YOU could be forgiven for thinking that exaggerating high fashion to the point where it becomes impractical, even unwearable, is a modern phenomenon remember Naomi Campbell's famous catwalk stumble on her enormous platform shoes?

But in fact, not much has changed since the late 18th Century.

Followers of Fashion: Graphic Satires from the Georgian Period, is a major new national touring exhibition from the collections of the British Museum and the Hayward Gallery in London. The hand-coloured etchings and mezzotints view the outrageous and often downright ridiculous world of high fashion as seen through the eyes of some of the leading satirical artists of the period. Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray and Richard Newton are all represented. Lucy Whetstone, curator of the Hatton Gallery at Newcastle University, where the exhibition opened at the weekend, says: "In the same way that the catwalk creations found on the pages of glossy magazines show the extremes of fashion so, in an age before there was fashion photography, cartoonists would satirise the fashions of the day. Trends in women's fashions in particular gigantic hats, towering wigs, huge bustles that made it impossible to sit down were extremes in exactly the same way as Vivienne Westwood's fantastic creations."

But in the late 1700s, it wasn't only women's fashions that fed the imagination of the satirists. Fashionable men came in for their fair share of ridicule too, from the "macaronies" of the 1770s young city fops whose ornate, effeminate mode of dress was inspired by the continental courts to the "buxom dandies" of the early 19th Century with their flamboyant extremes of pre-Victorian dress and manners.

Lucy says: "Although these images show fashion in extremes, they also allow us an insight into how fashion was perceived in terms of morality. The widely-held opinion was that "high fashion equals low morals", as though a desire to follow the fashion in some way lured an individual away from a more wholesome lifestyle."

At a time when fashion plates and magazines were beginning to promote style-consciousness and good taste, caricatures like those in the exhibition provided an ironic contrast.

The works also caricature the social importance of fashion and point to the way in which the fashion-conscious use the way they dress as a tool to project a particular image of themselves, or to convey a message about who and what they are.

Followers of Fashion has been organised by the Hayward Gallery in collaboration with the British Museum, and is curated by Diana Donald, Professor of the History of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University and author of The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III.

The prints are mainly caricatures of fashion, dating from the 1770s to the 1820s, by well-known artists as well as a number of amateur and anonymous draughtsmen. The exhibition also includes some contemporary drawings by cartoonist Posy Simmonds, and examples of fashion plates, portraits and crowd scenes which further illustrate the fashion phenomenon.

* Followers of Fashion runs until Saturday, March 10. Opening hours are Monday to Friday 10am to 5.30pm; Saturday 10am to 4.30pm. Admission is free. The gallery is also hosting a series of free events during the exhibition. For further details contact the Hatton Gallery on 0191 222 6059