for staging a thematic exhibition on fashion graphic satire from the 18th century to the present, that juxtaposes satirical prints and historic and contemporary fashions. The curatorial narratives link the fashion material with the histories and practices of Walpole and his milieu. Significant among them, is the tradition of extra-illustration, which has been harnessed as a metaphor and a methodology for devising and proposing site-responsive fashion exhibitions. This presentation tracks the project’s development and demonstrates how 18th century practices and ideas have inspired and informed a proposal for an innovative, creative exhibition.