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.
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.
