Fashion
archive: Cecil Beaton's testament of fashion
The Guardian, 28
September 1971: Fashion: An Anthology by Cecil Beaton opens at the
V&A
Alison Adburgham
Monday 22 September
2014 12.50 BST
No one but Cecil
Beaton could have cajoled so many beautiful dresses from so many
fashionable women, and in doing so confer upon their owners a sort of
immortality. That clothes one has worn should become a permanent
acquisition of the Victoria and Albert Museum is an exceptional way
of embalming the ego.
"Fashion: An
Anthology by Cecil Beaton" is the title of an exhibition which
opens at the V and A on October 13. It might be called Cecil Beaton's
testament of fashion, for professionally and socially he has been
involved with the beau monde and the haute chic for almost half a
century; and his emotional involvement with fashion goes back still
farther - to the time when as a small boy before the First World War
his imagination was enslaved by his fashionable Aunt Jessie, with her
trunk loads of frivolities from Paris. Recollections of Aunt Jessie
have inspired some of his costume designs for stage and films, in
particular for "My Fair Lady" and "Gigi."
As a portrait
photographer Cecil Beaton has done wonders for women, bestowing
mystery and magic upon fashionable faces, royal faces, theatrical
faces; bestowing romantic beauty upon the asymmetrical eccentricities
of the intelligentsia. One of his books, "The Glass of Fashion,"
contains the most wittily evocative descriptions of clothes as they
were worn, and the women who wore them, ever written in the English
language. And in the same book he refers to fashion as "'the
triumph of the ephemeral." For this V and A exhibition he has
caught past ephemera in his butterfly net, and catalogued it for all
time.
As its title
implies, the exhibition is his personal choice; but everything in it
will become part of the museum's permanent collection. Sir John
Pope-Hennessey, director of the V and A, stresses that it is a
criterion of the museum that everything in it must be a work of art,
and this criterion must apply to costume... "the museum shares
Mr Beaton's belief that style in dress is an art form, worthy to be
collected and displayed."
Stuck with it
And he is content
that Mr Beaton's exacting taste should decide what clothes should be
accepted. This shows great confidence in Mr Beaton as a connoisseur
of clothes - once the museum accepts something they are stuck with it
for ever. There is no legal way of getting rid of it. It does not
need of course, to be on display, but clothes take up a lot of
storage space.
Over the past 18
months Mr Beaton has followed clues from many countries, travelling
as far as Argentina in pursuit of a desirable garment. He arrived in
Chicago six weeks too late to acquire a collection of Worths; but an
exciting journey to Leeds captured a Queen Mary toque. He has
acquired a Dior dress from the Duchess of Windsor, a black dress so
constructed in the Dior nineteen-fifties manner that it stands up on
its own without the Duchess inside.
Yale University Press — Exhibiting Fashion: Before and After 1971
With the dramatic
increase in popularity of fashion exhibitions over the past decade,
we were commissioned by Yale University Press to design a book
looking at the evolution of the practice. Centred around the seminal
1971 Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition ‘Fashion: An Anthology
by Cecil Beaton’. The book includes a detailed account of the
exhibition, a comprehensive chronology of international fashion
exhibitions since 1971, and 28 different perspectives discussing the
working practices of exhibitions today.
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