Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World: Fashion, Photography, and Personal Connection

18 January 2026, by Elise Maynard

In this week's blog post, Costume Society member Elise Maynard reviews the first major exhibition dedicated to Cecil Beaton's fashion photography at the National Portrait Gallery, featuring over 250 items spanning his career from the 1920s to 1964.

The National Portrait Gallery's Cecil Beaton's Fashionable World marks a significant moment in Beaton scholarship. Despite his status as one of the twentieth-century's most celebrated society photographers, capturing everyone from Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn to Queen Elizabeth II, this is remarkably the first major exhibition focused exclusively on his fashion photography. While previous retrospectives covered his broad career, this exhibition, curated by photographic historian Robin Muir, concentrates on the 250 works (249 of them vintage prints) that defined his pioneering contribution to fashion photography from 1927 to 1955, and concluding with My Fair Lady.

Cecil Beaton's Fashionable World offers a rare opportunity to examine Beaton's practice in depth. As Victoria Siddall, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, reflects: “The National Portrait Gallery has a long and distinguished history with Cecil Beaton. His work was the subject of the NPG's first dedicated photography exhibition in 1968, made in collaboration with Beaton himself, as well as being the first solo survey accorded any living photographer in any national museum in Britain.” For those interested in mid-twentieth-century fashion, British society photography, or the intersection of costume design and photography, this exhibition provides valuable insights into one of the period's most influential visual practitioners.

"It's Beaton's Fashionable World, so it's focusing on his fashion… it brings in the fashionable Haute Monde and Demimonde that came within his orbit. It's about the beautiful people in a way," Muir explains in a recent interview with Carrie Kania and Charles Moriarty. 

The exhibition arrives at a moment when Beaton's aesthetics of societal glamour adorned in dramatic fashions, has renewed cultural currency, visible across contemporary culture from Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things (2023) to Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein (2025). Still it equally highlights the humanity within the fashion, placing war photography alongside glamorous stars.

Sir Cecil Beaton (1904 - 1980) established himself as a society photographer in 1926, securing a contract with Vogue at just 23 and later becoming court photographer to the British royal family in 1937. He became known for his theatrical photographs featuring society models and dramatic portraits of high fashion.

From the moment you enter the gallery, the exhibition evokes a grand English stately home atmosphere. Images are expanded across gallery walls within the National Portrait Gallery's prestigious architecture, grand, dramatic, and larger than life. The exhibition is organized into 13 chronological yet thematic sections tracing different stages of Beaton's career, from ‘Boy Wonder’ to 'The Gleam of an Eye' (focusing on his war photography), culminating in 'The Glittering Prize' featuring his My Fair Lady triumph.

What distinguishes this exhibition is Muir's emphasis on relationship and process. Rather than presenting Beaton's photographs as autonomous artworks, the curation reveals the personal networks, correspondence, and creative decisions behind each image. 

Muir's commitment to showing vintage prints, the actual photographs Beaton made and handled, reflects this philosophy. "There's no substitute for working with vintage prints, to actually hold the thing creased, scored, the pattern of age on it... This is the one they made for the magazine, and it's the way they wanted to print it."

Throughout the exhibition, Beaton's handwritten diaries, personal letters, and correspondence appear alongside photographs. These inclusions shift focus to the collaborative, deeply personal nature of his practice, grounding each photograph in specific social and material contexts.

For costume historians, this approach proves particularly revealing. The archival materials offer insight into how fashion knowledge circulated through personal networks and how sartorial choices were negotiated between photographer, sitter, and publication. 

Muir articulates Beaton's fundamental approach: "If Beaton was to photograph you and I… he would want us to look our very, very, very best. That's all he wanted, is for us to sing out at this moment... It's about how beautiful I can make you look at this moment and that you'll have it forever."

The exhibition's curation enhances close reading of dress through clever display. Several photographs appear twice: once as small original gelatine silver prints and again enlarged on adjacent walls. This dual presentation allows visitors to appreciate both original print quality and intricate costume details visible at scale, such as the portrait of Mrs Carl Bendrix wearing a costume designed in collaboration by Beaton and Oliver Messel for the Galaxy Ball.

A particular highlight is the section on Beaton's war photography. Hired by the British Ministry of Information during the war, Beaton considered this his most important work. The section features his photograph of Eileen Dunne, a three-year-old casualty of the London Blitz, which appeared on covers of both Illustrated London News and Life magazine, helping shift American public opinion toward intervention. 

Muir has also included Beaton's photographs of everyday servicemen and women. "He turns these people who are heroes into real heroes. You really get a sense of what they've done and what they stand for and how noble they are… he gives these ordinary people a sort of heroic beauty." This heroic quality becomes more prominent through their placement alongside the starlets of Beaton's oeuvre, revealing the consistency of his vision across subjects.

Another highlight demonstrates the convergence of Beaton's multiple practices: the rarely exhibited Eliza Doolittle costume from My Fair Lady, displayed alongside Beaton's Oscar, preparatory sketches, and photographs of Audrey Hepburn modelling each costume for the film.

This grouping presents costume design as an iterative, multimedia practice, revealing that Beaton photographed and viewed all costumes through a camera before use. The dress from the original 1958 West End production, displayed from both front and side, allows viewers to examin its materiality while marking a pivotal stage in the evolution of Beaton’s practice.

Throughout the exhibition, original artworks hang beside Beaton's photographs, contextualizing his visual references. The variety of materials, from original prints to magazine spreads, costume sketches to the Oscar statuette, gives visitors a comprehensive sense of Beaton's creative range.

Muir's curatorial vision extends beyond documentation to offer respite. He hopes visitors will "step away thinking, actually, you know what, sometimes it's just a great thing to step inside a completely artificial world of flowers, of beauty, of just immaculate photography where everybody is trying their best to look fantastic... We, at the moment are bombarded with imagery of a sort that makes us sad, upset, horrified. This exhibition, I promise you, will not make you sad, upset, or horrified. You hopefully will exalt in this extraordinary man at his genius for making people look, well, the best they ever could."

The exhibition ran through 11 January 2026 at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Sponsored by the Bern Schwartz Family Foundation.

Elise recently visited the Fashion and Textile museum, from which you can catch up on her review of their current exhibition 'Costume Couture: Sixty Years of Cosprop' on our blog.