CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/3/2025

Flamboyant poses and melodramatic airs in 'Cecil Beaton's Fashionable World'

Cecil Beaton’s “The Second Age of Beauty is Glamour,” shot for the February 1946 issue of British Vogue, is reproduced from Holiday Gift Staff Pick Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World—published to accompany the exhibition on view through January 2026 at the National Portrait Gallery, London. A beautifully produced monograph featuring portraits, magazine editorials, fashion photography, war reportage and illustrations by Britain’s celebrated renaissance man about town, this oversized volume features a lovely Swiss binding, more than 250 color and black-and-white reproductions and a wealth of pithy Beaton quotations that contextualize the images. “My pictures became more and more rococo and surrealist,” he wrote in the third volume of his diary, The Happy Years, published in 1972. “Society women as well as mannequins were photographed in the most flamboyant poses, in ecstatic or mystical states, sometimes with the melodramatic air of a Lady Macbeth caught up in a cocoon of tulle…”