Image: San Diego Museum of Art
‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ runs from July 11, 2026, through January 10, 2027. Organized by the National Portrait Gallery, London, and presented by the San Diego Museum of Art, the exhibition is located in the Nash and Schwartz Galleries at the Museum of Photographic Arts at The San Diego Museum of Art, also identified as MOPA@SDMA, in Casa de Balboa at 1649 El Prado in Balboa Park.
Photographer, fashion illustrator, Oscar-winning costume designer, social caricaturist and writer Cecil Beaton (1904–1980) was an extraordinary force in twentieth-century British and American creative scenes. Via London, Paris, New York and Hollywood, his era-defining photographs captured beauty, glamour and star power in the interwar and early post-war eras.
The exhibition follows Beaton’s work from shaping the public image of the ‘Bright Young Things,’ a group of exuberant and artistically inclined socialites in 1920s London, through fashion photography for Vogue and other magazines and his role as a photographer during World War II. It also presents his reinvention of royal portraiture for the modern age and his award-winning costume and set designs for ‘My Fair Lady’ on stage and screen.
The exhibition features portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando; Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret; and figures from artistic and literary scenes including Truman Capote, Francis Bacon and Salvador Dalí.
A featured example is Cecil Beaton’s ‘The Second Age of Beauty is Glamour, Checked Suit by Norman Hartnell’ (detail), made in 1947.
