Cecil Beaton is back. In the spring of 2020, the photographer’s work was on display for a mere six days before Covid forced the National Portrait Gallery’s Bright Young Things exhibition to close, never to return. This time, Beaton is in the company not only of his 1920s socialite chums but, frankly, everybody who was anybody. Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World is a more encyclopedic blockbuster of a show, featuring his portraits of sitters from Lillie Langtry (clasping lilies, naturally) to Marilyn Monroe, as well as extensive amounts of his fashion work, and some harder-hitting photojournalism.

Beaton made women look picture-perfect. In the earliest ultra-stylish studio portraits from the 1920s and 30s, his high-society sitters are all porcelain-skinned, not a blemish in sight, as if they were 20th-century Grecian goddesses. No wonder he was sought out by royalty (Princess Margaret in a controversial crinoline at a time of postwar austerity) and Hollywood stars (Leslie Caron, Venus-like in draped white silk). But Beaton wasn’t just a flatterer, producing vapid fashion plates. He was forever experimenting with photographic techniques such as multiple exposure, and it is fascinating to trace the journey from gelatin silver prints to the hyper-saturated palette of the postwar years, in shots often reminiscent of those of Madame Yevonde, another photographer who was the subject of a recent exhibition at this gallery. Beaton’s The Second Age of Beauty is Glamour, in gradations of scarlet, is a particular stunner.

In his early work, Beaton seems torn in inspiration between the powdered Rococo and the modernist aesthetic of the then-recent film Metropolis. Some of his sitters are surrounded by clouds of oversized blooms; others are dressed in, and pose against, sheets of what appears to be tin foil. Creative use of another newly invented everyday material is made in the enchanting Shooting Star, a photograph of Beaton’s doe-eyed sister Nancy, all dressed up with stars in her hair and an improbably pointy crown for a fancy dress party and framed by yards and yards of cellophane. Beaton’s backgrounds are always interesting and often do inventive things with texture. Sitters push their way through walls of torn paper or pop out of hat boxes, and pose in front of lace-like decoupage, rough hessian, shattered mirrors and paintings by Jackson Pollock. Beaton had a thing for graphic dots, stripes and stars, and in one of the last images in the exhibition, Audrey Hepburn (in costume for My Fair Lady) poses against a sequence of monochrome receding squares. Very 1960s.

Beaton said ‘I don’t want people to know me as I really am, but as I am trying and pretending to be.’ This exhibition has the scale and space to pay detailed attention to Beaton the man, as well as to his oeuvre, drawing upon the gallery’s collection of no fewer than 360 images of him, as well as numerous representations of his friends, associates and patrons: the Sitwells, Ottoline Morrell, Stephen Tennant et al. We encounter Beaton in numerous guises: as a child in 1910 reading his mother’s fashion magazines in bed, as a Harlequin in 1920s Venice, as a 1930s matinée idol, as a smart RAF officer, as a dapper older gentleman, and not least as numerous women. Refreshingly, no attempt has been made to impose a crassly anachronistic LGBTQ+ narrative. Beaton’s sexuality and penchant for cross-dressing are evident throughout the exhibition and allowed to be – no didactic commentary required.

Just as we see different faces to Beaton himself, so, too, are we shown some very different facets to his work. Fashion sells to museum-goers nowadays, but it is not the only thing this exhibition is about. If Beaton is primarily associated with fantasy, he could also do realism. His wartime photographs, of Arab legionnaires, Chinese commandos and RAF officers planning manoeuvres, are treated with the same attention to flawless composition and clarity of line as his portraits, but offer a glimpse into a milieu that seems far removed from the frivolities of fashion. The two worlds coincide in Fashion is Indestructible (1941), an image of a female BBC announcer in utility wear in the bombed-out ruins of Middle Temple. Another image, of a bandaged three-year-old in a hospital bed, clutching a soft toy, served as an important piece of wartime propaganda, appearing on the cover of Life magazine and doing much in the US to elicit public sympathy for Londoners’ plight.

The exhibition’s curation, by Robin Muir, a photographic historian and Contributing Editor to Vogue, is highly successful. Muir quite simply does what is necessary to show Beaton’s images off to best effect. Wall tones do more than many visitors realise to make or break the effectiveness of an exhibition’s design, but Muir gets everything just right, with sympathetic moss green, duck-egg blue or fuchsia walls here and there, and clever use of the architectural features of the exhibition space itself to frame some outsize Vogue fashion plates. Sometimes the walls have texture, too. In the ‘gallery of beauties’, garlands of white paper flowers spill out across a midnight blue background, picking out a motif from a portrait of Sita Devi, Princess Karam of Kapurthala. It is tastefully done, always resisting the temptation to descend into kitsch.

Of course, there is undeniably a side to Beaton that is all about surface, artifice, fantasy and disguise. ‘It’s the slightly shallow narcissism that puts you off, ’ squirmed one woman within my earshot. Perhaps this is not an exhibition for the austere modernist, then, but if you are a fan of interwar and mid-20th-century glamour, and of Beaton’s unashamedly frou-frou version of it, you will be in heaven.

Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World is on at the National Portrait Gallery until 11 January 2026.