The Cult of Beauty: an exhibition that raises questions that resonate today

The exhibition, The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900 at the Victoria & Albert Museum (2 April - 17 July) deals with several areas of late nineteenth century design, including dress, as part of an examination of a new culture, art and aesthetic which captured the imagination of middle class artistic Victorians who were not entirely at ease with what they saw as the deadening advance of mass production and the loss of individuality. And, for that reason, it is an exhibition that raises questions that still have resonance today, especially with regard to fashion.

Britain and London have rarely been in the vanguard of the visual arts and, in fashion, have normally followed Paris. But, for a brief period, the dress of the English woman of artistic leanings managed to create a personality for itself far different from the extravagances of the salons of Paris, which were lead magisterially (and paradoxically) by an Englishman at the time. Charles Frederick Worth, generally acknowledged as the first modern couturier, laid the foundations of what was to happen in the high fashion salons of Paris for the next hundred years - which was to put women on a pedestal that for most of the time kept them very much in their place as decorative chattels of men. But in London's avant garde creative circles, as one sees from paintings such as Albert Moore's An Open Book (1883-84) or Whistler's Symphony in White No 3 (1865-67) on display at the V&A, the perfect and precise for which Paris was famed were absolutely not what the artistic middle classes required. And that is a difference between the two cities that is still true today.

It is fascinating to wonder how fashion might have turned out had Worth stayed in London and set up his dressmaking establishment there at this aesthetically turbulent time when women were asked by artists to play various roles from the Greek to the Medieval, in their drawing rooms as well as studios, in paintings like Rossetti's Veronica Veronese (1872) looking pensively self-absorbed in dark velvet, her scarlet lips entirely dominating the canvas. Quite how Worth would have reacted to the clothing of women on display in the canvases of Lord Leighton's canvases such as Flaming June (1895), characterised by an almost wanton casualness often little more than a loose wrapping of semi- diaphanous fabric, is not too difficult to imagine. In my view he would have better understood the commercial and aesthetic mainstream dress of the late Victorian nineteenth century portrayed in the pert little figures wrapped in tightly cut dresses in the paintings of Tissot. In fact Worth had invented such a look for the whole of Europe, including London's upper classes who had no time for middle class bohemianism. But it is tempting to think that London might have tempered his grandeur with something more easily accessible to women of the time.

Worth never returned to work in his own country and the dynamic of high fashion settled firmly across the channel for the next hundred years, with only a few brief exceptions. As women took more control of their lives, including how they chose to dress, England's individuality asserted itself. The energy and vitality of London's Bright Young Things (who were paradoxically very silly young things); the swinging sixties and the mini skirt; the aberrant and iconoclastic moments (nano seconds in the history of fashion) when Westwood and her followers Galliano and McQueen attempted to redirect fashion were manifestations of changing female attitudes rather than fashion statements, just as this intriguing exhibition shows they were in the last half of Victoria's reign.

In pure fashion, Paris lead and the rest followed. But as this intriguing show demonstrates, there was much more than mere novelty in the clothes the artists chose for their sitters - an approach to femininity and beauty that still resonates today, wherever romance is seen as more important than mere chic...

Colin McDowell is a fashion historian and author of many books on the subject, including Fashion Today.