From a constellation of Cartier diamonds to a deep-dive into swimwear, Vogue rounds up the best fashion exhibitions in London to bookmark for 2025.
The Face Magazine: Culture Shift at the National Portrait Gallery
Corinne Day’s March 1993 shoot with Kate Moss for British Vogue is frequently credited with launching the latter’s career as the London model ne plus ultra, but Day actually published her first images of a 14-year-old Moss, taken on Camber Sands, in The Face. In Culture Shift, the National Portrait Gallery reassesses the youth mag’s influence on aesthetics and culture from 1980 to 2004 through the work of more than 80 photographers, curated by former art director Lee Swillingham and Vogue imagemaker Norbert Schoerner.
20 February until 18 May
Leigh Bowery! at Tate Modern
Leigh Bowery has had something of a renaissance of late, with the Fashion & Textile Museum bringing Taboo’s demimonde back to life with its ongoing exhibition Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of ’80s London. Tate Modern’s Leigh Bowery!, meanwhile, will trace the archetypal club kid’s journey from ’60s Australia onwards, encompassing everything from Michael Clark costumes to Lucian Freud portraiture, Nick Knight photos to Charles Atlas films, before revisiting Bowery’s final 1994 performance at London’s Freedom Café, attended by a young fan by the name of Alexander “Lee” McQueen.
27 February until 31 August
Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style at The Design Museum
The Design Museum’s latest thought-provoking exhibition traces the evolution of swimwear from 1920s lidos to Zaha Hadid’s London Aquatics Centre by way of more than 200 objects, from Pamela Anderson’s scarlet Baywatch suit to one of the earliest iterations of the bikini, debuted by ’40s French designer Louis Réard at the Molitor in Paris. Ahead of the opening on 28 March, dip a toe into the exhibition’s subject matter by ordering a copy of Lou Stoppard’s Pools: Lounging, Diving, Floating, Dreaming from Rizzoli.
28 March until 17 August
The Edwardians: Age of Elegance at The King’s Gallery
Until the outbreak of the First World War, King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra’s reign was remembered for its opulence and optimism. Revisit the period’s decadence at The King’s Gallery from 11 April, where The Edwardians: Age of Elegance will recapture the spirit of the age through 300 works from the Royal Collection: a never-before-seen study for Edward Burne-Jones’s “Sleeping Beauty”; myriad Fabergé treasures; the Dagmar necklace worn by Alexandra in her Coronation portrait; an early edition of The Glittering Plain from William Morris’s Kelmscott Press…
11 April until 23 November
Cartier at The V&A
Curated by Helen Molesworth and Vogue alumna Rachel Garrahan, the V&A’s Cartier retrospective features a veritable galaxy of diamonds from “the jeweller of kings and the king of jewellers”: the engagement ring Prince Rainier of Monaco presented to Grace Kelly, and which she wore in 1956’s High Society; the Williamson Diamond brooch commissioned by Queen Elizabeth II from the famed 23.6-carat pink diamond; and a menagerie of precious stone-studded serpents and panthers. Not to be missed.
12 April until 16 November
Cecil Beaton’s Garden Party at The Garden Museum
Beyond his role at Vogue, Cecil Beaton also served as a royal photographer and interior designer, irreverent dilettante and costume genius. For Cecil Beaton’s Garden Party, curator Emma House and designer Luke Edward Hall home in on the connecting thread between his endless creative projects: namely, an obsessive devotion to garden flowers. (This is a man who, when he moved into Rutland Court off Hyde Park, covered the living room floor with grass-green carpet which he starred with faux daisies.) Incorporating everything from portraits of Beaton in his fuchsia- and geranium-filled conservatory at Reddish to his costumes for Julie Andrews and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, it’s a garden party not to be missed.
14 May until 21 September
Dennis Morris: Music + Life at The Photographers’ Gallery
This year’s Met Gala theme, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, takes its inspiration from Professor Monica Miller’s Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity – with the accompanying exhibition set to study “the importance of clothing and style to the formation of Black identities in the Atlantic diaspora”, per Vogue Runway’s Nicole Phelps. Meanwhile, the V&A East will mark its long-awaited opening in 2026 with The Music is Black: A British Story, tracing Black British music’s influence on culture – and fashion – over the last 125 years. While you wait for both, decamp to the Photographers’ Gallery, whose Dennis Morris: Music + Life roams from the Black imagemaker’s shots of his teenage life in ’70s Britain to his portraits of Bob Marley, Oasis, Patti Smith and more.
27 June until 21 September
