While the V&A is ever the place to move with the times, it values its traditions and knows what it does best. The museum’s major forthcoming Autumn exhibition, Hollywood Costume, promises to be a crowd pleaser. In many ways it will hark back to the groundbreaking 1979 V&A exhibition, The Art of Hollywood, which focused on film set — as opposed to fashion — design. Orson Welles wrote the foreword to the earlier exhibition’s catalogue:
‘Dear John Hambley,
Thanks, but I don’t think I’m a good choice for the foreword to your catalogue. Menzies is the only name on your list I could enthuse over. You should realize that in Hollywood, until the collapse of the studio system, the head of the Art Department was essentially a bureaucratic functionary and did little or none of the actual designing for which he took credit and received awards. Van Nest Polglase for instance was very good as an executive and administrator, but if he ever designed himself, I never saw it. Citizen Kane was entirely the work of Perry Ferguson.
It is men like Ferguson who deserve to be brought out of obscurity, not the Department Heads who no more designed a movie than Louis B. Mayer directed one.’
Like the earlier show Hollywood Costume seeks to bring those ‘who deserve to be brought out of obscurity’ firmly into the spotlight. It will permeate that now archaic studio system to which Mr. Wells referred. That may not in all cases mean name-echoing fame for the sundry seamstresses and studio assistants required to make up a dress like Alexandra Byrne’s period style Elizabeth: The Golden Age dress, or James Acheson’s robes for The Last Emperor (both to go on display), but this exhibition will go far in celebrating those roles, through the presentation of sketches, video footage, and transcripts.
The most iconic of artists, from Leonardo to Hockney and Hirst, have always employed studio assistants to materialize their designs. The artist’s underdog usually remains that way. What’s different, and special, about fashion and stage set design alike is that they’re usually perceived as craft-like in genre; the transformation from paper, through sample or maquette, to finished product is at least as important as the initial idea.
This is of course a concept very much in the tradition of the V&A, which was born out of the 1851 Great Exhibition, a stunning showcase of industrial machines and groundbreaking technologies. One of the museum’s most recent exhibitions Power of Making, with its wonderful assortment of wacky creations — a dress made of pins, a baby made of cake, a jumper made of mould — by individuals from diverse walks of life made manifest the degree to which the craft tradition has been revived in recent years. Hollywood Costume will prevail like The Art of Hollywood and Power of Making because, like Orson Welles, we feel the lowly craftsman deserves his look-in as cultivator of the celebrity.
Hollywood Costume, sponsored by Harry Winston, opens at the V&A on 20 October 2012
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