Fashion Victims: London Macaronis and Paris Petits-Maîtres, c. 1760-80

Peter McNeil’s time as a Gervers fellow went in tandem with his PhD research, in which he was comparing English and French attitudes to male sartorial excess. He focused on roughly 50 fine examples of 18th century waistcoats in the ROM.  His interest was in the waistcoat as a target of satire and as a synecdoche for a certain type of male courtly persona. Through his study, he discerned the various and sometimes contradictory meanings that contemporaries of the waistcoat, as a part of court dress, associated with it, ranging from respectful awe at the display of wealth and status to satirizing the perceived effeminacy and excess of such items of dress.