High-Change in Bond Street. . .

This is one of a dozen or more prints Gillray created in 1795-96 satirizing the styles and manners of the fashionistas of the time.

Originally part of fields surrounding Clarendon House developed by Sir Thomas Bond in the late 17th century, Bond Street, in Gillray's era, was noted for its high-end specialty stores and its elite clientele. It was the place to shop, but even more importantly the place to see, and be seen. To be dressed to the nines (or overdressed as one might say of the two central figures) was de rigeur. So the gentlemen are all wearing the high neck-cloths, spencer jackets, low-top hats, and halfboots that were essential parts of a stylish young buck's wardrobe. And the women are mostly sporting the obligatory plumes that were almost a parody in themselves in the 1790's. One of the few un-fashionable women on the right peers through an opera glass perhaps identifying a celebrity in the central woman with her young companion or, at least picking up some style tips.

Catering as it did to the well-to-do, Bond Street featured raised stone walkways on both sides so that (under normal circumstances) one could promenade down its length without encountering the mud and the muck so common on other London roadways.

The print's subtitle, La Politesse du Grande Monde, is of course, completely ironic as the politeness of the fashionable young bucks, in this instance, is conspicuously absent. Not only are they caught up in leering at the members of the fairer sex, they have rudely forced the ladies off the sidewalk and into the dirty street where their elegant dresses trail in the mud.

Sources and Reading

• Commentary from the British Museum on High-Change in Bond Street. . ..
• "Bond Street," Wikipedia
• "London's Bond Streets: Old and New," The Regency Redingote
• "March 1796," The Gallery of Fashion (1794-1803)
• Thomas Wright and R.H. Evans, Historical and Descriptive Account of the Caricatures of James Gillray #417.
• Thomas Wright and Joseph Grego, The Works of James Gillray, the Caricaturist; With the History of His Life and Times, p. 210