Cecil Beaton's Bright Young Things by Robin Muir

Gender politics have once again risen to the forefront, and the conversations around sexual identity and self-expression have all been opened wide. Like the Roaring Twenties, we are once again living through an era in which we are preoccupied by youth, technological innovation and conspicuous consumption.

Curated by Robin Muir, who has also written a brilliant overview, the show offers a compulsive insight into 1920s and ’30s high society and an intimate portrait of the people who defined it.Įmilia Wickstead’s ’20s-inspired a/w 2020 collection © Go RunwayĪnd yet, for all the talk of history, one is struck most forcibly by the things we have in common still. Nearly 100 years after they were taken, Beaton’s pictures are a terrific mirror in which to mark the moods that shape today. This month sees the opening of Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things at the National Portrait Gallery in London, an exhibition dedicated to his most dazzling subjects. Now, the architect of this aura, Cecil Beaton, enters the spotlight once again. Nevertheless, their transgressive behaviour and sense of devilry has always been seductive, and the golden aura that orbited them has never dimmed. Perhaps it’s because we know that generation was ultimately doomed, to war, penury and broken-heartedness, or because we still mine the cultural legacy it left behind. Cecil Beaton’s The Book of Beauty, a folio of portraits featuring the set that came to be known as the Bright Young Things, still holds us in its thrall. It’s a very British habit to fetishise the eccentric rich. I have a peculiarly clear memory of the first episode: the fancy folk in the “Big House” had just installed electric lighting, while their social in-equivalents were left to scuttle lumps of coal about and take cool ablutions in a tiny kitchen pail. Our group was focused on the period between 1900 and the Great Depression of 1929. How To Spend It editor Jo Ellison © Marili Andreįollowing the lives of two northern-based families, How We Used To Live swept through decades of social history designed to dramatise how major global events can shape a person’s every day: it was history at its most basic and entertaining. I sometimes wonder whether I imagined this series, but Google reassures me it ran sporadically on British television from 1968 to 2002, and occasionally I find a colleague or acquaintance with whom I can share rapturous reminiscence.

The syllabus, looking at key events of the 20th century, was accompanied by an educational programme called How We Used To Live. I fell in love with history at primary school when I was about eight or nine.

Cecil Beaton's Bright Young Things by Robin Muir