Fashion and Interiors with Professor Peter McNeil

This double lecture explores the vagaries of luxury from the ballgowns of the 19th-century Dollar Princesses, to the consumption of chocolates and mass-produced foodstuffs, to health, insurance, cars, air conditioning, gemstones, ‘Gentlemen’ preferring ‘Blondes’, the Reagan and Thatcher years, the decline of the great plutocrat collectors, and the rise of ‘masstige’ or mass luxury and experience culture. Learn about the vagaries, changes and also the persistence of luxury as both practice and concept across time, place and experience, from fashion to the interior and back again.

Distinguished Professor Peter McNeil FAHA is an award-winning design historian. His book Pretty Gentlemen: Macaroni Men and the Eighteenth-century Fashion World was published by Yale University Press (2018) and was a Marina Warner ‘Book of the Year’ in London Review of Books. McNeil worked with Los Angeles County Museum of Art on the major exhibition ‘Reigning Men’ (2016).