London Fall Journeys add this exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery to your diary… Renowned as a fashion illustrator, Oscar-winning costume designer, social caricaturist and writer, Cecil Beaton – ‘The King of Vogue’ – was an extraordinary force in the 20th-century British and American creative scenes. Elevating fashion and portrait photography into an art form, his era-defining photographs captured beauty, glamour, and star power in the interwar and early post-war eras. 

Cecil Beaton was a self-creation. Through the art of photography he rose to become one of the great photographers and observers of the 20th century. He also designed costumes and sets for stage, screen, opera and ballet; was a wicked diarist and gossip; became an arbiter of taste and moved easily between many varied worlds. As such he captured the passing moment and portrayed the great figures of the age in photographic and pen portraits

No previous exhibition has exclusively spotlighted his ground-breaking fashion work, a pivotal aspect of his career that laid the foundation for his later successes. With this in mind, Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World will showcase Beaton at his most triumphant – from the Jazz Age and the Bright Young Things to the high fashion brilliance of the fifties and the glittering, Oscar-winning success of My Fair Lady. In between, he endured the hardship of war as a photographer of the home front and of the Western Desert campaign and further beyond. From 1939 as a royal photographer, by appointment to the House of Windsor, he propelled the monarchy into the modern age.

National Portrait Gallery London 9 October 2025 – 11 January 2026