Parasols for 1795

James Gillray's etching shows two figures from behind, their bodies almost entirely consumed by the fashions of the moment: the woman's silhouette is a great puffed skirt topped with an explosive plume of feathers, the man beside her reduced to a stick figure dwarfed by an enormous circular hat. A tiny parasol dangles absurdly from her hand. Gillray's target is the lunacy of elite fashion—the bodies beneath the clothes have practically ceased to exist. The joke is pure proportion: humanity swallowed by artifice. This kind of print satire, sold cheaply from London shop windows, trained the eye to read exaggeration as meaning—the core visual grammar that would pass through illustrated newspapers, Daumier's lithographs, the German Bilderbogen, and eventually into the comic strip itself.