Cathy's Art Diary

Beautiful exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at the work of Gabrielle Chanel. I found the pieces in this show stunning and the narrative it built excellent, but I do have some criticism on the layout. The show is a sell out and so is very busy, particularly as I think people are becoming   members in order to get in. The layout is innovative but not for the numbers it is catering for, so the early section, which is laid out charmingly like small shop fronts, is very cramped. It becomes nearly impossible to read the information boards. I had done an online lecture on the show so could live without the boards but it was annoying, as was the showing of films in such narrow spaces that they caused bottle necks. While I’m moaning I’ll also add that the glass cases where too reflective so at times, particularly if a film was running nearby it was difficult to see the clothes. Moaning over because the clothes themselves were stunning. It was amazing to see so many...

Useful online lecture from the Victoria and albert Museum introducing their new exhibition on Gabrielle Chanel. The three curators of the show, Oriole Cullen, Stephanie Wood and Connie Burks led us though the structure of the exhibition.   They explained how they wanted to focus on Chanel’s design work and to just take a light touch to her life story. They discussed some of the choices they made in choosing the pieces to show and explained how they covered periods, such as the Second World War for which there were no exhibits using archive material. They used some beautiful pictures to illustrate the talk and I can’t wait to go and see the show. It’s on my list for next week.