Night and Day

If you have ever fantasised about spending an afternoon in a 1930’s pastel paradise, with guys in dapper suits and gals in flapper dresses partying to the strains of the saxophone, then the Night and Day: 1930’s Fashion and Photographs exhibition, current at the Fashion and Textile Museum (83 Bermondsey Street) is for you. The items of clothing are organised into themed tableaux bearing sumptuous names like “Happy Days are Here Again” and “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries”, followed up by “Thirty from the 1930’s”, that is, thirty photos of Cecil Beaton’s fashion creations. Really, your eyes will pop and your mouth water at the line-up of frothy, frilly day dresses and luxuriant evening gowns in the understated styles of the 1930’s. And the curators haven’t shied away from showing the darker side of life back then. In the Smaller Gallery, Brother Can You Spare a Dime is a rolling film montage showing the rise of fascism and revealing the shocking social inequality of the time. But hurry: you have only got till January 20, 2019, to see this exhibition.