Viewing Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World at National Portrait Gallery

The late great and celebrated Cecil Beaton returns to the National Portrait Gallery, with this dazzling exhibition focusing on his fashion imagery, spanning 1927 to 1956. It’s curated by Robin Muir, who also curated the last Beaton show at the National Portrait Gallery in 2020, cut short by the pandemic.

Beaton was influenced by both Edwardian pictorialism and Surrealism, and was drawn to the aristocracy and high society life – his subjects included royalty, as well as society’s most prominent and beautiful characters, who he captured with his unique, dazzling vision. This exhibition brings together more than 200 works from across the years of the rich and the fabulous, presented with Beaton’s self-portraits, books, sketches and diaries.

The “King of Vogue” photographed for the magazine for fifty years, producing some of the magazine’s most influential editorials and popular covers, and making Beaton a tastemaker. His images were always a touch fantastical, a little flamboyant and unabashedly beautiful. As the photographer – who died in 1980, aged 76 – himself proclaimed: “All I want is the best of everything and there’s very little of that left.”