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What is beauty? The concept is hard to define, if not impossible. Andre Breton, the French surrealist writer, said in his novel Nadja: “Beauty must be convulsive, or it will not be.” The British have tended to be more laid back, and say it is in the eye of the beholder, or is only skin deep.
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The V&A museum in South Kensington has decided to devote a whole week, January 24-28, to question, and Stephen Bayley, design consultant and former museum boss, has chosen 26 works from the V&A’s collection through which he explores the concept of the beautiful, and the different ways in which beauty is expressed across cultures.
Bayley is well qualified to do this. He set up the Boilerhouse project with Terence Conran in the 1980s, which hosted exhibitions on Issey Miyake, Coca Cola and Taste, and he later went on to set up the Design Museum.
The works in the V&A which he has chosen to represent different perceptions of beauty include a Sleeping Nymph by the Italian sculptor, Canova, the imperial throne of Emperor Ch’ien Lung, a plaster cast of David by Michelangelo, David Bailey’s photographs of Brigitte Bardot and a 1956 Braun SK55 record player which became known as Snow White’s Coffin.
On Friday, Beauty Week will culminate with a masked ball, but to kick off the week’s events Bayley has chaired a debate, Future Perfect, to explore the question of what beauty actually means and where its future lies. His panel of experts consisted of Dr Armand Marie Leroi, reader in evolutionary developmental biology at Imperial College London, Elaine Scarry, professor of aesthetics at Harvard University, Tiffanie Darke, Editor of The Sunday Times Style magazine and architect Doug Branson.
Bayley introduced the session by asking if beauty has become democratised; do we need it? Almost inevitably, discussion focussed around the recent advertising campaigns by the soap company Dove, which have featured photographs by Rankin of untypically old, fat or freckled models. The adverts suggest that the definition of beauty should be widened to inspire women to celebrate themselves as they are.
Tiffanie Darke said: “All women aspire to be beautiful. Beauty has to be aspirational. The concept behind the Dove campaign is that normal people can be beautiful too. It highlights inner beauty, although not many women would have plastic surgery or put on weight to look like the women featured.”
“What is fashion and what is beautiful has changed over the decades,” she added. “In the 1990s, for instance, there was grunge. Grunge wasn’t beautiful. But if you are continually presented with images you are going to believe that something is beautiful. Take Victoria Beckham; she has made the most of what she has got and taken the concept of a footballer’s wife to another level.”
Dr Leroi backed up Darke’s view that there can be no universal definition. “There is a local notion of beauty, which can be seen in the BBC’s programme, Tribe. Beauty is fundamental to all species, because of its relationship with reproduction, which Darwin examined in The Origin of Species.”
But as far as the human race was concerned, Darke was not convinced: “Beauty is artificial. If you look at pictures of models in magazines some have been changed to look younger, even in advertising campaigns. No offence to Estee Lauder, but they have used models like Andie Macdowell and Liz Hurley, who are in their forties. Fashion designers associate themselves with inaccessibility. The models in the Prada campaigns, for instance, look like aliens.”
Summing up a discussion which proved only that, whether it be Victoria Beckham, Brigitte Bardot or the Citroen car, everybody’s concept of beauty and what is beautiful is different, Stephen Bayley concluded with the old Polish proverb: “There is no such thing as an ugly woman, only a lack of vodka.”
The Beauty tour is on at V&A until 27 February 2005. Beauty Week is sponsored by Estee Lauder.
Times Online