The Victoria and Albert Museum in London is preparing to launch its show "Ocean Liners: Speed & Style," exploring the golden age of travel, from ship design to the fashion and lifestyle of those aboard the most famous ships of the era.
The show is a joint exhibition with the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts, where it had its first run last year. After its time at the V&A, it will serve as the inaugural exhibition at the hotly anticipated V&A Dundee, the V&A's first museum outside London.
The exhibition will showcase more than 250 objects, including paintings, sculpture, ship models, wall panels, furniture, fashion, textiles, photographs, posters and film -- all in the name of giving a better sense of the vessels that revolutionized ocean travel from the mid-19th century to the late-20th century.
Highlights include a Cartier tiara recovered in 1915 from the sinking Lusitania, a panel fragment from the first-class lounge of the Titanic, an Art Deco interior panel from the Smoking Room of the Normandie, and the Duke of Windsor's 1940s Goyard luggage.
Also featured will be work by Modernist artists, designers and architects who drew their inspiration from ocean liners, including Le Corbusier, Albert Gleizes, Charles Demuth and Eileen Gray.
While telling the design stories behind the world's most luxurious liners, the show will also look at the ships' famous passengers and the couturiers who relied on ocean travel to promote their designs -- seen through a Christian Dior suit worn by Marlene Dietrich on the Queen Mary in 1950, as well as Jeanne Lanvin's Salambo, a key flapper dress that belonged to Emilie Grigsby, who traveled on the Aquitania, Olympic and Lusitania in the 1910s and 1920s.
The class structures that developed on board the ships, and the promotional strategies used by shipping companies to promote the new idea of aspirational travel, will also be examined.
"Ocean Liners: Speed & Style" runs at the V&A London from February 3 to June 10, before opening in Dundee on September 15.
Comments
0 comment