When she appeared, every eye was turned to her; when absent, she was the subject of universal conversation.” I was reminded of that description as the crowds converged on the Victoria & Albert Museum for Kylie: The Exhibition, and Kylie Minogue herself appeared in purple silk and diamonds, and a nation gathered in reverent adoration around a tiny pair of gold lurex hotpants.

The description, however, was not applied to Kylie, but to an 18th-century predecessor, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, another woman with whom the British public conducted a long and passionate love affair. For Kylie’s story of fame is a peculiarly British one. We like to imagine that celebrity on this scale is a modern phenomenon, but it is not. It is a story compounded of glamour, failed romance, personal adversity and lots of pretty frocks, and it is one repeated, with only minor variations, in our history: by Georgiana, by Diana, Princess of Wales, and now by Kylie Minogue.

Georgiana came to public prominence in 1774 as the willowy, wealthy wife of an English duke; Kylie came to our attention in 1986 as the tiny car mechanic Charlene in Neighbours, the Australian soap opera. Kylie is applauded for the shape of her backside; Georgiana was celebrated for the shape of her bouffant coiffure, which extended three feet from the top of her head and was decorated with all manner of ornaments including, once, a model ship under full sail.

Georgiana and Kylie, a grand Georgian aristocrat and a chirpy Australian pop star, may seem creatures from different planets, yet in their effect on public taste, and above all in the adoration they evoked from the public, they are remarkably similar.

The Duchess of Devonshire (wonderfully evoked in Amanda Foreman’s 1998 biography) was probably our first celebrity fashion icon. She was admired, copied and gossiped over by an almost limitless fan base: her clothes, her hair, her voice were scrutinised and adopted by women, and drooled over by men. As one of her contemporaries observed: “The slaves of fashion, rather than not resemble her in something, would gnaw their fans and imitate tricks, stick out their chins and effect to be short-breathed.”

If our endless interest in the shape of Kylie’s body seems a leering modern phenomenon, then it is worth recalling an article in the Morning Post from 1776 which held a competition to award points out of 20 for aspects of Georgiana’s anatomy.

Images of Georgiana (she was painted more than any other 18th-century woman) were used as marketing tools, just as Kylie’s image is used to sell music, clothes and newspapers. The Victorians were just as smitten as the Duchess’s contemporaries: her face and feathered hat adorned biscuit tins, china, cigarette cards, chocolate boxes and marble busts. Some fans became obsessive, then as now: the Victorian master-criminal Adam Worth stole the famous Gainsborough portrait of Georgiana, and kept it for a quarter-century in a false-bottomed trunk in a manner no different from an extreme celebrity-worshipper today.

All ages have their pin-ups, but Georgiana, Diana and Kylie have achieved a level of fame that suggests a more profound cultural significance. The public has identified with all three in a way that goes beyond mere looks, let alone talent. Indeed, part of the attraction lies in their failings: no one ever accused Kylie of being a great singer or actress; Diana was painfully shy and gauche; Georgiana was highly intelligent, but often hopelessly drunk, and addicted to gambling.

It is their strikingly similar story, finally, that appeals more than mere beauty. All three were unlucky in love, living lives in which nothing remained private for long, and the whiff of scandal and gossip never went away. Georgiana was cruelly treated by her husband, the Duke, who wanted an heir, not a partner; a similar pain suffused Diana’s overcrowded marriage; and now Kylie has been rather publicly dumped by her cheating French boyfriend. Where Diana struggled with bulimia, Georgiana also suffered eating disorders and endured with great fortitude the illness that killed her at 48. Similarly, Kylie’s courageous public battle with cancer has ensured her pop deification. All three bore misfortune steadfastly, at least in public.

For a supposedly unemotional people, the British have an extraordinary emotional attachment to this story, however familiar or even clichéd it may seem: a beautiful woman, wronged and suffering, that other women relate to and men aspire to. This is what makes Kylie culturally important: not the shape of her hotpants but her place in a long historical relationship between the British and their female idols.

Despite high-minded complaints that the V&A is no place to display the tawdry trapping of pop stardom, some 4,000 tickets were sold before the show even opened. Our fascination with Kylie is not some artificial modern construct, but part of a very British culture of celebrity stretching back at least 200 years. Like all the best exhibitions, this one says as much about us as it does about its subject.

Certainly, the cult of Kylie is joyfully, tastelessly over the top, but that, too, is part of the British way of adoration. Georgiana’s admirers could outdo even the most slavering tabloid paean to Kylie. Here is a particularly ghastly example of Georgiana worship from 1801, an appeal to Time to preserve her looks:

Hurt not the form that all admire
Oh never with white hairs her temple sprinkle
Oh, sacred be her cheek, her lip, her bloom,
And do not, in a lovely dimple’s room,
Place a hard mortifying wrinkle.

I rededicate this little gem to Kylie.

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