Double Lecture & Afternoon Tea: The Marriage of Fashion and Art with Distinguished Professor Peter McNeil

Art and fashion have a primary function today of representing the body. Designer Marc Jacobs was supremely successful in rebranding older luxury goods through art-fashion collaborations that include Jürgen Teller, Cindy Sherman and Takashi Murakami. Tracey Emin worked with Longchamp, Alexander McQueen with Damien Hirst. Spectacular effects from fashion and film are the ‘new normal’. Parades surpass art installations: from art comes the idea of autonomy. Fashion needs artists. Do contemporary audiences even distinguish between formats such as art and fashion, and will art-fashion pairings survive the ecological critiques of the hyper-digital age?

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). He has written on shoes for the bi-lingual Swedish/English Men’s Fashion: An Untold Story (2022) and co-edited a best seller, Shoes, with Giorgio Riello in 2006.

Your ticket includes two lectures by special guest Distinguished Professor Peter McNeil, and an afternoon tea of petit fours and tea or Market Lane coffee, served on our Wedgwood fine bone china, and time to browse our exclusive range of books, gifts, and homewares at TJC Emporium.

This event is presented on-site at The Johnston Collection. Please see your ticket for details. NOTE: Tickets for this event do not include access to our house museum, Fairhall. Guided tours of the current exhibition can be booked separately.

This event is supported by The Colin Holden Charitable Trust.

Presented as part of the PayPal Melbourne Fashion Festival’s Independent Programme