Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World is a captivating journey through Cecil Beaton’s photographs from 1922 to 1955, where glamour, resilience, and creativity converge to define an era that continues to captivate audiences today.
Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) was an extraordinary force in the 20th century British and American creative scenes. Renowned as a fashion illustrator, Oscar winning costume designer, social caricaturist, essayist, and decorated writer, Beaton’s impact spans the worlds of fashion, photography, and design. This publication will delve into the core of his career, focusing on his key influential contributions to fashion, a realm where he initially garnered acclaim. The publication accompanies the exhibition of the same name which opens at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in October 2025.
A virtuoso in capturing beauty, glamour, and star power, Beaton’s lens portrayed everyone of consequence in the interwar and early post-war eras. This book spotlights his ground-breaking fashion work, a pivotal aspect of his career that laid the foundation for his later successes. From his early snapshots of the Bright Young Things in the 1920s to becoming the star photographer of British Vogue by the age of 24, Beaton’s journey through High Society, which takes him from London to Paris, capital of the fashion world, and to New York and Hollywood, is documented in a chronological exploration of his most triumphant years, culminating in his Oscar winning designs for My Fair Lady.

Intimate handwritten manuscripts, letters and notebooks as well as rare first editions of books from the British Library are paired with the National Portrait Gallery’s outstanding collection of author portraits.

From William Shakespeare to Zadie Smith, Writers Revealed features over 70 poets, novelists and academics. Each short profile – which provides insight into the writers’ inspirations, struggles, and working practices – is beautifully illustrated with a portrait and manuscript.

Readers will enjoy in-depth encounters with some of the world’s most famous writers, including James Joyce, Bernardine Evaristo, Virginia Woolf, Bram Stoker, Jane Austen, Benjamin Zephaniah, and Angela Carter, and discover just what it is that makes these individuals so endlessly compelling.

“Cummins, typical Manc, combining art with a good time, a sense of beauty, which explains the iconic shots of Liam and Noel in Man City shirts: memorable, defining images.” – Miranda Sawyer, Observer

‘No one has captured the look of alternative UK music over the past half a century more tellingly than Kevin Cummins.’ Simon Armitage

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How does a band come into being? What are the myriad forces that shape their sound, look and identity? In 1993, Oasis signed to Creation Records and were shortly to begin recording their first album. The following year began with a masterplan – the creation of Oasis. At the centre of this enterprise was celebrated photographer Kevin Cummins, brought on board to help the band find a look that fitted their sound. In Oasis: The Masterplan we follow Cummins as he photographs the band as they cement their identity.

Noel Gallagher’s thoughts on football, fashion and music and his recollections of that formative year sit alongside those of Cummins himself. Throughout, we see how Oasis played with fashion and were taught how to pose and present themselves as they approached the summer when their first album, Definitely Maybe was released. The story from that moment on is well-known. Featuring 75% previously unseen images the book reveals just how effective the masterplan was to get them to that point.

The Royals: Tudors to Windsors features some of the earliest works in the National Portrait Gallery’s Collection alongside their most recent acquisitions.

This beautiful publication includes a timeline of key events and is illustrated through photographs and paintings of the British royal family, from King Henry VIII to King Charles III. Discover how the monarchy have positioned themselves within images of strength, domesticity and love; from traditional paintings by Nicholas Hilliard and Joshua Reynolds, to modern-day photographs by Dorothy Wilding and Nadav Kander. An introduction by Rab MacGibbon explains the history of the British royal family and their continued relevance today.

The Royals is a chronological, highly-illustrated book. Showcasing the Gallery’s collection of royal portraiture, works are accompanied by captions that explore reigns, relationships, biographies and portraiture. This publication is the newest addition to the National Portrait Gallery’s Royalty Book Collection.

The women who married Henry VIII have come to be encapsulated in a six-word rhyme: ‘Divorced, Beheaded, Died / Divorced, Beheaded, Survived’. But what were their real stories and legacies? Six Lives: The Stories of Henry VIII’s Queens reveals the extraordinary lives, and afterlives, of Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Katherine Parr. A source of fascination to historians and writers down the centuries, each of the queens, and their relationship with the king, has been the subject extensive research and a source of creative inspiration. This publication focuses on the material traces of the queens and the court culture that shaped their lives, extensively illustrated with their letters, heraldic devices, books, love tokens and, of course, their portraits.

The book begins with an examination of the women as cultural phenomena, looking at the ways in which their lives have inspired storytellers, from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII to the musical Six, and the role that portraiture has played in the performance of the queens’ stories. An overview essay examines the queens’ self-presentation through portraiture before individual chapters consider each of their relationships with the king, their social and familial networks and their patronage. Each chapter is accompanied by a thematic piece written by an expert scholar, taking a closer look at an element of court culture, ranging from music and jewellery, to court pageantry and heraldry.

The publication accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the National Portrait Gallery in Summer 2024.

“DAVID BOWIE WAS ON A CREATIVE JOURNEY THROUGH MUSIC,
FASHION AND ART. A JOURNEY UNPARALLELED IN POPULAR CULTURE.
WHAT A PRIVILEGE IT IS FOR US THAT KEVIN CUMMINS WAS THERE TO
CAPTURE THIS JOURNEY. HIS WONDERFUL BOOK SHOWS US EXACTLY
WHY BOWIE WAS SO UNIQUE.” -NOEL GALLAGHER

“KEVIN BRILLIANTLY CAPTURES THE ESSENCE OF THE GREAT MAN IN
THESE REMARKABLE PHOTOGRAPHS. CUMMINS IS SO ADEPT AT BREAKING
DOWN THE BARRIER OF THE CAMERA, YOU SENSE BOWIE IS COMPLETELY
AT EASE WHEN THEY WORKED TOGETHER” -GOLDIE

‘Whether you know him as Ziggy Stardust, Major Tom, or just David Jones, there is a David Bowie for everyone. Through Cummins’s photos, each of these iconic personas is brought before our eyes.’ DAILY MAIL

The career of celebrated photographer Kevin Cummins began on 29th June 1973 when, as a nineteen-year-old photography student, he photographed David Bowie. That image is now in the renowned photography collection of the V&A Museum and marked the beginning of Kevin Cummins’ four-decade-long visual chronicle of David Bowie’s remarkable career. David Bowie: Mixing Memory & Desire includes some of the best portraits of Bowie ever taken, the majority of which have never been published until now. From those legendary Bowie gigs in the early 1970s, through to a poignant image taken outside his apartment in New York in 2016, Cummins has captured the many faces of Bowie and created a book that is essential for Bowie fans everywhere.

David Hockney: Normandy Portraits illustrates around 40 acrylic on canvas works painted by Hockney at his Normandy studio – depicting his friends and visitors, including his partner JP, pop-star sensation Harry Styles, and the artist himself. This image-led book product will showcase a series of some previously unseen portraits, through 48 pages, uninterrupted by text, to allow readers to engage directly with the artworks that will be on display at the National Portrait Gallery as well as some added exclusives. These works highlight the ongoing importance of portraiture within the artist’s practice and demonstrate his sentiment that ‘drawings and paintings ? are a lot better than photographs to give you a sense of the person’. Hockney returned to painting after an intensive period spent depicting the Normandy landscape using an iPad. The portraits were painted quickly and directly onto the canvas without under drawing. As Hockney has said ‘to do a portrait slowly is a bit of a contradiction’.

Cecil Beaton: The Royal Portraits looks back in time to tell a very modern tale: the creation of a public image. Offering a fresh appraisal of Beaton’s portraits of the British royal family, the book explores not only the finished images but also the sittings in which they were created, revealing Beaton’s central role in shaping the public face of the House of Windsor and the ways in which he collaborated with his subjects.

Organised chronologically, from the 1930s to the 1970s, each of the book’s four chapters comprises an introductory essay, plates with extended captions, and one or two in-depth analyses of a particular sitting. Throughout, a variety of contextual material – contact sheets, test shots, out-takes, sketches, letters, journals, tear-sheets – helps build a detailed picture of Beaton’s working methods, the relationships he developed with his sitters, and how the eventual portraits were received.

Drawing on the Victoria and Albert Museum’s unparalleled collection of Beaton’s photographs, Cecil Beaton: The Royal Portraits will appeal not only to those interested in the photographer and his work, but also to anyone for whom the distinction between the private world and the public face of the royal family remains a source of fascination.