Abstract:
My paper will compare two eighteenthcentury
English men who were extraordinarily
fashionable in their youth, but who appear transformed in middle and old age. They
were so fashionable, in fact, that dress made them famous and projected them into
the arena of printculture,
theatre and press as ‘macaroni’ men. Whig politician
Charles James Fox (17491806)
and court painter Richard Cosway (17421821)
used novel and extreme modes of dress in order to cement their social rank and
place in the public imagination. Their stylepolitics
was as much about the process of
wearing, as the garments themselves. Previous studies of macaroni dress have
tended to focus upon caricature as a fictive genre. This paper aims to knit together a
cultural form with historical bodies, without suggesting that the caricature is in any
way a simple reflection. In considering the authenticity of a newly discovered selfportrait
of miniaturepainter
Cosway in old age, the understudied
area of male
fashion and the staging of a life will be considered.
