“If you wish to attempt any definition of me as a photographer, you might say that I am a photographer of the fantastic.”
– Cecil Beaton
Audrey Hepburn in costume for My Fair Lady, 1963 – by Cecil Beaton
Triple Oscar-winning costumer designer and fashion photographer Sir Cecil Beaton (1904 – 1980) launched his career as a society photographer in 1926 with an exhibition in London that secured him a contract with Vogue magazine, where he worked for the next 30 years, . The man for whom fashion was “‘the triumph of the ephemeral” assumed the title ‘King of Vogue’.
His blend of stagey Edwardian portraiture, European surrealism and American modernism, fed his essentially English sensibility. In 1937 the once middle-class suburban schoolboy became court photographer to theBritish Royal Family and turned his flattering gaze to styling the extravagant world of the Bright Young Things.
He worked as a successful set and costume designer for stage and film productions, most notably My Fair Lady (1956) and Gigi (1958).
The Second Age of Beauty is Glamour (suit by Hartnell), 1946
Painters’ Print (dresses by Eta Hentz, Nettie Rosenstein and Sophie of Saks Fifth Avenue), 1947
‘Best Invitation of the Season’, Nina de Voe in Ballgown by Balmain, 1951
The Value of Unclutter (dress by Henry Rosenfeld), 1947
“I don’t want people to know me as I really am. “but as I am trying and pretending to be.”
– Cecil Beaton
Worldly Colour (Charles James evening dresses), 1948
Princess Emeline de Broglie, 1928
Princess Natalia Pavlovna Paley, 1935. Beaton: “Her eyes are star bright and her laughter tinkles like a mountain stream over pebbles”’
In his novel Vile Bodies (1930), English writer Evelyn Waugh satirised these Bright Young Things:
“Miss Mouse (in a very enterprising frock by Chéruit) sat on a chair with her eyes popping out of her head… She never could get used to so much excitement, never… It was too thrilling to see all that dull money her father had amassed, metamorphosed in this way into so much glitter and noise and so many bored young faces.”
Beaton as King Cnut.
Audrey Hepburn in costume for My Fair Lady, 1963
Fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, 1935
Gwili Andre, 1932
Elizabeth Taylor at the Dorchester Hotel, London, 1955
Marilyn Monroe, Venus Unmasked at the Ambassador Hotel, New York, 1956
Cecil Beaton working on My Fair Lady, 1963
Gary Cooper, 1929
Salvador and Gala Dalí, 1936
Cecil Beaton, c.1935
Self-portrait as King Cnut, circa 1915, London
Aircraft Recognition Room 1941
Lucian Freud, 1948
Francis Bacon, 1951
See more at Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World at the National Portrait Gallery from 9 October until 11 January.
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