Club to Catwalk at the V&A

The V&A is so adept at putting on exhibitions that I like to go to them even when they cover topics that I think I am not interested in. I thought that I was not interested in fashion, especially from the 80s, but the V&A proved me wrong.

I was in the V&A making the most of  visit later in the day to the theatre but did not have enough time to do either of the major exhibitions and I had walked past this one on my previous visit so I knew that I could cover it in an hour.

The exhibition was in the unusually shaped fashion zone and was on two levels. But then the V&A is full of unusual spaces and they know what to do with them.

Club to Catwalk consisted of several themed displays of around eight models each with useful descriptions.

The unusual thing about this fashion exhibition was that these were clothes worn by real people in the real world, albeit people like Boy George and Steve Strange in the world of eccentric nightclubs.

I never read The Face so these were mostly names and clubs that I had not heard of but I was aware of the club scene in London in the 80s as I moved up here then and papers like the Evening Standard liked to cover stories that showed London to be an exciting place, even if the high fashion club scene was actually quite small.

This may have been a small and largely irrelevant fashion fad but the V&A made it interesting and entertaining, even for somebody like me.