Man as Peacock, a response to Dandy Style at Manchester Art Gallery
There is a new exhibition at the Manchester Art Gallery dealing with men's fashion in the last 250 years, and members of the Making Conversation group were shown around it a few weeks ago and challenged to make a response to it.
One of the commentaries in the gallery referred to peacocks and it occurred to me that a peacock automaton might work for this and so I have made a drawstring automaton of a man in his new suit and ornamented top hat looking at himself in the mirror and displaying.
As I always do when starting a new piece, I began to read around the subject to see if there are 'in jokes' that I can reference, did you know that in Yankee Doodle Dandy the feather in the hat is about a ridiculous trend for high wigs and lace and feathers that was in the 18th century called Macaroni. It is called that because rich young men would finish their educations with visits to foreign countries, the grand tour. Italy was very popular Rome, Florence, Venice, they would eat exotic food like pasta and come back with foppish fashion ideas and were called Macaronies.
