It can be easy to romanticize the past—especially when you are looking at beautiful images featuring enchanting garments. Such is the case with the paintings of Thomas Gainsborough. The portraits of this 18th-century British painter have been collected for the first time in “Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture,” an exhibition opening at the Frick Collection in New York on February 12.
What the artist’s subjects are wearing is an important topic, which the museum explores alongside subjects like class and power. The overlap with New York Fashion Week is fortuitous—and telling. Portraits, which are time-intensive, projected prosperity, with sitters usually dressed in their “Sunday best.” In Gainsborough’s day, it wasn’t just the cut of an outfit that communicated status and rank, but also the materials from which it was made. Among the painter’s subjects were stylish, tastemaking women such as the Scottish courtesan Grace Dalrymple Elliott—predecessors to today’s influencers, who will sometimes change outfits between shows in the hopes of catching the eye of street style photographers.
In the interest of bridging past and present, we’ve paired Gainsborough’s portraits, which speak to us through time, with more fleeting runway images from recent seasons. While the goal here is less about exactitude than vibes, it is really interesting to consider why designers—and museum curators—are exploring the Age of Enlightenment and its rococo stylings (which gave way to revolution) now. (Overlapping with the tail end of the V&A’s “Marie Antoinette Style” exhibition is “Fashion in the 18th Century: A Fantasized Legacy” at the Palais Galliera.) Maybe it has something to do with putting one’s best foot forward. On y va!
“Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture,” is on view at the Frick Collection from February 12 through May 25, 2026.
