Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World review – a narrow view of beauty from a borderline stalker

<p><strong>National Portrait Gallery, London</strong> <br>The ‘King of Vogue’ was a desperate social climber and the world on view here seems constricted and parochial. Still, his backdrops are fabulous – usually more interesting than his subjects</p><p>At the entrance to the National Portrait Gallery’s new Cecil Beaton exhibition, there’s a wall-sized reproduction of a 1948 colour transparency, originally printed in Vogue. In it, eight coiffed white women wear elegant evening gowns by designer Charles James, chatting and preening in an 18th-century style French-panelled room. They engage only with each other, uninterested in the camera, looming larger-than-life above us. The effect on the viewer is of being excluded, unseen. This feeling only mounts as you proceed through Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World, a show that presents the photographer as a sharp-tongued socialite obsessed with high society, beauty – and himself.</p><p>Beaton’s first exhibition at the NPG was in 1968. It was then the first ever solo show by a photographer at a British museum. Sixteen surviving silver gelatin prints from it are presented in the show’s first room. They are lavish, theatrical portraits of brooding beauties with dark-painted lips, a swansong to the age of elegance.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/oct/08/cecil-beatons-fashionable-world-review-national-portrait-gallery-king-vogue">Continue reading...</a>