Fashion illustration at the Design Museum

The Design Museum has a great exhibition on at the moment. In fact, it has two. I took our niece Izzie to see the fashion illustration exhibition on the first floor and managed to keep the husband entertained to boot as the upper floor has a product design of the year exhibition that had recently opened. 


The Drawing Fashion exhibition pays homage to some of the incredible draughtsmanship clothes designers and their illustrators. From Dior and Chanel right through to Alexander McQueen and Viktor & Rolf, the exhibition encompasses nearly a century of fashion drawing. 


Many of the illustrations went on to tell fashion stories in Vogue - even to cover illustration status - while all brought an extra dimension to the fashion house concerned. The vintage magazines on show, complete with their original cover designs, were a treat in themselves. 


What amazed me was the diversity of the drawings. Some of the illustrators showcased in Drawing Fashion were able to turn their hands to several radically different styles. Pop Art might look simple, but illustrating such directional lines almost certainly wasn't. Yet the illustrator Antonio was able to flit from 1930s style graphics such as the image above, to Pop Art via the quite dandyish, Lautrec-like drawing of the illustration below. 

By its nature, Drawing Fashion was primarily a static image show, but the pictures were interspersed with videos showing illustrators at work. The 12 separate processes used in the production of one of the designs in which block printing and overlaid inks were involved was an apposite demonstration. 


Drawing Fashion is on at the Design Museum, Shad Thames on London's south bank until 6 March 2011. Entrance to the Design Museum covers both Drawing Fashion and the Brit Insurance Design of the Year exhibitions.