“Hello Viccy, you’re looking well.” – Orla McCool (Derry Girls, 3.7)

Seasons: Summer, with a mild mid-afternoon drizzle just to maintain its reputation

Steps: 13, 118

Intended Itinerary: Crown to Couture at Kensington Palace, Style & Society: Dressing the Georgians at The Elizabeth Gallery, Buckingham Palace, The Rosettis at Tate Britain

Managed: Two out of three before jet lag kicked my arse.

Granted, as I’m presenting at a conference the timing of my trip to London was partially out of my control, I would still very much not recommend visiting under the following conditions:

• July (is EVERY country on their holidays in the British Capitol right now?? Must they all stop dead in the middle of thoroughfares to gawp when I have timed entry tickets to things?)
• During Wimbledon (though I did get to enjoy the collective pub joy when Carlos Alcaraz won)
• A “heatwave” – this is relative as I come from California which is currently being baked by 42C/108F temperatures, so I admit I laughed at London’s 23C/73F temperatures. That was until I realised that there is no air conditioning on the Tube (why would there be?), and that Kensington Palace having been built to maximise light in a time without electricity, central heating let alone air conditioning, ends up ridiculously stuffy.

So, point one to you London, I am humbled and have learned you can in fact make me sweat.

It’s been twelve years since I was in London, and I was stunned most by how easily I stepped back into her rhythms, adapting to the new innovations. The  Heathrow Express to Paddington and the oyster card, by the way, are brilliant!

My first stop after checking in at my hotel in Blackfriars (more later), was Kensington Palace for Crown to Couture. The show’s premise is to lay out the parallels between the Georgian court and today’s red carpet culture, and it suggests some influence of the latter on the former. I’m not entirely sure about the direct influence idea other than the usual tendency of fashion designers to look to silhouettes past for inspiration and then utilise them in a contemporary design, but the concept was intriguing.

As I am finishing a reread of Lucy Worsley’s Courtiers, examining the early Georgian court and the Georgian history of Kensington Palace itself, I was seriously struck by the parallels and deeply enjoyed the comparisons and contrasts through displays of various media. I also particularly enjoyed the use of the public Palace spaces – the path through the exhibit meanders through both the servants quarters and the “public” spaces. You enter along a “red carpet” surrounded by water colours reminiscent of René Gruau’s style, depicting both Georgian fashions and recognizable red carpet looks before you stumble upon one of the main reasons I decided to attend this exhibition: the newly conserved Silver Tissue Gown from 1660, on loan from the Bath Fashion Museum.

We will now pause to pay proper reverence (select images to see them in their entirety).

This gown is STUNNING. Now imagine it in candle and fire light as it would have originally been seen. The wearer would have absolutely caught Charles II’s eye – I’m sure.

Silver tissue unsurprisingly has a tendency to tarnish over the years, typically losing its lustre. There is also the damage the fabric itself endures just by its very nature: silver tissue is created by wrapping silver around silk threads and then weaving the fabric. The weight of the silver puts pressure on the threads which means it can tear and deteriorate very easily.

This exhibition has TWO such gowns. The 1660 gown above, and the Rockingham Mantua (part of the Royal Collection Trust collection). I was intrigued to overhear other visitors’ comments that these must have been gowns for “a queen”. They are stunning, but not that stunning – the queens would have been encrusted with actual jewels. That the dresses were worn by “mere” (ha) nobles does not change that they are remarkable survivals (and that their delicacy means this was a rare chance to see them mounted and on display).

I admit I paid far more attention to the eighteenth century garments, etc., on display than to their contemporary counterparts. And due to my reread of Courtiers even more attention to the palace (and the William Kent ceilings) than anything else.

But I was very impressed with a number of elements of the exhibition. The visual cues there to help the visitor follow the show’s thesis, if you will. The most impressive, was that they led visitors up the King’s Staircase with red carpet commentary, and upbeat modern music in the background. The staircase was painted by William Kent for George I when he renovated the palace in the 1720s, and Kent used actual palace servants as his models. The Beefeaters depicted would have been recognizable guards permitting or denying admittance to courtiers trying to gain access to the Royal drawing rooms. There is Peter the Wild Boy, the king’s personal servants of Turkish origin: Mustafa and Mohammad.

The staircase also served the purpose of the Red Carpet for the court – it was your access point to the King’s court appearances, but also where you went to see and be seen before you entered the “crush”. And just like the red carpet, your attire could make or break you: there were no invitations to court, you were allowed in based on whether you looked the part (it was much more difficult to mimic the elite in a time period when a single gown could cost as much as an entire country estate’s yearly income and the average yearly income was about £20 for us mere mortals (guesstimate of £2,500 today)). So the utilization of the staircase to draw the parallel – along with the audio soundtrack – was a brilliant way of bringing this obscure aspect of Georgian court life home.

It also afforded me the closest look I’ve ever had of all of William Kent’s amazing details.

I also loved the compare and contrast between the red carpet celebrity’s make up table and the eighteenth century courtier’s toilette – it was a glorious representation of how the more things change, the more they stay the same. Though I did have to explain to some folks that the “toilet or toilette bowl” was not the modern meaning of toilet (they were a little horrified until I did so).

And the underpinnings – the padded stockings to give men more shapely calves = gloriousness (feeling your shape didn’t fit the current fashionable one is also nothing new).

The reverence for modern celebrity (see specifically: the tendency to call favoured celebs “queen!” and “king!” on social media), was brilliantly illustrated as another continuum, through a couple Beyoncé displays (naturally).

And of course, the other parallel was the inspiration that modern designers take from the Georgian era into their designs.

All in all a very fun exhibition, with silver tissue gowns and William Kent ceilings to boot.

I next went to Buckingham Palace, more specifically The Queen’s Gallery for Style & Society: Dressing the Georgians. In case it wasn’t obvious, the Georgian Period is “my” period, so basically this is as close to heaven as I can get (heaven will likely be the V&A Dundee Tartan exhibition I see on Wednesday…).

I was NOT disappointed. It is a glorious mix of paintings, fashion plates, caricatures, educational illustrations, sketches, and surviving objects to delve deeply into the dress and fashion culture of the Georgian period, predominantly of the Royal family and elite – but also examining the dress of the “average” person as well (though of course, almost none of that will survive). The catalogue is extremely thorough and the main effect of the show was to make me want to do an immediate close read when I get home (so glad I bought it ahead of the opening – it is HUGE and heavy, and that extra weight in my suitcase would have made me weep in all those Tube stations with no lifts).

The jet lag was starting to hit hard at this point – and the fact that I am no longer 26, and joints and feet ache far more acutely now – but I did make sure to spend rather a lot of time examining one particular painting.

This is rather a central painting to what I do, it even features in my paper for Thursday, but this was my first ever time seeing it in person. Digital photography allows us to see so much more in paintings than we ever could before – more than the naked eye ever could take in – and yet, standing in front of this painting for a solid ten minutes (oh my poor feet), I saw things I had never seen before on a computer screen. It was a wonderful surprise to find it in the exhibition (see: ginormous, heavy catalogue I haven’t been able to read yet).

I was really starting to fade after that, but the exhibition was truly magnificent. I think I will have many more blogposts to come out of it.

But upon finishing, and then spending too much money in the shop (I now own a GEORGIAN TOTE BAG Y’ALL), it was time to make my way to Victoria so I could head back to Blackfriars for a nap. I grabbed an egg mayonnaise (egg salad without the mustard to us Americans), and a Gently Sparkling Elderflower (British food and drink, I have MISSED YOU), got back to the hotel room and crashed.

I did venture out one last time, for dinner in a pub on Fleet Street, just up from my hotel (right across the way from the Blackfriar pub and the station): Punch Tavern. A former 19^th century gin palace originally called the Crown and Sugar Loaf, in the 1840s it changed its name to honor the popular magazine that had its headquarters just up Fleet Street. The décor is appropriately glorious.

Then after a glorious pub meal with an amazing pint of cider, the amazing experience of collectively watching someone win Wimbledon with a group of folks in London, I went back and crashed again (until about 4:00am, curse you jetlag, though The World’s Bestest Mummy Person™ had a brilliant idea to practice the paper with the extra time).

And as I write this, I am on the train to Glasgow (with the chorus from Tide Lines’ ‘Any Heart in a Storm’ stuck in my head every time they announce the stops). More tonight!