CAPTURING PERFECTION

We go behind the scenes as a groundbreaking exhibition of Cecil Beaton's fashion photography reveals how he made royalty and the world's most famous stars look their best

- INTERVIEW: MIRANDA THOMPSON

In 1939, the photographer Cecil Beaton received a telephone call that he at first thought was a prank.

“Mr Cecil Beaton?” the caller asked. “We'd like you to come and photograph the Queen [Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother] tomorrow morning.”

Cecil put the phone down without saying anything. But it rang again, and this time the caller was more insistent.

The next day, he goes to the Palace, where he has been given an hour with the Queen. “That hour turns into virtually the whole day,” Robin continues. “Cecil runs out of film twice. The Queen is absolutely entranced. They change clothes many times, go inside, go outside.

Like so many high-profile figures of the 20th century, among them Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe, the Queen had fallen under the spell of the portrait photographer, who, as Robin explains, captured his subjects “at the peak of perfection; the most beautiful [they] have ever wanted to be and the most beautiful they ever should be”.

Now, his groundbreaking work is being celebrated in an exhibition, Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World, at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

It has been curated by Robin, a former Vogue picture editor whose formative work at the publisher Condé Nast was to photocopy and photograph a number of Cecil's images from its archive for a book.

"There have been many shows on Cecil Beaton, but this is the first that delves into his fashion photography and the stylish people who wore the clothes," he says.

The timeline of the show follows Cecil's stratospheric rise as he captured society's Bright Young Things in the 1920s, and concludes in 1956, when he turned his attention from fashion to the performing arts (he would go on to win global acclaim - and Academy Awards - for his costume design and art direction of My Fair Lady).