Welcome to our weekly run-through of BBC Two’s Secrets of the Museum. Episode 4 was broadcast last night and featured monsters, heroes, battles and villains, as well as one or two plaster casts.
Preen’s Fashion in Motion was in June 2019 but you can watch a 2-minute clip of the catwalk event or take a look behind-the-scenes to find out how the event was brought to life. If you’ve not already been to a Fashion in Motion, these are a series of free, live fashion events held at the museum, and over 20 years have featured designers including Alexander McQueen, Christian Lacroix, Erdem, Vivienne Westwood and Yohji Yamamoto. We made a film to celebrate two decades of cutting-edge fashion, from established labels and up-and-coming designers. There is also a podcast, featuring Oriole Cullen, who featured in last night’s episode, and the initiator of the project, Claire Wilcox.
Oriole was a key contributor to our David Bowie Is exhibition, and its accompanying catalogue where she wrote about Bowie’s lasting impact on the fashion world. The book was designed by Barnbrook, who worked on several album covers for the artist – find out more about their collaboration here.
Victoria Broackes, seen rocking a pair of Ziggy earrings last night, curated the Bowie exhibition with Geoffrey Marsh. The photograph she catalogued in the programme was part of a series by Brian Duffy for the 1973 Aladdin Sane album. Bowie is known for his collaborations with other artists, as well as his impact on them.
Margaret Calvert’s impact on the world around us is pervasive but in a different way. Her ‘Transport’ typeface, developed with Jock Kinneir, was designed for legibility at speed, and has been adopted for use around the world. She featured in our exhibition British Design: 1948–2012, the first major exhibition to celebrate post-war British art and Design – and talks more about her work in the video below:
The impact of Star Wars continues to reverberate, as Keith Lodwick mentioned in the film. But if you can’t wait to see the restored Storm Trooper costume in the Theatre and Performance galleries, perhaps there is another iconic outfit from the film that might be of interest: Obi-Wan Kenobi’s costume from the 1977 film Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, designed by John Mollo, is on view from tomorrow in our brand-new exhibition Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk.
The photograph of the Bayeux Tapestry is on display in the Tim Walker: Wonderful Things exhibition until 22 March. The story of its making is fascinating, and required more than 180 glass negatives to produce. Tim Walker used it as the inspiration for his photoshoot Soldiers of Tomorrow.
Finally, if you’d like to delve into our cast collection in a little more detail, then this section of the blog covers a huge range of our work in conserving, researching, preparing and installing them. You can also read more about them in this V&A book, which shines a light on some of the museum’s most intriguing copies – exploring the reasons for their manufacture and how the museum is working to conserve the collection today.
