Chinese Whispers: Brighton Museum and Royal Pavilion

Chinoiserie has long provided a backdrop for women behaving badly across the centuries. The American silent-film star and sex symbol Clara Bow created a Chinese room in her home that was a symbol of her own exciting immorality - decorated in red, black and gold lacquer, Chinese carpets and a lacquered Buddha she described it as a "loving room, not living room".

Love is a theme of Chinese Whispers: Chinoiserie in Britain 1650-1930 at Brighton Museum and Royal Pavilion. Early on in the show you find a silver box given by Charles II to his mistress Nell Gwynne in 1670. An opulent love token, designed to catch the eye. A new craze was born.

Merchants returning from China brought with them silk, porcelain, tea and lacquer, visitors learn at the start of the exhibition. These exotic objects captured the imagination of English craftsmen who were only too happy to supply their own overheated versions to wealthy and fashionable women (and their dandified beaux).

Contemporary commentators associated the purchase of Chinese porcelain with rapacious and irrational women, even going so far as to suggest mental instability. John Gay wrote: "China's the passion of her soul/ A cup, a plate, a dish, a bowl/ Can kindle wishes in her breast/ Inflames her joy or breaks her rest" - a point well made by William Hogarth in his series Marriage à la Mode.

The series includes Tête à Tête, which is one of the many impressive loans to Chinese Whispers. In Hogarth's picture, Viscountess Squanderfield's taste for Chinese porcelain is equated with her failed marriage.

A tea service is laid out on the table in front of the wayward viscountess. Drinking tea - the ladies' amusement - provided the gentry and aspiring middle classes with an opportunity to show off their wealth and taste with glamorous imported wares.

A dazzling array of kettles, canisters, pots, bowls and saucers has been brought together in Brighton to illustrate the point - the functional showcases cleverly disguised by some sumptuous design. The colourful backdrops, with their Chinese motifs, avoid overwhelming these domestic objects and work rather well.

The same cannot be said for the interpretation, which is rather underwhelming. The labels are technical and at times a struggle to read in the low-lit spaces. The flatness is at odds with the fancy objects on show.

Each of the three galleries is a set piece: the first, based on designs copied from Stalker and Parker's Treatise of Japaning and Varnishing, creates the impression of a lacquer box. Setting the scene is a pair of lacquer doors from the Royal Pavilion saloon.

Beyond, is a light, feminine space that Thomas Chippendale would have approved of. He suggested that his fret-back chairs would be "very proper for a lady's dressing room; especially if hung with Chinese wallpaper". As well as examples of the chairs, there is his day bed commissioned by the 7th Earl of Wemyss and in the form of a Chinese garden pavilion.

Chippendale also supplied a suite of furniture to the actor David Garrick, whose wardrobe is here. Hoping to cash in on the vogue for chinoiserie, Garrick mounted the Chinese Festival in 1755, bringing the French ballet to London.

The lavish tastes of George IV are finally explored towards the end of the show. Visitors are encouraged to take advantage of a joint ticket to see the Royal Pavilion for themselves in all its fantastical glory.

Loans from the Royal Collection mean that several of George's commissions are currently back in their original settings, (albeit accompanied by some clunky labelling on easels alongside).

However, China was associated with the extravagant Prince Regent, lampooned as an obese voluptarian in cartoons. With his death in 1830, the mania for chinoiserie passed until the heady days of the 1920s when a new version of chinoiserie (along with japonisme) was once again the epitome of modernity.

Chinese dragons danced across the cushions, curtains and wallpapers of British drawing rooms, while highly fashionable and wealthy women such as Clementine Mitford draped themselves in couture decorated with familiar motifs such as butterflies, dragons and pagodas. Mitford's blonde beauty led to her being described as one of London's 10 most elegant women and she caught the eye of a young stormtrooper on a visit to 1930s' Berlin with her cousin Unity.

Her sequinned evening jacket is one of the last items in the show. It seems to sum it up - it is an elegant, visual treat for grown ups.

Caroline Worthington is the director of the Florence Nightingale Museum, London