Icons of posh

Getting in the way

At last, a new stately home to look at, and this time it’s Blenheim. This is a bit of an oddity because it’s too big, built for unusual reasons and called a palace even though it’s not royal. Nonetheless, being handily situated on the road from London to Stratford on Avon via Oxford, it is very appealing to Americans and is, therefore, the most visited stately home in the UK.

And once again, I have a lot to say about what I saw. So we’ll start today with what is Blenheim’s main attraction at the moment, an exhibition called Icons of British Fashion. This is, if you visit the house, completely unavoidable, because it’s not tucked away in some old stables or laundry rooms. Instead it inhabits every single room in the house.

It’s there from my very first entrance into the hall, which is devoted to the works of Vivienne Westwood. At least some of them. Because if you’d only ever seen the displays here, you would conclude two things.  One is that Vivienne Westwood devoted her life to making ballgowns (“handcrafted in a London atelier”); the other is that punk never happened.  Which it clearly didn’t at Blenheim.  The agenda is clear: this is a very particular version of British Fashion Icons, viewed through the lens of people who go to expensive parties in stately homes and need a wardrobe to suit.

From the hall we walk from one vast room to another and another, and then one more, all stretched out in a grand line along the facade of the buildings. These are the great State Rooms of the house, built for display and all with high ceilings and murals, furnished with tapestries and overwrought furniture as in any similar house. But it’s very hard to comprehend any of this because the mannequins and the clothes and the displays are too much in the way.

One room contains bright orange trees like stage coral which match nothing in the decor and which are designed to show off accessories which are, apparently “a treasure trove of handbags from the Lulu Guinness archive”.

In the dining room, the figures are at the tail end of a wild meal, where a couple of them have decided to stand on the table and throw their hand in the air while their fellows sit and watch. They are all, of course wearing ballgowns and cocktail dresses. This is not just the story of posh clothes, it’s also a stark reminder that these houses are inhabited by people who are very different to the rest of us.

There are two outliers in the display, but their message is nonetheless very similar. One is an entire room devoted to waxed outdoor jackets and flat caps, made, naturally by Barbour. This means that every possible flat surface has been covered in fake plastic ivy (along with that well known woodland plant, wisteria) and someone has built a fake stone wall in the middle of the carpet.

To one side is a display of photos of famous people who are also wearing Barbours. The result of this is that it’s hard to see the objects in the room, never mind what it looks like as a whole; even more irritatingly, it’s been done to glamorise shooting. I’ve already mentioned the aristocratic obsession with field sports and the close connection with the stately home and I am sure I will do again but for now it’s enough to note that these people are pretty obviously as posh as any woman with a ballgown might be.

The other takes place in what the house rather weirdly calls the Birth Room. Churchill was born at Blenheim and the current house reveres him as another icon of Englishness (there is a small exhibition about him next to the chapel that I don’t have the mental strength to visit) but don’t mistake that for thinking that the family liked him at the time. Consuelo, when she married the 4th Duke was told by his grandmother that “Your first duty is to have a child and it must be a son because it would be intolerable to have that little upstart Winston become Duke.” This has now been carefully forgotten and the house places itself spiritually alongside Stratford on Avon as a birthplace of the core English character.

All of which means that we are looking at not just a bed but Churchill’s iconic siren suit and pyjamas reinterpreted, with a twist, by Turnbull and Asser. I do not want to see this, I have never asked for anything like this, I just want it all to stop.

So what’s going on here? I think there are two things worth noticing. One is that the exhibition is very involved in normalising posh people, the kind of very posh people who buy expensive clothes and live in houses like this (although in truth no-one but the Duke of Marlborough lives in a house like this, because it’s such a peculiar one off). Its version of British fashion is completely partial; yes to ballgowns and ateliers and waxed jackets, no mention of punk or Mary Quant. And so, in a small way, it’s doing the same work as stately homes are in general - making sure that our ideas of what it is to be English and great are defined in terms of what the aristocracy wear (and live in and do).

But by putting the displays where they are, not in the laundry rooms and with the mannequins dominating the spaces, the exhibition is also acknowledging an uncomfortable truth. That in some ways, stately homes are becoming if not redundant, then certainly irrelevant. Blenheim may be the most visited stately home in the UK, but it also understands that its visitors are not actually that interested in the building as “the pinnacle of English cultural achievement”. Although they are still coming to the house, people are not actually that interested in the architecture and the tapestries and the portraits. So something else has to be put in place to justify the slow procession through the rooms. And if that continues to involve the glorification of the aristocracy, all the better.