How the King of Vogue modified the artwork of images endlessly

Few folks can lay declare to irrevocably altering the world of images like Cecil Beaton did. A real multi-hyphenate – an Oscar-winning costume and stage designer, illustrator, photographer and socialite – Beaton’s affect spanned journal, display and stage and likewise garnered a starry clientele, starting from Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn to the British Royal Family and Coco Chanel. In the mid-19^th century, anybody who was anybody wished to be photographed by Beaton – however why? “There is no skull beneath the skin with Beaton – he is not trying to make some sort of psychological statement about the real ‘you’,” explains Robin Muir, photographic historian and Vogue contributor. “It’s all about the surface. It’s about the joy of photography.”

Muir would know. Having spent years delving into the Beaton archives, Muir has curated the Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World exhibition which opens right now (9 October 2025) on the National Portrait Gallery (NPG). Slated as the primary retrospective to solely discover Beaton’s pioneering contributions to style images, he says: “It’s actually the primary present anyplace to give attention to the core of Beaton’s profession and the self-discipline that gave him his earlier success, and that’s style images and the years that discovered him at his very, perfect.

“A bit like Lee Miller or Lloyd Webber, people can’t get enough of their oeuvre, but these are [often] all-encompassing retrospectives providing a broad brushstroke outline of his various accomplishments: portraiture, fashion certainly, interiors, gardens, war photography, his service to the royal family, his trips to Hollywood. But this is the first time any show has focused on his fashion work and the fashionable people who came into his orbit.” 

It is just not NPG’s first foray into the world of Beaton. In reality, as Denise Vogelsang, director of audiences, reminds us, Beaton himself collaborated with the gallery in 1968. “It really was a groundbreaking moment in the history of the gallery,” she says. “It was the first NPG exhibition devoted to a photographer, the first time living sitters had been exhibited in an exhibition, the first show to exhibit non-British sitters, and the first solo survey accorded any living photographer in any national museum in Britain. It’s very exciting and fitting to see Beaton’s portraits on our walls once more.”

So, what’s new? This present exhibition spotlights his contribution to the evolution of style images, which is usually highlighted, however not often examined intimately, and the way his signature creative model – a wedding of Edwardian stage glamour and the class of a brand new age – revitalised and revolutionised the sport. Muir says: “The exhibition is from 1927 to 1956; in 1927, 23-year-old Cecil had come down from Cambridge without his degree and he’s been working in a very dispiriting office job in the city. When by luck, charm and sheer hard work, suddenly almost overnight, he becomes the star photographer at Vogue.” 

His lifelong ambition of working for Vogue, nonetheless, stems from childhood. Born in 1904 in Hampstead, London, Beaton first acquired maintain of a digicam on the tender age of 12. “When he began taking photographs with a Box Brownie it was those closest to hand who became his first models, chiefly his very handsome – and endlessly patient – sisters, Nancy and Baba,” explains Muir. “He dresses them up and portrays them against increasingly exotic, homespun backdrops. He would often reference an early childhood memory as his introduction to both the allure of feminine beauty and the means by which to capture it.”

Peppered all through the exhibition are photos of his sisters, but in addition his mom Esther ‘Etty’ Beaton. She typically posed for her son – though Beaton as soon as stated “she strongly objected in the middle of a busy morning, to being made to put on a full evening dress” – throughout which he solid her because the Madonna, The Virgin Mary, as he later did with the likes of Lady Lavery and Lady Diana Cooper too. 

Atypical of the time, although, Beaton additionally made himself the topic of his pictures. Acquiring a 10-second timed shutter launch for his digicam kickstarted a lifelong follow of self-portraits, which means he may additionally declare to be the inventor of the ‘selfie’. Often lauded because the world’s most photographed photographer, NPG alone has 360 portraits of Beaton, who typically donned a girl’s wardrobe or historic uniform when in entrance of the lens. Beaton wrote in his diary as a schoolboy: “I don’t want people to know me as I am, but as I am trying and pretending to be” – and, in the end, it was this experimentation with identification that underpinned his multi-faceted life. 

Having studied artwork, historical past and structure at Cambridge University – however finally leaving and not using a diploma in 1925 – he spent a lot of his twenties poring over Vogue. “He dreamt of Vogue. This is the man who once declared ‘when I die I want to go to Vogue’. After years of lobbying the magazine, his first picture was published there in spring 1924. Within three years he was hired by the magazine to make drawings and caricatures as well as photographs and, shortly after that, he was their chief portrait and fashion photographer.” 

Muir says Beaton’s turning level got here when he befriended a few of London’s social elite. “Meeting Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, the main avant-gardists of literary London in 1926, who took him beneath their wing. After coming down from Cambridge, Beaton was not sure about what to do subsequent, the place to take his images or certainly if images would work for him in any respect. 

“Confiding this to a friend, Kyrle Leng, Leng said prophetically: ‘I would not bother too much about being anything in particular, just become a friend of the Sitwells and wait and see what happens.’ And this is exactly what happens: the three Sitwell siblings, the great polemicists of the time, become his earliest patrons and give him an entrée into a world he has only been able to observe from the sidelines.”

Soon, Beaton’s clientele expanded and he turned synonymous with the Bright Young Things of the Twenties and 30s, capturing their aptitude for theatrics and costume. Impressed by his creative use of backdrops and pose, Vogue signed him in 1927: a job that took him to Hollywood and Paris and noticed him {photograph} Elizabeth Taylor, Fred Astaire, Francis Bacon and, inevitably, Julie Andrews and Audrey Hepburn. Muir provides: “The great thing about Beaton, especially when he started out, was that he was interested less in what his sitters were wearing but what they brought to the picture. Whoever ranged into his viewfinder, he wanted them to look the best they could possibly look at that moment. This could be achieved with what we might now call “styling’ but to him it was more about mood and ambience, the backdrop.”

Beaton’s first royal pictures appeared in 1939, when he was summoned to Buckingham Palace to take pictures of Queen Elizabeth, spouse of the then reigning monarch George VI. Given he was the official marriage ceremony photographer for the abdicated Duke of Windsor and the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson in 1937, Beaton was deemed a daring alternative. But his work put the royal household in a brand new mild, capturing the Queen after which her daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret, as a contemporary, fashion-forward household. 

“Though he professed technical incompetence, he used an amateur’s camera during his early years with Vogue and with extraordinary results,” says Muir. “In London, I would say he single-handedly turned fashion photography, if not into an art form then into something approaching art. And doing that while also being a remarkable polymath – he could turn his hand to almost anything, and was a man of varied and outstanding talents.” 

However, it’s no secret that Beaton may very well be a troublesome man to work with, commonly quarrelling with editors at Vogue and somebody who wrote “venomous” diary entries about even his closest associates. His ties with American Vogue have been abruptly severed in 1938 when an anti-semitic comment was printed in considered one of his cartoons. Later, in 1955, British Vogue additionally declined to resume his contract after a slew of poorly-received tales and tasks. 

As the Second World War loomed, nonetheless, he was appointed an official warfare photographer by the Ministry of Information and his wartime service took him across the globe. This a part of his portfolio is the place many consider he’s most expert. “His documentary work on the realities of conflict and its aftermath, revealed him as a photographer of great compassion. As a lifelong cultural and social commentator his observations on taste, decoration and stylish living were eloquent; as a diarist he was often devastatingly forthright; as caricaturist his drawings were razor-sharp; and as an essayist he was witty and fluent on a range of subjects.”

The warfare’s finish ushered in a brand new period of class and Beaton captured the excessive style brilliance of the Fifties in wonderful technicolour, paving the best way for what many deem to be his biggest achievement: the costumes and units for the musical My Fair Lady, on stage and afterward display. “[The exhibition] ends in 1956 when, having been let go by Vogue on both sides of the Atlantic, Beaton turns his attention back to his first love: designing for the stage,” says Muir. 

“He’s invited to create the costumes for a stage musical based mostly on what he considers relatively ‘unpromising material’ – George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. That, in fact, turns into My Fair Lady which ran for practically 3,000 performances on Broadway and, when it opened in London in Drury Lane in 1958, it was the most costly musical ever staged within the capital. 

“When the film was suggested in 1963, where famously Julie Andrews loses the part of Eliza Doolittle to Audrey Hepburn, there’s little doubt about who will do the costumes and this time the set too.” However, Beaton discovered it an sad filming expertise. One of his Oscars is displayed within the NPG exhibition, but it surely’s famous that he famously didn’t accumulate them on stage. Hepburn wrote to Beaton in 1965: “I wish you could have heard the applause.”

Now 45 years on from his demise, Beaton’s work continues to encourage the world of style and his enduring affect might be felt amongst artists in every single place; living proof, NPG have simply launched a Beaton-inspired fashion collection with artist Luke Edward Hall, who has collaborated with Harriet Anstruther for corsages and Amelia Graham for silk scarves. 

After meticulously researching Beaton’s each chapter, Muir says that regardless of his achievements, self-doubt by no means left him. “Among all this, it is surprising to learn from his diaries, published and unpublished, and that despite his polished public appearances and utterances, just how anxious and desperately insecure he could be about it all. He never really felt he belonged anywhere, having spent so long trying to rise up above a determinedly middle-class upbringing. I’m not sure if he ever worked out who he really was.” 

Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World is open on the National Portrait Gallery till 11 January 2026, go to npg.org.uk

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