IT'S hard to argue that pictures taken by Cecil Beaton are in short supply. Over the course of a 40-year career he worked as a fashion photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair, and shot portraits of everyone from Benjamin Britten and Wallis Simpson to Marilyn Monroe and Twiggy. He also turned his hand to stage and set design, winning an Oscar in 1965 for My Fair Lady, and is an acknowledged influence on David Bailey amongst others.
So whoever the sitter and whatever the scene, most every time the shutter clicked on Beaton's Rolleiflex it resulted in images that were stylish, graceful, polished. As a result, his critical stock as a chronicler of 20th century fashion and style remains high, just as his many photographs continue to circulate and be admired.
But as a new book about Beaton demonstrates, those same qualities of style and grace were present in abundance when others turned the camera on him or he turned it on himself. And nowhere are they more evident than in his unfailingly dapper – and occasionally slightly eccentric – attire. A dedicated follower of fashion he was not; a very singular sartorial talent he most certainly was, from his student days at Cambridge University through the war year to the final years of his life in the flamboyant 1960s and early 1970s.
In The Wardrobe Of Cecil Beaton, fashion historian and curator Dr Benjamin Wild collects images of Beaton across the decades and uses them to “peel back” what he refers to as Beaton's “carefully curated facade” and assess his relationship with clothes and style.
What he finds lurking behind that facade is a man whose biographical details may make him sound old-fashioned – born in the Edwardian era (in 1904), Beaton was educated at Harrow and was a sucker for hand-made suits – but whose fashion legacy and sartorial tastes make him seem very modern indeed.
So modern, in fact, that his fashion influence continues to be felt: designer Giles Deacon and Savile Row tailor Richard James have both based collections on Beaton's look, and in 2014 Belgian designer Dries Van Noten included Beaton's “rabbit costume” in a museum exhibition he curated in Paris. Created by Beaton in 1937, it consists of a hand-made rabbit mask and a corduroy coat decorated with muslin flowers and plastic eggshells.
So while the images of Beaton may be in stark black and white, much of what they have to say seems bang up to date. For a start, he wore make-up, proof that cosmetics for men aren't an entirely 21st century innovation. He also took a pick-and-mix approach to dressing, ignoring the (often strict) sartorial rules governing how men looked by wearing casual shoes with formal tailoring, say. Pop a pair of white trainers under a dark suit today and you're doing more or less the same thing.
Then there was his love of old clothes. “One fashion which is particularly prevalent today is the interest in vintage,” says Wild. “Beaton, particularly when he was young and at Cambridge University, was really interested in it largely because he didn't have the funds to indulge his sartorial habits. But wearing Fair Isle jumpers, over-sized clothing, that sort of quite homely look which is prevalent today does connect him with the present.”
A portrait of Beaton from 1945 shows him wearing a Guernsey-style knit which has been frayed into ribbons (or deliberately badly darned) over pleated Oxford bags trousers. Today we'd call it “the distressed look” and you'll see it everywhere from the catwalk to the high street, where artfully ripped jeans sell for £200.
Also interesting, and modern, is Beaton's obsession with his body image. Still snake-hipped even in his early 30s – measurements taken by his tailors Anderson & Sheppard in 1934 show he had an impressively svelte 29-inch waistline – he nevertheless felt the pressure to stay slim as he aged, taking to his diary to bemoan his increasing girth and poor skin.
These days, assailed on all sides by more and more images of super-fit young athletes and models, many men feel the same way: according to a survey published last year, 48% of British men are dissatisfied with their bodies.
“Throughout his life you get these constant references to what he looks like, how he's ageing,” says Wild. “In 1969 David Hockney was dispatched to draw him for a Vogue feature and Beaton hated the images that were produced. He says in his diary. 'How could he see me like this?'.”
The painter Augustus John had slightly more luck, though Beaton retouched the mouth on his portrait before he hung it. But a sitting for Francis Bacon was, predictably, a disaster.
“In front of me was an enormous, coloured strip-cartoon of a completely bald, dreadfully aged – nay senile – businessman,” Beaton wrote in his diary when he saw the finished work. “He wore a sketchily dabbed-in suit of lavender blue … the head and shoulders were outlined in streaky wet slime.” In the end he refused to buy the painting, so Bacon destroyed it.
As for the clothes themselves, Beaton even had the foresight to anticipate the current trend for blockbuster museum exhibitions centred on individual wardrobes, such as the one mounted in David Bowie's honour at London's Victoria and Albert Museum in 2013. Many of Beaton's own collection of clothes, including the Lanz of Salzburg jackets, were bequeathed to the V&A as well as to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
As well as vintage clothes, Beaton co-opted traditional wear from other countries, most notably Austria. He visited the country several times between 1930 and 1935 and bought many jackets from a company called Lanz of Salzburg. He can be seen wearing one of these short, military-style garments – and looking a little over-dressed for the occasion – in a picture from 1935 showing a group of Bright Young Things picnicking in the grounds of Ashcombe House, the Wiltshire pile Beaton would later make his home.
Looking at the collected photographs, then, Wild also sees a man intent on curating his own image as much as other people's, and creating a flattering photographic version of himself in much the same way as users of social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook do today. He was once photographed in a coat covered in images of his own face and he's commemorated in Evelyn Waugh's 1928 novel Decline And Fall as the character David Lennox, a photographer whose first task on arrival at a party is to find a mirror and check his appearance.
And, most modern of all, it seems Beaton even snapped a selfie or two with his famous subjects.
“There's a wonderful portrait he took of Andy Warhol and when you look at it more closely there's Beaton in the background,” says Wild. “So is this an image of Andy Warhol – or one of Andy Warhol with Beaton? And there are a lot of images like that … I think he was definitely ahead of the curve.”
The Wardrobe Of Cecil Beaton is out now
(Thames & Hudson, £29.95)
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