THEHis point of view on style went through scandals and wars without being affectedwith grace and irony, as demonstrated by the shots exhibited once again at the National Portrait Gallery in London in Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable Worlduntil January 11, 2026. Another milestone for the first exhibition dedicated only to Beaton’s view on fashion, interpreted in over 200 objects including photos, letters, sketches, illustrations and costumes. «A camera will never be invented that can capture or understand everything he actually sees» wrote Truman Capote in 1968 of a photographer who, that very year, had conquered the National Portrait Gallery in London with the exhibition Beaton Portraits: for the first time, a British national museum dedicated a monographic retrospective to a living photographer.
At the time, Cecil Beaton, born 1904had already immortalized the beautiful world loved (and envied) by the great novelist, crowned heads and Hollywood stars, creating a brand of surrealist elegance that would remain indelible in fashion photography and which would also win in cinema, with three Oscars for costumes and set design.
Cecil Beaton: The Birth of a Star, on display
«It is impossible to separate Beaton’s fashion photography from his eclectic figure: debuted from Vogue in 1927 at just 23 years old, becoming the magazine’s main collaborator with splendid shots but also drawings and caricatures, observations on the life of high society and contemporary customs. He was a unique figure” explains Robin Muir, curator of the exhibition and photography historian. The ambition of that creative polymath? As he himself admitted, leaving the anonymity of a bourgeois, respectable and ordinary family. He did this in many ways, «…one of which was the pleasure I took in surprising – or even scandalizing – people, thanks to the inimitable way in which I adorned myself» he said.
Son of a merchant, raised in a wealthy London neighborhood, from an early age Cecil was attracted by the glamor of his mother and aunt. The first shots of theater and fashion stars, published in magazines, fascinated him: during his studies he developed a strong passion for photography, thanks to the first camera he received at the age of 11. Strengthened by an innate esthete nature, he quickly climbed the golden stairs of good society, with a charm that would lead him to gain fame from a young age. Among his high school classmates he would meet the writer George Orwell and Charles James, a stylist who he would later influence Christian Dior.
Costume designer by vocation
His first models were his mother and sisters. Almost entirely self-taught, with a very elegant look, Beaton soon understood that the skillful use of props would mask his technical shortcomings: fabrics, crumpled cellophane, mirrors, flower vases and figures created with his hand in front of the camera transformed women into goddesses. He didn’t think photography would be his career, imagining himself more as a costume and set designer (an activity which later, in Cambridge, completely absorbed him).
«It was a thought due to the role that photography occupied in the collective imagination and in the artistic world: it was not considered an activity for collectors or even an art form» underlines Muir. «Beaton did not believe that his portraits would be recognized as art. But he realized the role he had played in advancing the discipline. Later he told colleagues like David Bailey that, perhaps, thanks to him, photographers no longer had to enter “through the service entrance”, but “through the main door”.
“Best Invitation of the Season”: model Nina de Voe in a Balmain dress in 1951 (The Condé Nast Archive, New York).
A brilliant young man
At Cambridge, his time was occupied with building a career, the pursuit of the beautiful and the eccentric. «It was wonderful, new doors opened before me, a world I didn’t know. The idea that one could dedicate one’s life to aesthetics fascinated me. It was fun,” he told her BBC in 1962. He returned from university without a degree: secretly, he had already sent his shots to the first editorial offices. Upon returning to London he began to frequent Bright Young Things“brilliant young people”, a current of style and thought.
In the 1920s these children of the aristocracy and the middle class rejected the memories of the Great War, resisting with excesses, disguises and promiscuity that scandalized (and delighted) the press of the time. With them Cecil juggled films and living rooms with such skill that he reached the most high-class houses. His cute mischievousness even led Jean Cocteau to nickname him “Malice in Wonderland”.
Photographer, illustrator and costume designer Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) posing in his studio in 1935 (The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive).
Cecil Beaton photographer, workmanlike look
With an unprecedented cocktail of Edwardian aesthetics and surrealism, he experimented with his photographic style on “bright young people” with original scenes and costumes. TO British Vogue he arrived in the year in which the shots of high-ranking young people in revolutionary settings consecrated him, in an exhibition, among fashion photographers, with a pinch of austerity inspired by the modernism of a great photographer of the time, Edward Steichen. Meanwhile, in his diaries he wrote: «I don’t want people to know me for who I am, but for how I try to be».
“At the Tuxedo Ball”: wealthy debutante Nancy Harris, 1946 (The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive).
The time came to try my luck in America. He arrived in New York in 1928: if Elsie de Wolfe, godmother of high society, offered Beaton an exhibition in her gallery, Mr. Condé Nast asked him to photograph his daughter in his home on Park Avenue. In a short time he already had a contract for American Vogue. His portraits of the most famous socialites became very famouswas sent to Hollywood for numerous shoots and in 1937 he was the only photographer invited to the wedding of former King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson in France, taking the official portraits after the private ceremony (without any members of the British royal family).
The following year everything collapsed: at the bottom of an illustration he placed an anti-Semitic word (it is not known whether out of spite against someone). Having identified it, the publishing house destroyed 130 thousand copies already printed. And Beaton, who had already apologized profusely, was fired. But all was not lost: upon returning to London, he was called to Buckingham Palace to photograph Queen Elizabeth with fictionalized shots that, it is said, changed public perception of the monarchy.
Princess (and future Queen) Elizabeth with the newborn Prince Charles, in 1948 (Photo by The Print Collector/Heritage Images via Getty Images).
The relationship with colleagues, from Man Ray to Irving Penn
What was the relationship with the other big names of the time? For Muir, Beaton was “the photographer among photographers”. Many created the portrait of this whimsical and very photogenic character: Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn.
The National Portrait Gallery holds over 350. “But strangely, he regarded his war work as the most significant. He learned a new way of working by shooting quickly, based on the environment. I included some of his war photos, anomalous in fashion, because he was able to instill in simple soldiers a heroic grace that none of them would have imagined they possessed” specifies the curator. Beaton’s new position was in fact that of war photographer for the Ministry of Information: he traveled to distant countries, portraying clashes even in India and Burma, creating a corpus of almost seven thousand photographs.
Elizabeth Taylor taken in 1955: despite her beauty, Beaton said he found her rather vulgar (The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive).
The arrival of color was complicated: shooting in black and white had always satisfied him. However, he learned new techniques and his sense of style made him very skilled. Not very inclined towards retouching, he told the BBC how, often, the camera could exasperate some defects: «I don’t love it but sometimes a natural image, even of a young and beautiful woman, can show unpleasant details that need to be corrected. It’s a sort of poetic cleansing.”
From the theater to the big screen
Although homosexual, it is said that his (almost obsessive) friendly relationship with the bisexual Greta Garbo had become something more when they started dating in the 1940s: he asked her to marry him, but in The Happy Yearsthe third volume of her diaries published in 1972, told too much about the diva’s intimate life. And the long friendship was broken.
Beaton in 1934 at Ashcombe House: his home from 1930 to 1945, he transformed it into a home of fantastic inspiration. It was a sensational meeting for his friends at the time (Photo by Hulton-Deutsch/Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis via Getty Images).
Naturally, My Fair Lady it represented Cecil’s greatest triumph: from his Broadway debut in 1956 starring Julie Andrews to the 1964 film with Audrey Hepburn, he established his name and his style. The costumes, inspired by memories of her Edwardian childhood (from her mother’s dresses to the theatrical divas on postcards) gracefully recreated a lost world. Beaton noted in his diary that the success exceeded all expectations. Despite tensions on set with director George Cukor, the film earned him two Oscars, for costumes and artistic direction.
With that work Beaton achieved artistic immortality. Eternal dandythe wide-brimmed hat was the only legacy of his extravagance because “…it has an Edwardian boldness. Its proportions compensate for the imperfections of my figure. And it hides the fact that I’m going bald!”. He died in 1980, when he had already started working again after his stroke in 1974. What Osbert Sitwell had previously written about him can be said: «The people of the next century will look at his portraits, when they want to rediscover the character of this one».