The V&A’s spectacular Design 1900-Now galleries reopen this week – here’s what to expect

The V&A is stuffed with a truly magnificent array of weird and wonderful things from centuries of human existence. Under one roof, you can find the sixteenth century Raphael Cartoons, Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, an Iranian carpet thought to be the oldest in the world, a Storm Trooper suit from the Star Wars movies, a diamond butterfly ring worn by Beyonce and... a Labubu. 

Yes, a Labubu. The freaky-looking plush toy that had Gen Z in a chokehold last year is one of the new exhibits at the V&A’s Design 1900-Now galleries, which are due to reopen to the public on Wednesday, February 18, following an upgrade. 

The Design galleries are spread across two rooms on the museum’s upper floor. Packed with 250 artefacts (60 of which are new additions), they cover six different themes: housing and living, crisis and conflict, consumption and identity, automation and labour, sustainability and subversion, and data and communication. 

All of the items on display invite visitors to interrogate ‘every element of the designed world’. There are very familiar everyday items like an iPhone, a tupperware from the 1960s, an office chair and an Ikea lamp, as well as more political and confronting designs such as a poster calling for ‘No More Racist Murders’ created after the death of the teenager Rohit Duggal in 1992, a ‘life medal’ given to people imprisoned for environmental action and fast fashion jeans like those made at the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh, which collapsed due to a structural failure and killed more than 1,000 people in 2013. 

Items are on display alongside plaques telling their often surprising back stories. For example, did you know that the baby monitor was invented in 1937 in response to the shocking Lindbergh baby kidnapping five years earlier? Or that plywood only became a popular commercial material when it was used to make splints to hold soldiers’ legs while in transit during WW2?

Other new additions to the collection include a reconstructed early YouTube watch page, a pocket prayer mat, Loop earplugs, Hydrostar pimple patches, and a Hamed Ouattara cabinet made from repurposed oil drum scraps.

At a preview of the upgraded rooms, Corinna Gardner, the V&A’s senior curator of design and digital, said: ‘The ambition of these galleries has always been to think that everybody who enters these spaces wakes up in the 21st century.

‘So how can we inform an understanding of today through the past? But also maybe think about a collective sense of what a future that we all might want can be, and the role design plays within that? It’s material things through which we navigate our place in the world.’

Elsewhere in the galleries, visitors can learn about the importance of  Edward Snowden’s laptop to British history, the origins of the burkhini, the Snake Island stamps that became a symbol of Ukraine’s resistance to Russia, what goes into designing a football shirt and how designers are creating more planet-friendly products. 

More from the V&A: The highly anticipated V&A East opens this spring – and tickets are now on sale. 

Plus: The 8 best museum exhibitions coming to London in 2026.  

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