Hot on the heels of September’s merry-go-round of Fashion Weeks, the National Portrait Gallery’s latest opening is another moment to reflect on what fashion and beauty mean to us today. A second outing in five years for the trailblazing 20th century photographer, Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World unfolds like a billowing ballgown; opulent and eye-catching, but it can’t help tripping over its long hem. The glittering charm, however, forgives its clumsiness.
Beaton’s previous outing at NPG in 2020 was cut short after only five days because of the pandemic. Rather than reviving Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things, this revamped exhibition presents him as more than just a photographer. Younger audiences are likely to find this show more relatable, through its emphasis on his contributions to costume and set design, given their ascendant roles in contemporary fashion. From curious beginnings to his rise through the cultural upper-class, his war photography and costume designs for My Fair Lady, we get a good look at how places and periods influenced Beaton’s style.
If anything, this show is about how big Beaton’s prop and costume chest is. Elaborately grandiose outfits screaming over intricate backgrounds made his early shots look like stills from the kind of plays Aristophanes would’ve put on during his day. Flirting with the avant-garde in Paris, Beaton’s staging and costumes turn weird and uncanny. Even during the war there’s a bold expressionism to his framing that only intensifies once Hollywood’s projectors start flickering.
There’s a bold expressionism to his framing that only intensifies once Hollywood’s projectors start flickering
Breathing the rarified air of a very very narrow slice of society, at no point does the decadence in his work falter. Whether it’s planetary dresses created for high society’s 1929 ‘Galaxy Ball’, frocks of shimmering white and gold, or gowns fit for a monarch, his lens captures the luxury of the age right from the epicentre. Rubbing shoulders with and photographing cultural elites like Bacon, Dali, Lucian Freud, and the Sitwells opened up a world of stylistic hedonism which suited him nicely.
Despite occupying a privileged world inaccessible to most, his mark on wider visual culture is undeniable. By over 30 years, he pre-dates the loud, psychedelic pattern mismatching of the 1960s with his portraits of Princess Emeline De Broglie. Polka dots, stripes, stars, and floral backgrounds explode around his sitters. His Vogue front covers from the late 40’s serve as the model for today’s haughty sophistication by making the staged look candid.
Sumptuous as it is, the exhibition isn’t without its faults. Beaton found colour photography tricky to work with, so the show is overwhelmingly monochrome. The absence of colour in his black/white shots is fulfilled by a rich palate of textures that play with the light in different ways, but even so, it starts to get a touch too samey by the end; with the vivid costume sketches interspersed amongst all the grey providing a welcome distraction.
And it loses its way slightly at the end. You’re pulled to the end of the exhibition through three squared arches that line up with this carnivalesque portrait of Audrey Hepburn in front of some hypnotic squares. Once you’re here, supposedly the pinnacle of Beaton’s career when he won an Academy Award for Costume Design on My Fair Lady; where to then? It feels all too abrupt.
Still, it will definitely leave you feeling very chic by association. It’s a manifesto for maximalism that asks, ‘Who the hell says you can’t wear those things together? Do what elevates you!’
