Long before Cecil Beaton pointed his camera at Marilyn Monroe or Audrey Hepburn, he was draping muslin over frames in his studio, testing how gaslight caught silk and working out exactly how a costume could turn a sitter into a character. That instinct for theatre, born from a lifelong love of the stage, runs through every photograph he ever took, and sits at the centre of Cecil Beaton: Staging Icons, a major exhibition at Harewood House Trust in Yorkshire until 4 October 2026.
Cecil Beaton by Cecil Beaton, 1933 © Cecil Beaton Archive. Conde Nast
Organised by the National Portrait Gallery in partnership with Harewood, the show brings together more than 50 photographs from the Gallery's collection, several never displayed publicly before. Beaton (1904–1980) photographed Hollywood royalty and actual royalty with the same theatrical eye: elaborate backdrops, painted scenery, heavy brocades and structured gowns built to hold their shape under studio lights. He treated the camera as a stage set, and the sitter's clothing as costume rather than dress.
Audrey Hepburn by Cecil Beaton, 1963 © Cecil Beaton Archive. Conde Nast
That crossover between photography and costume design ran through his whole career. Beaton designed for opera, ballet, film and theatre, dressing productions with the same appetite for spectacle that filled his portraits. His work on My Fair Lady brought him an Oscar for costume design in 1965, on top of the one he'd already won for Gigi in 1958, and both productions drew on his understanding of how fabric moves under lights and how a silhouette reads from a distance. Structured corsetry and Ascot grey silk were built to hold their shape on stage as much as in front of a lens: Beaton understood cloth as a tool for constructing identity, whether the sitter was a debutante or a monarch.
Marilyn Monroe™; Rights of Publicity and Persona Rights are used with permission of The Estate of Marilyn Monroe LLC. marilynmonroe.com Photo by Cecil Beaton, 1956 © Cecil Beaton Archive, Condé Nast .
His early studio portraits helped define the image of the ‘Bright Young Things’, with costume and interiors forming part of their carefully constructed identities. Sketching costumes and designing sets also allowed Beaton to work directly with line, proportion and fabric, translating ideas from paper into something that could be inhabited and seen under theatrical lighting. His royal portraits, made from 1939 onwards, apply the same instinct for costume to the crown. Princess Margaret and Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother appear draped in fabrics chosen to project intimacy alongside grandeur, tiaras and tulle doing as much work as the pose itself.
Cecil Beaton, Staging Icons, 2026. © Harewood House Trust. Photography by Tom Arber.
The Harewood strand of the exhibition adds texture of its own, drawing on the house's connections to the Lascelles family, whom Beaton photographed and visited repeatedly through the 1960s and 70s. A hand-drawn costume design tucked inside a Christmas card, kept in the Harewood archive, offers a rare glimpse of Beaton at work away from the studio, sketching the fabric he'd later stage under lights.
. . .
Further Information:
Cecil Beaton: Staging Icons runs at Harewood House until 4 October 2026.
. . .
Image Credits:
Lead: Princess Margaret by Cecil Beaton, 1950 © Cecil Beaton. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
All further images as credited in captions.