In their search for larger, and different types of, audiences galleries around the world have been exploring fashion (especially of the haute couture variety) for a long time, often with a remarkable degree of success. The idea is far from new. One of the first significant shows in the UK in this genre was “Fashion: an anthology by Cecil Beaton “, which opened at the V & A in October 1971 and which showed the beautiful dresses which Beaton had acquired from his extensive network of society clients. Significantly, in terms of getting this type of show taken seriously in the more traditional echelons of the UK art world, the director who permitted his galleries to house such a show was one of the driest, most scholarly and intellectually rigorous directors around at the time, John Pope-Hennessy. The fact that he, with a training in Old Master scholarship, was prepared to host such a show indicates that, nearly 50 years ago, fashion had already breached the world of the serious art gallery in this country. In the Guardian review of the show (28 September 1971) Pope- Hennessy was quoted as saying that “ the museum shares Mr Beaton’s belief that style in dress is an art form, worthy to be collected and displayed.”

From there, other hugely successful shows have followed at the V & A. The Alexander McQueen show in 2015, Savage Beauty, attracted 490,000 visitors, staying open throughout the night for its last two weekends to try to accommodate those who wanted to see it. The same show had already been seen by over 660,000 visitors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Even these numbers had been dwarfed at the Met by their 2018 show, “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination “, which was seen by more than 1.6 million people. The Met has probably been the world museum most dedicated to putting on large shows relating to fashion history. Its long-established costume institute, containing over 30,000 objects , is now called the Anna Wintour Costume Center; it evolved from The Museum of Costume Art which had opened on 5th Avenue as long ago as 1937. The first show which the newly- named Center promoted in 2014 was of the work of the English fashion designer, Charles James ( a contemporary of Beaton’s at Harrow). This drew over half a million visitors.

So to Manolo Blahnik. Shoes on their own have not been the subject of many gallery shows. The V & A put on “Shoes: Pleasure and Pain” in 2015 (216,000 visitors) and the Civic, Barnsley , followed by the York Castle Museum, showed Vivienne Westwood’s shoes in 2018. Apart from the rarity of its subject matter, the Wallace Collection show is unusual in a number of ways. For a start, it is not in any sense a study of Manolo Blahnik’s shoes. There is no attempt to explain to viewers the history or nature of his shoe production. There are dates given for the manufacture of the shoes and the attentive visitor could piece together a chronological thread from that; but it would be painstaking. The shoes are displayed in a loosely thematic way across quite a number of rooms and looking for order amongst their dates would involve constant wandering backwards and forwards. Similarly with the process of their manufacture: one can see that beautiful materials have been worked on with great skills to produce the shoes, but exactly how the design prepared by Mr Blahnik in his English studio is finalised before going to Milan to be produced and later to arrive at, for example, the shop in Burlington Arcade, not to mention the type of people who then buy them, is unexplored. A fascinating study, were it able to weave around the modern restrictions on the disclosure of personal data, could compare the clientele of the Parisian marchand -merciers in the 18th century with their modern day equivalents. Allowing for the different social strata at the court of Louis XVI compared to modern Bond Street ( not many aristocrats now), the analogous similarities might be striking.

Instead, what the various curators have sought to do is to insert the shoes into the Wallace Collection’s variety of masterpieces as nearly as possible as if they were part of one of the greatest groups of French 18th century furniture and porcelain (and to a lesser extent pictures) in the world. Waddesdon and the Royal Collection are the Wallace’s peer group in the UK. The shoes, therefore, have what might be called a hard act to follow. That they succeed in holding their own in this stupendous setting of furniture by Jean-Henri Riesener and Sevrès decorated by Charles-Nicolas Dodin, each in their areas in the top league, shows that the brave curatorial concept has worked: modern luxury items of great quality, inspired design, partly no doubt based on shoes of the 18th century, and produced in tiny quantities for a rich clientele, can survive in this rarefied atmosphere. In fact, they do more than survive; they fit gracefully and almost naturally into their setting. One says almost only because of the artifice imposed on the curators by the limitations of a temporary exhibition. This requires the shoes to look a little isolated and out of place, protected in their glass bell jars like the ones that used to inhabit old-fashioned antique shops containing exotic stuffed birds. Where the shoes are allowed to take their place in the cabinets themselves, their potential as long-term exhibits in their own right becomes apparent. For example, suitably bejewelled shoes have been put into the vitrines containing the gorgeous gold snuff boxes. This collection contains some of the finest examples of any museum in the world; the largely unusable objects are supreme examples of their type and would have been the height of luxury in their time. The shoes nestle amongst them quite comfortably. It transpires that luxury items speak quite happily to each other across the years.

Elsewhere the groups of shoes on display relate more to the French 18th century pictures of Watteau, Fragonard, Lancret, Greuze, Boucher and Vigée le Brun. It is as if the delicate shoes have fallen from the feet of the ladies pictured, or perhaps have been discovered, unworn, in a hidden cache from a cupboard in Versailles or Rambouillet. They glow discreetly in their sheer refinement of taste; really some of them could have come from the V & A’s historic shoe collection, except here they are more gloriously luxurious.

This, then, is a clever, sophisticated show, fitting in to the traditions of the collection. Following on from the groundbreaking show of Henry Moore’s Helmet Heads, the Wallace is clearly embarking on a journey into new, uncharted territory. Who knows where this will take it? Such shows will inevitably attract a new audience for the gallery; it is greatly to the credit of the Director, Xavier Bray, and his team that they have seized the initiative and plunged out into what some of their colleagues must see as terra incognita. One wishes them every success in this; all galleries today are looking to augment their funding shortfalls by trying new things and experiments like this deserve our congratulations and support.