The Origins of the Fashion Blockbuster Exhibition

Today the blockbuster fashion exhibition – comprising awe-inspiring apparel set within a spectacular installation - has become a hugely popular cultural mainstay. It can be traced back to Diana Vreeland’s tenure at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York and, slightly earlier, to one exhibition called Fashion: An Anthology by Cecil Beaton staged at London’s V&A in 1971. My colleague exhibition-maker Judith Clark and I have researched this show for over twenty years. In 2015, our book Exhibiting Fashion: Before and After 1971 was published by Yale University Press and we continue to explore strategies to variously capture it. Although I never saw this exhibition, it is the exemplar against which I evaluate all others.

In 1971, fashion held a very lowly status in the V&A’s hierarchy of objects. Contemporary objects - defined as less than 50 years old – were not collected and the collection policy was unashamedly elitist. It would take the full force of British photographer Cecil Beaton to ring in the changes! Fashion: An Anthology by Cecil Beaton was modern, enchanting and dynamic; it was multi-sensorial (different designer fragrances were sprayed into the spaces twice daily and there was a sound track) and incorporated movement (some mannequins rotated).

From 1969 Beaton corralled, from the world’s most stylish clients and top designers, with whom he was on first name terms, a huge collection of the twentieth century’s most iconic fashion items for the museum. At the suggestion of Michael Haynes, the Regent Street display artist who was brought in to design the show. Beaton also raided the rails of nearby boutiques including Biba, Foale & Tuffin and Mr Freedom. It would have previously been unthinkable for the museum to acquire, let alone display, ready-made fashions that were simultaneously offered for sale.

Fashion: An Anthology by Cecil Beaton was arranged thematically (Royalty, English Contemporary, Space Age & Miscellaneous), chronologically (1920s, 1930s, 1950s), and by fashion designer (Schiaparelli and Surrealism in the 1930s, Balenciaga, Mainbocher, Dior, Givenchy). The intriguingly titled ‘Miscellaneous’ section permitted Beaton the conceit of placing centre stage in the front entrance the Ascot scene costume he designed for Audrey Hepburn to wear in the film My Fair Lady (1964). The exhibition was sited in the museum’s main Brompton Road entrance. Sunday Times journalist Ernestine Carter described Haynes design as a ‘Perspex Cathedral of Fashion’. The complex double-tiered structure was divided into different sections, each of which was given an entirely distinctive interior treatment.

The following images, taken as 35mm slides, provide a taste of the panoply that visitors experienced.