The English painter and printmaker Thomas Gainsborough, one of Britain’s most prominent 18th-century artists, understood that his task was not merely to depict his subjects as fashionable, but as people of fashion. In the painting Mary, Countess Howe (c. 1764), the aristocrat wears a luminous blush-satin gown overlaid with white lace, accessorized with a pearl choker and a wide-brimmed straw hat. Her direct gaze engages the viewer. These Georgian fashions are the focus of the Frick’s new Gainsborough show. “This exhibition necessarily deals with clothing and personal attire, while exploring how fashion was understood in Gainsborough’s time,” says the curator Aimee Ng, “how it touched every level of society, and how portraiture itself was as much a construction and invention as a sitter’s style.” —Elena Clavarino