NAOMI In Fashion at V&A

I had a few hours to fill before a theatre date and was with two women so we decided to fill the time with the NAOMI In Fashion exhibition at V&A. 

We were all members of V&A so we could just turn up and walk in, which we did having first taken advantage of members' privileges to drop out coats of in the cloakroom for free.

It was a fairly small exhibition, unlike say Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty which had been on in the largest space and this was, appropriately, in the fashion space, as Wedding Dresses had been. That suited me as while I was not quite there under duress I do not think that I would have gone but for the external influences, unlike the other fashion exhibitions which I had definitely been up for.

I had not followed Naomi Campbell's career at all and only knew the things forced on me through the mainstream media. I probably could have learned a lot more about her life had I read more of the exhibition notes but it was not her life that I was interested in, it was the clothes that she had worn, and she had worn some incredible outfits (using "incredible" in several ways). 

I was also interested in the way that she had been photographed. There were plenty of outfits and photographs on display so that was good.

The common factor in the exhibition was Naomi and as that did not interest me I found the collection of clothes by many different designers to be a disjointed exhibition.

I was also surprised at how few of the outfits actually impressed me and it is telling that I have chosen an Alexander McQueen one. If I had to pick another it would have to be a Vivienne Westwood tartan outfit.

NAOMI In Fashion did not do a great deal for me but it did enough, and it was free.

It was also at V&A which meant that I could go and have a coffee and a cake in the Members' Room afterwards. A fair start to a busy day.

Delighted by Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser at V&A

Once upon a Time the V&A was my favourite place on the planet and I went there so often it felt like a second home. Then I stopped working in Central London and then covid-19 happened and unexpectedly I had not been there for two years. 

I could have been away for even longer but for the chance to use a corporate booking to see all three of the current exhibitions. A previous medical appointment meant that I had no time for Bags: Inside Out and I chose to go to Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser first.

I arrived at South Kensington in good time and with the V&A cafe sadly still closed I had a mid-morning boost, coffee and cake, at Brown & Rosie.

I was not sure what to expect from the exhibition, I rarely do, and I was pleased to discover that it largely focussed on the iconic imagery and little was said about the text, other than putting it in the context of the time it was written.

I had a copy of the classic book as a child, and it is probably still in the library room somewhere, so I have known the original John Tenniel illustrations for over fifty years. It was interesting to read how this writer and this artist worked together, something I am familiar with from comics, and also to see other examples of Tenniel's work.

A large part of the exhibition then showed how these iconic (I know I used the word earlier and I repeat it to make the point) characters and images have been included and adapted in popular culture from then to the present day.

The story has been retold many times and in many forms. Notable film versions include Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010) with Johnny Depp and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972) with just about everybody around at that time including Peter Sellers and Dudley Moore.

There were also posters from plays, album covers, books of foreign adaptations and quite a few other things that I paid too little attention as I rushed round in the little time that I had (about an hour).

Several images struck me hard in a good way, like the Japanese Lolita outfit in black, and the standout image for me was this from the Pirelli 2018 calendar shot by Tim Walker and styled by Edward Enninful.

And that's why I love the V&A, I never expected to be see, let alone be delighted by, a photo from a Pirelli calendar.

Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser was as excellent as I have come to expect a V&A exhibition to be and I might well go again before it finishes at the end of the year.

I had planned to also see Epic Iran and had a ticket for entry between 1;30 and 1:45. I got there at 1:35 to find the exhibition closed. There were a couple of other people there with tickets and after some discussion we were allowed in but told that we had to be out again by 2pm, which then became 1:55. That gave me 20 minutes to try and absorb what I could but this did not work as what I saw was quite wordy, unlike Alice, and there was little of the architecture and decorative tiles that I was hoping to see. It was very disappointing and I saw nothing to tempt me back for a proper look.

Things got better when I went back to Brown & Rosie for some lunch and a beer in the sunshine.

Wallowing in Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a Classic at V&A

I had gone to V&A to see Opera: Passion, Power and Politics but it would have been stupidity to go all that way and not also see Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a Classic.

I needed a rest first and I went to the cafe, as I do on every visit to V&A, and had a nice bowl of comforting soup. One of the advantages of going during the week was that I was easily able to get a table in the William Morris room.

Rested, I went to the new entrance, it being the closest, and with not much difficulty managed to use one of the large self-service touch screens to buy a ticket for the first free slot to Winnie-the-Pooh, which was about an hour later. That gave me just the right amount of time to find (the hardest part) and visit the display Into the Woods: Trees in Illustration, and then return to the cafe for a coffee and some cake.

Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a Classic was in half of the main exhibition space which gave me an estimated visit time of an hour, long enough given what I had already done and my interest in the subject.

The exhibition was stuffed full of E.H. Shepard drawings of all types and stages from woodland scenes used for research through to drawings he added colour to when in his nineties. The drawings were every bit as charming as I remembered from the books, probably more so.

The text with the pictures helpfully explained the techniques and tools used, e.g. the different types of pencils he worked with and the way shading was used to produce different effects.

It was also fascinating to learn about the way that the illustrations were always designed to be embedded in the text with individual pages being design in the same way that pages in a comic are.

This being V&A there was a lot more to the exhibition than words and pictures; there was even a almost full-sized mock-up of the famous Poohsticks bridge that you could walk over and have your photo taken as if in a drawing, which a lot of people did.

If I had one minor gripe with the exhibition, it was that the focus was overwhelmingly on the E.H. Shepard and relatively little was said about the A.A. Milne words. It would have been good, for example, to read/hear some passages with some explanation of how they were constructed (rhythm, rhyme, etc.). That said, it was the illustrations that I had gone for and there were lots of them and they were all lovely.

Opera: Passion, Power and Politics at V&A

As a lover of both opera and V&A it was only a matter of time before I went to see the exhibition Opera: Passion, Power and Politics at V&A, though I did have to take a day's holiday to find that time.

Going on a work day meant that it was not sold out and I could get tickets on arrival. It also helped that it was towards the end of its long run. I treated myself to a decent lie-in first and after a leisurely breakfast and a decent journey in I arrived there just after 11:30am.

The exhibition was in the new Sainsbury Gallery and it was nice to have an excuse to see it.

The technology was the same as for Pink Floyd earlier in the year, headsets and a devise that played music (it was almost all music) according to where you were in the various rooms.

There were two helpful signs at the start, one said that photography was allowed and the second said that visitors should allow 70 minutes for the exhibition. One of those proved to be more true than the other.

The opera story was told as a series of dates, places and significant works connected to them. It started with Venice around 1600 and Monteverdi's Orfeo, moved on to London a century later with Handel's Rinaldo, and so on. It started off very historical with little in the way of passion, power or politics except for opera always being a rich person's activity and so it was entwined with them through its patrons.

That started to change with Marriage of Figaro which let servants get the upper-hand over their masters, something shocking in a period when workers never played important roles in art much less triumphal ones.

The passion reached its zenith with the closing aria from Richard Strauss' Salomé where a blood splattered Salomé embraced the severed head of Jochanaan much to the disgust of her step-father Herod. This was top-grade Sex and Violence.

The tour ended with Stalin's Russia and Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District by Dmitri Shostakovich, an opera unknown to me which featured some frenetic piano playing by the composer.

The final room was a sample of opera today with excepts from several contemporary works, including a few I had seen and I few more that I would like to.

The expected 70 minutes turned out to be 100 or more and that tells you how much there was to listen to, look at, read and watch, and how engaging it all was.

The Fabric of India and more at the V&A

There are those exhibitions that I chance upon, those are normally in small art galleries that I discover when walking, and there are a few that I make a determined point of seeing, many of which are on at the Victoria and Albert Museum, probably my favourite place.

The Fabric of India was something that I wanted to see as a coda to my holiday in India in November and also because I like exhibitions at the V&A even when they are on things that I do not know that I am interested in, things like wedding dresses.

Any visit I make to the V&A includes at least some time walking the main galleries for no particular purpose other than to discover, or rediscover, some of the many interesting things there.

This time I started of in the galleries covering recent English history (intentional) before drifting off into ceramics (unintentional). One of the pleasant quirky things about the V&A is its layout (partially caused by the way it has been added to) and so I got from the English gallery on the fourth floor to the ceramics on the sixth (with no fifth along the way) via an almost hidden staircase in the middle of one of the galleries.

The porcelain galleries ran across the long frontage of the V&A and, starting at the west end, the first two rooms had deep shelves running from floor to ceiling that were absolutely stuffed with all sorts of stuff from the useful to the decorative to the pointless.

Here there were more teapots than anybody could ever want. There may have been some changes as I am pretty sure that there was a pile of just red teapots last time that I was up there, or perhaps they were somewhere else.

Moving east I came to the main stairwell next to the Cromwell Road entrance and I think that is far as I went the last time so continuing into the east wing may well have been a first for me. Here the emphasis changed from household objects, cups and ornaments etc., to decorative pieces.

The first to catch my eye was this full-sized picture of a woman painted on tiles (above). I had to trim this picture a little as there was a south-facing window behind it which confused the camera and I did not have time to wait for the sun to move around.

In the final gallery was the biggest and best surprise which confirmed everything that I thought about the magic of the V&A.

In a display of plates based on the famous Willow Pattern there were two based on popular computer games, including this one based on Pokémon Yellow a 1998 Game Boy game. I recognised Snorlax immediately.

From there another half-hidden staircase took me down into the architecture section. I often go there on purpose so I was quite happy to find myself there by accident. Most of the displays were the same as last time, as far as I could tell, but there are always temporary exhibitions in a small side room and this time it was on Phillip Webb who worked with William Morris. I like looking at plans of buildings and these were nice plans to look at.

Another of my rules on visiting the V&A is to make at least one trip to the cafe.

This was Christmas week and it looked as though everybody else in London had the same plan and I had to queue for a while to get my curry (on the menu on account of the India exhibitions) then to pay for it and then to find a table. But it all worked out in the end.

Being packed meant sharing a table and I spent some time talking to a couple from Melbourne who were heading off to the Spain the next day with little idea of what their itinerary was, they were not even sure which airport they were flying to though it sounded like Seville.

The curry was followed by a coffee and some cake (more queueing but not quite as bad) and then I was ready for Fabric of India.

This was in the main exhibition space which meant that it would be a long session but I had plenty of time to take it steadily. Being the main exhibition meant that there was a bog book to sell and that meant lots of people around to stop photographs being taken. I expected that and was ready for it but after I had seen everything (it would not matter if they threw me out then) I went back to the beginning partially just to make sure that I had not missed anything (I had) and to take a picture if I could.

The thing I missed was very early on, due a crown of people in the area, was a small room covered in colourful wall hangings. There was a seat for a guard in it but he was away at the time (he came back soon after) and so I took the one picture that I wanted.

What I had also missed on the first time round due to the crowds was the bit explaining why the fabric trade grew up in India in the first place (cloth and dyes). Reading about that on the second time around helped the rest of it to make more sense.

The main message from this starting point was the constant flow of trade and ideas both east and west. Two examples of this were the import of designs from Persia and the export of chintz dresses to the UK where they caused a commentator to remark that it was becoming hard to tell a servant from a lady.

The centre piece of the exhibition was a large tent from around 1750 decorated with large floral patterns and a bench in the middle to sit and appreciate it. Elsewhere there were clothes of all kind, including some very cute outfits for small children and some modern reimaginings of classic themes, and more hangings. Most of it was dyed by hand using wooden presses, as I had seen done in Jaipur, but there was some needlework too.

It was a bold colourful assault on the senses which I was delighted to wallow in for an hour and a half. The V&A does this sort of thing rather well.

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the V&A had lots of stunning outfits but little information about them

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty was one of those blockbuster exhibitions that every arty person was obliged to see and so many arty people wanted to see it that extra evening and night sessions were added. It was one of those evening sessions that allowed me to see the show less than a week before it closed.

The V&A closed for the evening as usual at 5:45pm and then opened just for the exhibition at 6pm. That sounds simple enough until I missed the bit, which I am sure they told me, about which entrance to use. I tried the main entrance, the tunnel entrance and the Exhibition Road entrance before finding the Secretarial Entrance (staff only) beyond the main entrance. I found it with a good five minutes to go before my 6:30pm entrance time.

There were fewer people than I expected queueing up given that it was sold out. I suspect that the V&A were letting fewer people in than they had for other exhibitions as it was busy all the way around but never as busy as David Bowie is ... had been. Having slightly fewer people in made it much easier to move around the exhibition and to get close enough to the texts to read them.

I had heard of Alexander McQueen, obviously, but apart from one or two outfits that had appeared in other exhibitions I really had little idea of his work so was looking forward to learning something new rather than, as I had with Bowie, seeing some old favourites.

The V&A obviously thought that it had something to live up to in showing us Alexander McQueen and it was quite arty itself, probably over so.

There was a room that looked like an ossuary with walls made from painted bones. There were words of wisdom from McQueen painted on the walls, much of the lighting seemed designed for dramatic effect rather than to highlight the clothes and we were teased with different music in each room.

Despite the best efforts of the exhibition to get in the way of the content, the outfits were dominant, as they should be. There were many of them arranged in themes which sometimes, but not always, equated to collections.

My simple summary was that I loved the outfits but not the accessories. We were told that many of these were designed just for catwalk shows and were never intended for sale but, even so, some of the constructions were just weird, like the metal frame holding knees and elbows (you try walking wearing that).

There was a lot of exaggeration in the outfits, collars that rose to eye height and beyond, shoulders that ballooned or spiked, and skirts fluffed about with vasts amount of fabric. There was a lot of attention to detail too with some exquisite embroidery, neat and unusual fastenings and everything tailored precisely to the mannequins.

What was missing was much of an explanation for what it all meant, how it had been made, how his career progressed or who his customers were. The room texts were general, e.g. telling us that he liked Victorian Gothic, and the costumer texts just gave the show, the year and the main materials used. I suspect that this was all very deliberate as the V&A had a hefty book to sell.

I would have liked more words but even without them the exhibition took me 90 minutes to get around because there were so many fine outfits to see. My favourites were the Japanese inspired collection and those at the very end where digital printing on silk produced some extraordinary patterns.

Wedding Dresses at the V&A

I will admit that wedding dresses is not the obvious thing for me to go and see an exhibition on but this was the V&A and they do exceedingly good exhibitions on fashion.

I had intended to go to see Wedding Dresses for many months, the exhibition started in May 14 and I knew that it was coming before then, but, predictably, I finally got to see it just two days before it closed in March 15.

I was in London for something else that morning and had taken a day's holiday to take in an exhibition in the afternoon before going to the theatre.

I got to the V&A at 1:30pm and joined the short queue for a timed ticket. The exhibition was clearly busy but was not sold out. I opted for a 2pm ticket to give me time for lunch in the cafe first. After a very leisurely lunch that featured some sort of butternut squash pie, I went in to the exhibition around 2:20pm expecting it to take about an hour which would leave me just about enough time to get to another exhibition at RIBA that was also due to close shortly.

The exhibition was busy but following the slow queue around the outer circle of the lower floor allowed me to see everything and in chronological order too. There were a few other men there, just not very many.

The displays were of typical wedding dresses of the middle class (mostly) and it was interesting to see how the shapes, styles and colours changed over the years. It was also interesting to learn that wedding dresses used to have a life after the big day, much like a smart lounge suit work by a bridegroom today has.

One of my favourite dresses on the lower level was a fairly simple purple dress that looked just like the sort of thing that one of the smart ladies in Lark Rise to Candleford would wear.

Upstairs was a completely different affair and introduced the exotic world of contemporary designed dresses many of which were worn by the rich and famous.

The first of these was the full purple dress worn by Dita Von Teese on her wedding to Marilyn Manson in 2005, as seen in the photo above. Photography was banned in the exhibition (they had a book to sell) but I was able to take this one from outside when sitting among the statues in the long corridor on the ground floor.

A few of the dresses were outrageous, one even upset the bridegroom because of its revealing nature, but most were very pretty and a few were just stunning.

The star of the show, in my opinion, was 'Flower Bomb designed by Ian Stuart which, conveniently, was at the back of the exhibition and so could be viewed clearly from the metalworks section on the first floor.

My objective measure of how much I like an exhibition is the amount of time I spent in there and for Wedding Dresses I expected to take an hour but took almost two. And given that it was not physically a very large exhibition that meant a lot of time looking at and reading about each dress.

The one disappointment that I had with the exhibition was the lack of context. I presumed that most of the examples on the lower floor were typical but those on the upper floor clearly were not so I left not knowing what wedding dresses look like today or what they cost. None of the exhibits had any prices on which surprised me.

It was a fairly exhausting two hours too so I had no option but to go back to the cafe for a pot of tea and the first scone of the season.

That the V&A could make wedding dresses so interesting to me is a testament to their curating skills and reinforced my determination to see more of the same, starting with Alexander McQueen which had just opened.

Lucky Dips at the V&A

I had an afternoon to fill between a comics signing in Central London and a theatre date in Hammersmith so the V&A was the obvious place to go. So I went.

The first destination was easy to choose and I headed to the cafe for a coffee and a cake. The cake was an easy choice too and I had my first scone and cream of the season. I then sat comfortably in the cafe and used my iPad and the visitors' free wi-fi to see what was on and to make my plan for the afternoon.

Three small exhibitions caught my attention so I set off to do all three.

First I went to Room 104 in the theatre section to see an exhibition on William Shakespeare.

This was a small room with an assortment of diverse objects arranged around the outside. I always like to see models of stage sets and there were a couple on display.

The main feature of the exhibition was an audio-visual booth in the centre of the room. This sat six to eight people, depending on size and friendliness, on a single curved bench that faced two sets of screens suspended at odd angles.

The programme was a series of interviews with Shakespearean actors and directors. While they spoke on one of the screens the other screens were used to show things like extracts from performances and extracts from scripts. This worked excellently and the quick-fire change of people and their interesting insights made this as interesting a programme about Shakespeare that I had seen.

The proof of this pudding was in its eating and I sat through the programme for the full fifteen to twenty minutes it took to start repeating itself.

My next destination was room 102.

As I was already in Room 104 that should not have been that hard to find but the V&A is delightfully confusing, and that is one of the reasons that I like it.

I was almost wandering around in circle when I came across a Beatrix Potter drawing and as that is what I was looking for I, rightly, concluded that I was in Room 102. A reason that it was hard to find was because it was a corridor rather than an exhibition room. Well, that's my excuse.

This was not the traditional, cosy, view of Beatrix Potter but a look at her work around the time of World War I.

There was still a Peter Rabbit but this was a political cartoon. Here Potter was protesting against the unofficial Peter Rabbit toys that were coming in from Germany and undercutting the official local craftsmen and women.

Another political comment was in a letter Potter wrote about the possibility of drafting working horses in to the war. She argued that they should be left working on the land.

There were several pretty watercolours from Potter on show.

My favourite was a simple one of the countryside under snow and it is a mystery why I did not take a picture of that one with either of the cameras that I was using. This one is not a bad substitute though.

I knew that I liked Shakespeare but had never been much of a Potter fan (despite buying dozens of the Beswick figurines for Mum) but I became something of one thanks to this display. I would not claim that she was a master artist but her drawings were very evocative and successfully captured the mood of the countryside.

It was also interesting to read some of her letters to discover just a little more about the famous woman.

My final destination was Room 128a. Coming from Room 102 that should have been easy but the V&A's novel room numbering system meant that 128a was nowhere near 102. It was not even on the same floor. Rooms 102 and 104 were on Level 3 at the back of the museum whereas Room 128a was on Level 4 at the front.

I was heading there for Empire Builders: 1750-1950 which was part of RIBA's Brits Who Built the Modern World season, having seen the main exhibition at RIBA the previous month.

As the title suggested, the display looked at works by British architects across the Empire. In some ways this was a prequel to the main exhibition in that it covered the period before the famous architects, Foster et al, emerged and so gave the context for their new ways of working.

The projects shown were from across the Empire and were often an interesting mix of styles familiar to this country and those of the occupied territory. For example, the building above is clearly Gothic but has domes on the turrets that would not be seen in Britain.

The buildings were typically public service buildings like railway stations, hospitals, schools and, of course, governors' residences and as such they tended to be on the grand side.

Room 128a was hardly big, yet such was the amount and quality of information on display it took me a fair while to get through it all. I was not watching time too closely but I must have been in that one room for half an hour.

I had only decided to go to the V&A earlier that day and had not chosen which rooms to go to until I had arrived there and still it managed to find three very different things to educate and entertain me for a couple of hours. That's why the V&A is just about my favourite museum, place and thing.

Masterpieces of Chinese Painting at the V&A

It was a late decision to go and see Masterpieces of Chinese Painting and I got there with just a couple of days to spare, and had to finish work promptly on a Friday afternoon to do so. It was the constant stream of positive comments on Twitter that forced my hand.

The exhibition had all the usual V&A hallmarks of interesting items laid out in carefully each with enough annotation to inform but not too much to bore.

The exhibition was sold out for almost all of its run. And it showed. It was busy all the way round and I had to queue for some of the displays. This was not helped by there being several long scrolls on show that could only sensibly be viewed right-to-left which meant that we all had to flow in the same direction and had to stick close to the display to see all of it.

The paintings were much as I expected (and hoped) with lots of exotic costumes, magical landscapes and dragons. The subjects of the paintings were as much interest as the techniques and materials used to produce them.

Also as usual at the V&A the rules said no photographs and as usual I kept to them but a few people did not. So these pictures have all been borrowed from the V&A site. That limited my choice somewhat but I did find a few that I both liked a lot and which, I feel, give an honest feel for what the exhibition was like.

Here I have fallen for the crisp white storks performing the aerobatics against a bold blue sky while a typical building just about manages to peak above the clouds.

I found these dragons irresistible.It is a detail from a long scroll called Nine Dragons(you can guess why).

Like most of the painting in the exhibition is was seriously old. In this case it dated from1244 and there were paintings there much older than that.

The red stamp is a personal mark of a creator, owner, curator or somebody else with an official interest in the painting. On a picture this size there were thirty or forty of them, all carefully placed so as not to disturb the picture.

My final choice is the most typical. This green/blue style was very popular in several periods.

The composition was also very typical with the picture dominated by the landscape of hills and water and with the action confined to small figures.

The combination of the quantity and quality of the exhibits and the busyness meant that it took me two and a half hours to get around, and that was taking the last small room at some speed. By my own highly scientific measure of an exhibition, anything approaching two hours means that there was plenty to see so this was most definitely a very good exhibition.

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.

Dipping into theatrics at the V&A

After enjoying the excellent Tomorrow: Elmgreen & Dragset exhibition at the V&A I had an hour or so to spare and I went back into the bowels of the museum to see what else I could find.

The first thing to make an impact was the cascading light just inside the main entrance on Cromwell Road. This was a strange twin to the one just a little further inside that has hung above the reception desk for years.

Somehow I found myself in the Theatre and Performance area on the 3rd floor. Somehow I had never been in that section of the museum before. I think that I got close to it once but it was closed.

As elsewhere in the museum , the objects were quirky and well presented.

One room had theatrical costumes and a make-up area where visitors could try things on. I was too busy with the exhibits but a small group of visitors were having a lot of fun there taking lots of photos of each other.

I much preferred Room 104b: Designing which had lots of drawings and mock-ups of theatre sets. These, and the explanations that went with them, gave a good insight in to the thinking that goes in to designing a set.

Many of them were pretty in their own right, without having to imagine a performance in them, such as this one that is obviously by John Piper. Sadly it is not in the V&A Collections database (or my search skills are not up to the task) and I cannot recall which show it was for other than it was one that I had seen (not that that helps very much).

I know that I did not know the show which the next set design was for and it got selected just because I liked the way that the mix of props and painting created the illusion of a large field full of ripe crops.

There were quite a few model sets on display and I liked a lot of them, far too many to include here.

I recognised this set instantly, it is from Long Day's Journey into Night and it looked almost exactly (perhaps it was exactly) as when I saw the play last year.

The next room had a collection of posters on the wall. These were as eclectic as you would expect from the V&A and they included posters for Doyly Carte, Sex Pistols, Cinderella with Rolf Harris, Ballet Rambert and, poignantly, Lou Reed.

The poster for The London Ballet amused me because it boasted review comments that included, "Pretty in the extreme", "Very charming" and "Very attractive". Now we expect to be extorted to sell our children's organs to get a ticket for the best shows.

And then there was the rhino.

It was there because it was a theatrical prop though, as with much in the exhibition, for a play I had not heard of, much less seen. I suspect that much of the stuff in the collection was donated by theatres that would otherwise have thrown them away so giving it that cosy feel of jumble.

Behind the rhino is a display cabinet showing more oddities.The image from Les Miserables is familiar enough and it is easy to understand why it is there. Beneath it is a signed copy of one of the Beatles' Christmas singles. It is the surprising juxtapositions like that which make the V&A so interesting.

Every visit to the V&A is an adventure, an instruction and a pleasure.

Tomorrow: Elmgreen & Dragset at the V&A

It was something of a last minute decision to go to the V&A in the afternoon ahead of a theatre date in nearby Hammersmith.

I did not have a firm plan of what to see when I got these which is just as well as an incident at South Kensington (reported at different times as a broken train, a fire and a person under the train) meant that the station was closed. As a result I made the last leg of the journey by bus and I arrived almost an hour later than hoped. Time for a coffee and some cake while doing some replanning.

There were several exhibitions on that day and only time to see one of them so I chose Tomorrow by Elmgreen and Dragset. This was held in a corner of the third floor reached via the silver collection and the tapestries room.

Tomorrow is an installation that purports to be several rooms in an apartment belonging to Norman Swann an elderly and disillusioned architect.

As with other installations that I have seen recently, The Drowned World and In the Beginning was the End, a lot of attention had been paid to the detail and the normal was juxtaposed to the weird. For example, the picture below looks ordinary enough at first glance then you notice the large crack in the dining table that also runs through the plates and chairs.

Unlike the other installations there is no narrative. Or, rather, there are no actors to tell the story. The story can be gleaned from the object or a version of it can be read on the exhibition website.

The rooms on display are the entrance hall, reception room, kitchen, study and bedroom and each is packed with interesting things that become more interesting the closer you look at them.

For example, the books in the case at the far end are a mix of architecture and medicine, including a medical book by JG Ballard. The boy sitting in the fireplace is distinctly spooky and I expected him to move. Even half an hour or so later I looked at him closely still not entirely convinced that he was not real.

I loved the study most of all because it was stuffed full of architectural models and drawings that I go to architecture exhibitions to see. Again the details mattered and there were letters on the desk to read and a noticeboard thick with clippings.

There were a repeated ideas across the rooms, such as the cups of tea, models of horses and scary models of birds. The scariest bird of all was at the bottom of the bed (see the top picture) as if waiting to eat the occupants of the bed as they slept.

My only (minor) gripe with the exhibition is that photography was banned (not that everybody followed that rule) and so I have had to reply on pictures from the exhibition website rather than using my own of my own favourite parts.

I found Tomorrow very interesting and stimulating, even more so because it was unexpected. The V&A majors in quirky and eclectic and Tomorrow by Elmgreen and Dragset is at the top-end of both.

David Bowie is ... in the best selling show ...

... and it's easy to see why.

Bowie has been a prominent figure in British cultural life for over forty years and the V&A has pulled all the stops out in collecting and curating material relating to his life in music and on stage.

I bought my tickets months ago and even then I had to settle for a 10am slot on a Sunday morning.

TfL did not help by cancelling trains west of Earls Court that day and I had to risk the rail replacement bus service. I was relieved to get to the V&A only a few minutes late for my timed slot.

The V&A seemed to have learnt some lessons from the also-sold-out Hollywood Costumes exhibition which was, at times, too packed to enjoy easily. Perhaps being in the first slot of the day helped.

Another change was the technology. This time we all got clever audio guides that did not have the usual numbers to call up the voice, it used proximity instead so you only had to walk up to one of the exhibits and the headset automatically spoke or sang to you. This was a little spooky at times and I found myself looking around for the video that was lip-synced to what I was listening too.

Costumes featured heavily and there were outfits on display from many of the album covers and major tours. No prizes for spotting the Pin-Ups suit here.

I found myself strangely entranced by the costumes, when I had not expected to. I especially liked the Alexander McQueen frock-coats from the Earthling album and tour. And that hints at one of the exhibition's strengths, it drew on the full range of Bowie's career and did not play safe and just draw on the big periods like Ziggy. There was even some Tin Machine stuff in there.

Other things on display included song lyrics, album covers, stage designs and interviews, such as one with a hopeless Russell Harty who referred to the new single as "Golden Tears" before asking Bowie to introduce it himself.

Of course there were lots of video clips too and I caught more than one person singing out loud. A highlight was the final large room (above) which had several large screens and lots of seats too. There I watched a number of songs from live performances and at one point there were two versions of Heroes playing and which one you heard depended on where you were in the room. It was magic and I'd probably still be in there if it was allowed.

The V&A are seriously good at curation and when they combine those skills with a popular subject then they know that they have got another big hit on their hands. I absolutely loved it and I think that all the people grabbing the merchandise in the shop on the way out did too.

More wanderings in the V&A

Having spent the morning touring the Hollywood Costume exhibition I then spent most of the rest of my birthday exploring other parts of the V&A. It was my birthday and that is what I wanted to do.

I won't pretend that I knew where I was going most of the time, or even that I knew where I was, and that is a positive. The big joy of the V&A is the serendipitous discovery that comes from random wanderings and the obstinate refusal to look at one of the helpful maps.

There are large sections that, ostensibly,  are filled with things that I am not that interested in, such as sculpture or metalworks, yet such is the richness and quality of the V&A that there are always some objects that appeal immensely as I amble past and these make me pause to examine them further.

Thinks such as The Lure of the Pipes that I love for its simplicity, clear lines, neat typeface and the palpable sense of anticipation in the two women.

Somewhere in the same corner of the museum (and it has an awful lot of corners, possibly a British record) is the Medieval section which is kept dark to protect the fragile objects on display. Amongst them is this lively tapestry.

Also on the ground floor, and this time fairly easy to find as it is close to the shop, is the Japan gallery.

I was just using it as a route through avoiding the busy shop but was halted by the display of Lolita fashion. This mixes other styles, such as Gothic and Punk, with little girl skirts and soft toys.

My immediate thought was of Gogo Yubari in Kill Bill Vol. 1 (a wonderful film) where O-Ren Ishi's most deadly aide combines extreme violence with a pleated skirt and girlish giggles.

This is the Punk Lolita complete with chains and cuddly toy. It looks fantastic.

I did have one destination in mind, and that was the new furniture gallery. This is located on the sixth floor in a new half-wing off the ceramics section that runs across the front of the building.

Getting there is not easy, which is how I like it. For example, staircase V only goes to level 4; there is no level 5 in that section of the building.

The furniture is arranged sparingly along a narrow corridor. Space is limited but what the V&A does well across the museum is select pieces that give you a enough of a flavour of the subject to satisfy and inform.

The gallery also takes a big technological step forward and instead of the usual printed cards describing the works the information is provided by iPad-like touch-screens. The big advantage of these is that they can hold a lot more information as each one can have several pages of information.

This innovation means that a gallery that I could have walked through in something like ten seconds took getting on for an hour to wade through.

After the furniture I went in to the modern ceramics section next door. This is unusual for the V&A in that here the approach is to stack-em-high and there are long shelves from floor to ceiling that are stuffed tightly behind protective glass.

I tried to walk past slowly, intending to spend time there on a future visit, but it proved impossible to do so and I was forced to stop repeatedly to looking at things. Things like teapots.

The familiar V&A whimsy was on display here too and in among old and valuable objects was a collection of everyday mugs, including a Beano mug.

I was flagging a little by then, I think that I had been in the museum for over five hours, so it was time to head back to the cafe (where I had had lunch earlier) for the mandatory tea and cake.

Of course the route there was not straightforward and I found myself seriously distracted by the Britain 1500 - 1760 gallery on level 2.

That is where I discovered this four-poster bed dressed in the sort of fabric that should be made in to a tie.

The gallery does not connect directly to any others, the only access is via stairs or lifts, and that heightens the sense of adventure in getting there when you meant to.

Going down from there took me back in to the main flow of the building and then the cafe was was a simple, if slow, jaunt. It was a slow cup of tea too as I really needed a rest by then.

The quickest way from the cafe to the tube is through the garden and out the main entrance. The sun had given up for the day by then and the courtyard looked stunning in its night-guise.

And that was that for an excellent day out and a series of birthday treats all in one building. This blog informs me that I have been to the V&A twelve times in the last six years, and I had been several times before that, and still it is easy to find new things to surprise, entertain and delight. It really is a magical place.

Hollywood Costume at the V&A

I was not interested in the Hollywood Costume exhibition when I first heard about it but the steady trickle of positive reports, mostly on Twitter, convinced me that it was worth going to but by then it was sold out.

Fresh hopes were dashed and forgotten.

Then another tweet said that a limited number of tickets were available. On my birthday. So I bought some.

These were timed tickets due to the huge popularity of the event and I was scheduled for 11:30 on a Sunday morning. The transport worked well and I was there with enough time to spare to allow a little jaunt through the sculpture galleries before taking my place near the front of the queue.

The layout of the exhibition did not suit timed starts as there were two ways in and that meant two streams of people moving in opposite directions past the first displays. Progress was very slow and good positions were aggressively fought for and defended.

Things got a little better as we moved in and thinned out a little but it was very busy all the way round, good positions had to be waited for and progress was slow. But then I was not in any rush, I had all day for this.

The curation was as good as I expected from the V&A, and that is very good. Each costume came with an explanation of the film, the character and what the designer was trying to achieve. Many of the outfits had digital heads above them to remind us of what they looked like in the films and a few videos took us in to greater depths on the characters and the designs.

The mix of costumes was refreshing too. There were the obvious grand outfits from period dramas but these were a minority. We also had simple outfits for films iconic and unknown and some icon outfits from films good and bad.

If you look carefully in the middle picture you can see Neo (The Matrix), Terminator and The Bride (Kill Bill). And just to make the point, the last three costumes in the exhibition are Judy Garland from The Wizard of Oz, Marilyn Monroe from Seven Year Itch and, finally, Michelle Pfeiffer (Batman Returns).

It was to the V&A's credit (again) that they kept me entranced for approaching two hours on a subject that I thought I did not care about.