Beauty By Design: Fashioning The Renaissance

Beauty by Design is an innovative exhibition linking the renaissance art collections of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and Scottish National Gallery to contemporary fashion design, practice and display.

The exhibition showcases two different, but inter-connected strands of research activity: responding to old-master paintings in the National Galleries’ collections, UK-based fashion designers have created new works using high-quality materials such as lace, while renaissance art specialists have explored ideas about beauty and cosmetics. The theme of body image is central: the historic paintings have been approached both as a means of challenging current perceptions of physical beauty, and as inspiration for a more diverse and emotionally considerate practice on the part of today’s fashion designers.