Vogue centenary exhibition styles fashion bible as cultural record

At first glance, it’s all chiffon and glamour: Kate Moss in a huge hooped skirt, photographed by Mario Testino in 2008; David Hockney posing with a sequin-clad Maudie James in 1968, as captured by Cecil Beaton; Anne Gunning, swathed in pink in Jaipur in the 50s, looking away from Norman Parkinson’s lens.

But the National Portrait Gallery’s major spring exhibition, celebrating 100 years of British Vogue, will argue that it is much more than a style magazine.

“As well as the fashion bible it has now become, it is a cultural record of the times,” said current editor Alexandra Shulman at a launch event for Vogue 100, A Century of Style, on Monday. The exhibition, opening on 11 February next year, will launch the magazine’s centenary celebrations, which also include a behind-the-scenes BBC2 documentary.

British Vogue first hit newsstands in 1916 and – as with many desirable fashion brands – the ability to leverage this illustrious heritage has been key to the magazine’s success.

The exhibition will highlight British Vogue’s work with “the greatest photographers in modern history”, said curator Robin Muir, including Edward Steichen, Helmut Newton, Man Ray and Irving Penn, and will include portraits of Marlene Dietrich, Henri Matisse, Francis Bacon and Fred Astaire.

The show will also incorporate moments of recent fashion history, such as the 1990 Peter Lindbergh cover – featuring Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford – widely regarded as defining the supermodel era, and the notorious 1993 Corinne Day shoot that helped introduce Kate Moss, and so-called “heroin chic”.