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Membership Newsletter Autumn/Winter 2017

Diary dates

A New Way In New Members’ Room Members’ Reception Desk

V&A Photography Centre Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a Classic Ocean Liners: Speed & Style

Members’ Events Members’ Benefits and Offers

Victoria and Albert Museum South Kensington London SW7 2RL vam.ac.uk

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boats (notably in the British self-build Mirror dinghy of the 1950s and 1960s), in cars (see the chassis of the 1962 Marcos Gullwing) and in aeroplanes. Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Vega, the plane she took on her record-breaking solo flights across the Atlantic and from the west to east coasts of America in 1932, was constructed from bag-moulded plywood. Earhart became an international celebrity, yet her plywood Vega soon began to appear dated. Metal was cast as the material of the future, and the Electra that she was flying on her disappearance in 1937 was Lockheed’s first all-metal model. Indeed, this might have marked the end for wooden planes, but for the advent of the Second World War and the subsequent metal shortages. Stepping into the breach, the engineer and pilot Geoffrey de Havilland designed the Mosquito, a plane intended for fighting and high-flying reconnaissance. A plywood fuselage built in two halves with a single-piece wing moulded from a stress-skin plywood panel, the Mosquito was a simple design suited for high-speed production.

Significantly, de Havilland persuaded the British government to opt for a light plane that was able to outrun the enemy rather than a slower one weighed down by defensive armament. The Mosquito was hugely successful in combat and was said to have turned the leading Nazi and veteran pilot Hermann Göring “green and yellow with envy”.

While plywood was reviled in the late Victorian interior, its fortunes improved with the emergence of the moderne style of the 1930s. A material well suited to the creation of flawless flat surfaces, it lent itself to the kind of glossy wall panelling that became a feature of well-heeled offices, ocean liners, smart shops and expensive private homes. Designed by the Swede Rolf Engströmer in 1933, the entrance to Eltham Palace in south-east London is a particularly beautiful example. Much more often, however, plywood’s role in architecture and interiors has been workaday. From the 1920s to the present day, its primary use has been in the shuttering for poured concrete. Look at any contemporary building site and, chances are, plywood is playing its part.

For all the material’s multiple roles, its chief association in the minds of most design enthusiasts is with iconic twentieth-century chairs. From the sinuous all-wood pieces designed by Alvar Aalto and Marcel Breuer in the 1930s to the simple wooden-seated, metal-legged chairs of the post-war period created by Charles and Ray Eames, Arne Jacobsen and Robin Day, many of these remain in production.

Placing such a chair in a contemporary interior is a means of signalling an ongoing enthusiasm for modernism. Plywood furniture was not always a byword for restraint, however. In the 1850s the New York furniture maker John Henry Belter designed plywood bed heads and sofas that were decorated to within an inch of their lives. Showing the material in every guise, the V&A exhibition is set to turn many an assumption on its head.

Iwould say that plywood had a bad name in the late nineteenth century, but it didn’t, because it didn’t have a name at all. Around 150 years ago the material we now know as plywood was called several different things, among them veneer work, built-up work and glued-up board. Whatever the term, however, the reputation was not good.

This was, in part, the fault of Charles Dickens. Among the minor characters in his widely read 1865 novel Our Mutual Friend were the couple Mr and Mrs Veneering:

“Mr and Mrs Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their plate was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new…”

Veneering, which is intrinsic to plywood, is cast by the novelist as untrustworthy. The literal superficiality of a thin wood surface is taken to imply lack of cultural and moral depth. It’s likely that Our Mutual Friend did more to harm the reputation of veneers than any other single published source, yet Dickens was not the first to cast aspersions on the material. He had almost certainly picked up the theme from the cultural critic George Henry Francis, who, a decade earlier, had written an essay entitled The Age of Veneer. Mounting an attack on Victorian advertising, Francis used the term “veneering” as a metaphor for deception.

The co-curator of the V&A’s Plywood: Material of the Modern World exhibition, Christopher Wilk, is passionate about plywood, yet he delights in finding examples of his pet material being slighted. Interviewed shortly before the launch of the show, he mentioned an instance from last year of a British furniture shop selling itself with

the slogan “no veneer in ’ere” (a claim it had to withdraw after its “oak wraps” were reported to the Advertising Standards Authority). “When I started this research, I didn’t know what I would discover, but among the biggest and most pleasing surprises has been this cultural history,” Wilk said. Tracing plywood’s history back to its earliest known use in Ancient Egypt (a coffin made from panels of six-ply wood joined with pegs was found in the Step Pyramid at Saqqara), he argues that, in spite of its present-day ubiquity, the story of the material is “genuinely unknown… It has been hidden in plain sight for more than a century”.

Before going any further, let’s be clear about what Wilk means when he talks about plywood. First used in 1906 and becoming the standard name only in the 1930s, the term applies to a material made from a stack of thin sheets of wood, usually odd in number, glued together with the grain of each tier running perpendicular to that of the next. Plywood is distinguished from other kinds of engineered wood such as MDF or chipboard in that it is built from layers rather than being moulded from chips or fibres. It was invented for practical reasons. Crossing the grains of the wood creates a unique combination of strength and lightness, and the introduction of waterproof glue in the early twentieth century rendered the layers comparatively weatherproof. The material became stigmatised after the introduction of the rotary veneer cutter in the mid-nineteenth century made it inexpensive to produce. At that point, the reputation of the onceluxurious veneer took a tumble.

In terms of volume, the most significant uses of plywood in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century were in tea chests and sewing machine covers – in effect, two kinds of box. The chests were made in England from plywood imported from the Tallinn-based company Venesta (then in Russia, now in Estonia) and used for transporting vast quantities of tea from the British colonies to far-flung markets. The covers were made by the American sewing

as with the formaldehyde crisis, there is now a set of guidelines aimed at promoting its sustainability. That said, regarding both health and environmental worries, it remains the case that plywood buyers need beware.

The “rise” of plywood is down to its particular propensity to be the material of computer-aided craft. Light yet strong, easy to cut and mouldable, it has become the most widely used stuff of the “makerspace” – places where amateurs can access equipment to make new designs or modify existing ones. Likewise, it is a feature of utopian digital ventures such as WikiHouse, an open-source project for designing and building houses. Broadly speaking, it seems that plywood is embraced at times or in places where there is an appetite for the new and falters at moments when fear of change becomes paramount. Returning to the British furniture shop’s 2016 slogan “no veneer in ’ere”, perhaps this false pledge was symptomatic of a nation that was deeply apprehensive about its future.

Emily King is a writer and curator specialising in graphic design Plywood: Material of the Modern World The Porter Gallery, V&A, London SW7 (020 7942 2000, vam.ac.uk), 15 July – 12 November. Sponsored by MADE.COM, supported by the American Friends of the V&A

Facing page: moulded plywood chair designed by Grete Jalk, 1963. Above: Singer sewing machine with moulded plywood cover, 1888. Both © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

As a forthcoming V&A exhibition is set to turn many an assumption about the material on its head, the co-curator talks to Emily King about the cultural history of plywood. Could it actually act as a barometer for the climate of a nation –embraced when there is an appetite for the new and faltering at moments when fear of change becomes paramount?

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Bejewelled Treasures: The a l Thani Colle CT ion

Curator Susan Stronge introduces her highlights of a sparkling V&A exhibition featuring more than 100 objects made in India or inspired by the nation’s sophisticated jewellery traditions

Ajade wine cup made for a Mughal emperor, a jewelled tiger-head finial from the throne of Tipu Sultan, an emerald given by a Sikh maharaja to his young Spanish wife in the early twentieth century and Art Deco jewels by famous Parisian houses such as Cartier will all intrigue visitors to ‘Bejewelled Treasures’.

The forthcoming V&A exhibition will feature a selection of more than 100 objects from the collection formed by His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al Thani of Qatar, with three important additional loans from the Royal Collection Trust. These spectacular pieces, made in India or inspired by the country’s sophisticated jewellery traditions, date from the early seventeenth century to the present day.

Presented in a series of interlocking hexagonal spaces, the show begins with a dazzling array of unmounted precious stones. India was the major source of diamonds in the world until the eighteenth century and the exploitation of mines in Brazil. The purity and size of those from Golconda have a legendary allure. Examples in the collection include one of the two very large diamonds presented to

Jewels of another crown

Queen Charlotte in 1767 by the Nawab of Arcot, who then controlled the mines. These and other remarkable diamonds are shown in the exhibition with spinels, the red stones valued more highly than any other precious stone at the Mughal court, Colombian emeralds brought by Portuguese traders to India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and sapphires of beautiful colour that probably came from Sri Lanka.

From ancient times in India, precious stones were secured in jewellery by highly refined and therefore extremely soft gold. This allowed goldsmiths to set stones of any size or shape in delicate patterns across the surfaces of gold ornaments – and even into hardstones such as jade and rock crystal.

The hidden backs or inner surfaces of these gold jewels were decorated with brilliantly coloured enamel. The master craftsmen of the Mughal court had embraced this European technique by the late sixteenth century. They created a new style that became one of the greatest arts of the imperial goldsmiths’ workshops. Its typical palette of white ground with flowering plants in translucent red and green was adopted in centres across the provinces of the empire. The combination of kundan settings and enamelled gold also left an artistic legacy that survives to the present day, notably in the Rajasthani city of Jaipur.

The many different processes used in making enamelled gold jewellery are demonstrated in films specially commissioned by the V&A for the exhibition.

The collection includes pieces made in the Muslim courts of the Mughal emperors and the south Indian Tipu Sultan of Mysore, as well as the Hindu courts of rulers of Rajasthan. A jewelled sword from the collections of the Nizams of Hyderabad demonstrates the increasing influence of Western stone cutting and setting in the nineteenth century, while jewels made by European houses indicate the more significant impact of India on Art Deco jewellery in the early twentieth century.

These spectacular jewels highlight the exceptional and enduring skills of goldsmiths in the Indian subcontinent. They also reveal the complex cross-cultural influences across centuries that continue to inspire some of the best contemporary jewellery designers in India and Europe.

Susan Stronge is a senior curator in the Asian Department and curator of ‘Bejewelled Treasures: The Al Thani Collection’. She specialises in the arts of India’s courts from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century

‘Bejewelled Treasures: The Al Thani Collection’, sponsored by Wartski, V&A, London SW7 (020 7942 2000, www.vam.ac.uk), 21 November – 28 March

The “Idol’s Eye” 70.21 carats

This Golconda diamond is notable for its size and for the rarity of its light blue colour. It first appeared in a London auction in 1865. Its name suggested it had been stolen from the statue of an Indian deity, a tale probably invented to increase its appeal to potential Victorian buyers.

All images: the Al Thani Collection

© Servette Overseas Limited 2014.

Photos: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd

Bejewelled Treasures: The a l Thani Colle CT ion

Curator Susan Stronge introduces her highlights of a sparkling V&A exhibition featuring more than 100 objects made in India or inspired by the nation’s sophisticated jewellery traditions

A

jade wine cup made for a Mughal emperor, a jewelled tiger-head finial from the throne of Tipu Sultan, an emerald given by a Sikh maharaja to his young Spanish wife in the early twentieth century and Art Deco jewels by famous Parisian houses such as Cartier will all intrigue visitors to ‘Bejewelled Treasures’.

The forthcoming V&A exhibition will feature a selection of more than 100 objects from the collection formed by His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al Thani of Qatar, with three important additional loans from the Royal Collection Trust. These spectacular pieces, made in India or inspired by the country’s sophisticated jewellery traditions, date from the early seventeenth century to the present day.

Presented in a series of interlocking hexagonal spaces, the show begins with a dazzling array of unmounted precious stones. India was the major source of diamonds in the world until the eighteenth century and the exploitation of mines in Brazil. The purity and size of those from Golconda have a legendary allure. Examples in the collection include one of the two very large diamonds presented to

Jewels of another crown

Queen Charlotte in 1767 by the Nawab of Arcot, who then controlled the mines. These and other remarkable diamonds are shown in the exhibition with spinels, the red stones valued more highly than any other precious stone at the Mughal court, Colombian emeralds brought by Portuguese traders to India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and sapphires of beautiful colour that probably came from Sri Lanka.

From ancient times in India, precious stones were secured in jewellery by highly refined and therefore extremely soft gold. This allowed goldsmiths to set stones of any size or shape in delicate patterns across the surfaces of gold ornaments – and even into hardstones such as jade and rock crystal.

The hidden backs or inner surfaces of these gold jewels were decorated with brilliantly coloured enamel. The master craftsmen of the Mughal court had embraced this European technique by the late sixteenth century. They created a new style that became one of the greatest arts of the imperial goldsmiths’ workshops. Its typical palette of white ground with flowering plants in translucent red and green was adopted in centres across the provinces of the empire. The combination of kundan settings and enamelled gold also left an artistic legacy that survives to the present day, notably in the Rajasthani city of Jaipur.

The many different processes used in making enamelled gold jewellery are demonstrated in films specially commissioned by the V&A for the exhibition.

The collection includes pieces made in the Muslim courts of the Mughal emperors and the south Indian Tipu Sultan of Mysore, as well as the Hindu courts of rulers of Rajasthan. A jewelled sword from the collections of the Nizams of Hyderabad demonstrates the increasing influence of Western stone cutting and setting in the nineteenth century, while jewels made by European houses indicate the more significant impact of India on Art Deco jewellery in the early twentieth century.

These spectacular jewels highlight the exceptional and enduring skills of goldsmiths in the Indian subcontinent. They also reveal the complex cross-cultural influences across centuries that continue to inspire some of the best contemporary jewellery designers in India and Europe.

Susan Stronge is a senior curator in the Asian Department and curator of ‘Bejewelled Treasures: The Al Thani Collection’. She specialises in the arts of India’s courts from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century

‘Bejewelled Treasures: The Al Thani Collection’, sponsored by Wartski, V&A, London SW7 (020 7942 2000, www.vam.ac.uk), 21 November – 28 March

The “Idol’s Eye” 70.21 carats

This Golconda diamond is notable for its size and for the rarity of its light blue colour. It first appeared in a London auction in 1865. Its name suggested it had been stolen from the statue of an Indian deity, a tale probably invented to increase its appeal to potential Victorian buyers.

All images: the Al Thani Collection

© Servette Overseas Limited 2014.

Photos: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd

Bejewelled Treasures: The a l Thani Colle CT ion

Necklace of spinels

The Mughal emperors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries valued the red stones mined in Badakhshan, central Asia, more highly than any other precious stone. One of these is engraved with a minute inscription to the Mughal emperor Akbar.

Dagger and scabbard

Nephrite jade set with rubies and emeralds in gold, watered steel blade with gold overlaid decoration

Mughal court, c.1610–1620

Nephrite jade was imported into the Mughal empire from Khotan by the late sixteenth century. It was rare, and this,

combined with the high quality of the precious stones, suggests the dagger was made in the court workshops.

Wine cup of the Mughal emperor Jahangir Nephrite jade, dated 1607–1608

The emperor’s cup is the earliest dated imperial Mughal jade artefact. It was made in 1016 of the Islamic era, and in the second year of Jahangir’s reign. Its simple form is ornamented with very fine calligraphy, including Persian verses. Persian was the cultural language of the court and the administrative language of the empire.

Belt brooch

Emeralds, sapphires and diamonds in platinum and gold Cartier, Paris, 1922 Cartier’s jewellery at this period was often inspired by eclectic oriental influences. The association in this piece of emeralds and sapphires evokes traditional Mughal jewellery, while the palmettes on either side of the large central emerald combine Chinese and Middle Eastern motifs.

Turban jewel

Enamelled gold with diamonds and spinels

Jaipur or Hyderabad, nineteenth century

Traditional gold Mughal jewellery combines two fundamental techniques. The front or outer surfaces of an ornament are set with gemstones using highly refined gold, or kundan. At the imperial court, this ancient technique of the subcontinent was combined with the foreign technique of enamelling, confined to the back or inner surfaces of jewellery.

Bejewelled Treasures: The a l Thani Colle CT ion

Necklace of spinels

The Mughal emperors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries valued the red stones mined in Badakhshan, central Asia, more highly than any other precious stone. One of these is engraved with a minute inscription to the Mughal emperor Akbar.

Dagger and scabbard

Nephrite jade set with rubies and emeralds in gold, watered steel blade with gold overlaid decoration

Mughal court, c.1610–1620

Nephrite jade was imported into the Mughal empire from Khotan by the late sixteenth century. It was rare, and this,

combined with the high quality of the precious stones, suggests the dagger was made in the court workshops.

Wine cup of the Mughal emperor Jahangir Nephrite jade, dated 1607–1608

The emperor’s cup is the earliest dated imperial Mughal jade artefact. It was made in 1016 of the Islamic era, and in the second year of Jahangir’s reign. Its simple form is ornamented with very fine calligraphy, including Persian verses. Persian was the cultural language of the court and the administrative language of the empire.

Belt brooch

Emeralds, sapphires and diamonds in platinum and gold Cartier, Paris, 1922 Cartier’s jewellery at this period was often inspired by eclectic oriental influences. The association in this piece of emeralds and sapphires evokes traditional Mughal jewellery, while the palmettes on either side of the large central emerald combine Chinese and Middle Eastern motifs.

Turban jewel

Enamelled gold with diamonds and spinels

Jaipur or Hyderabad, nineteenth century

Traditional gold Mughal jewellery combines two fundamental techniques. The front or outer surfaces of an ornament are set with gemstones using highly refined gold, or kundan. At the imperial court, this ancient technique of the subcontinent was combined with the foreign technique of enamelling, confined to the back or inner surfaces of jewellery.

Political knit wear

The latest addition to the Rapid Response Collection is a modest object that packs a real punch. Marie Foulston discusses how the Pussyhat has pulled the wool from over our eyes

Pussyhat

Maker: Jayna Zweiman

Date: 2017

Material: wool

Origin: Los Angeles

On 21 January 2017 a knitted pink hat became a global symbol of female solidarity and the power of collective action. Known as the Pussyhat, it was worn by many of the half a million people who took part in the Women’s March on Washington that day. The Pussyhat Project aimed to turn the event into a “sea of pink”, creating a striking visual statement of unity for women’s rights in protest against the incoming Trump administration. An estimated 4 million people took part in sister marches in more than 600 cities around the world on the same day.

On 13 February 2017 one of these Pussyhats entered the V&A’s collections as part of the Rapid Response Collecting project, a strand of the museum’s collecting activity that acquires objects in a timely response to major moments in history that shape or are shaped by design, architecture and technology. It was knitted by Jayna Zweiman, who alongside Krista Suh co-founded the Pussyhat Project shortly after the 2016 US presidential election. The pair teamed up with Kat Coyle, owner of Los Angeles yarn

shop the Little Knittery, who designed a simple pattern that was shared publicly to encourage people to knit their own Pussyhat to wear during the march or to donate to others marching. The cat-ear design was developed in part as a response to an Access Hollywood recording of Donald Trump released during the election campaign, in which he claimed “to grab them by the pussy” – a comment he later put down to “locker room banter”.

What started as an LA community craft project grew rapidly, eventually gaining global support as people shared the pattern and photos of their hats across social media, from the knitting community site Ravelry to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. It even featured on the cover of Time magazine in February 2017. While materially the Pussyhat is a modest object made of wool, it is also a product of digital design and culture. The scale of its success reflects the impact digital communication platforms have had on the evolving relationship between craft and objects of contemporary protest.

Marie Foulston is a curator in the Design, Architecture and Digital Department

Above: Pussyhat on display in the Rapid Response Collecting gallery © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Facing page: view of the Women’s March on Washington from the roof of the Voice of America building on 21 January 2017

Political knit wear

The latest addition to the Rapid Response Collection is a modest object that packs a real punch. Marie Foulston discusses how the Pussyhat has pulled the wool from over our eyes

Pussyhat

Maker: Jayna Zweiman

Date: 2017

Material: wool

Origin: Los Angeles

On 21 January 2017 a knitted pink hat became a global symbol of female solidarity and the power of collective action. Known as the Pussyhat, it was worn by many of the half a million people who took part in the Women’s March on Washington that day. The Pussyhat Project aimed to turn the event into a “sea of pink”, creating a striking visual statement of unity for women’s rights in protest against the incoming Trump administration. An estimated 4 million people took part in sister marches in more than 600 cities around the world on the same day.

On 13 February 2017 one of these Pussyhats entered the V&A’s collections as part of the Rapid Response Collecting project, a strand of the museum’s collecting activity that acquires objects in a timely response to major moments in history that shape or are shaped by design, architecture and technology. It was knitted by Jayna Zweiman, who alongside Krista Suh co-founded the Pussyhat Project shortly after the 2016 US presidential election. The pair teamed up with Kat Coyle, owner of Los Angeles yarn

shop the Little Knittery, who designed a simple pattern that was shared publicly to encourage people to knit their own Pussyhat to wear during the march or to donate to others marching. The cat-ear design was developed in part as a response to an Access Hollywood recording of Donald Trump released during the election campaign, in which he claimed “to grab them by the pussy” – a comment he later put down to “locker room banter”.

What started as an LA community craft project grew rapidly, eventually gaining global support as people shared the pattern and photos of their hats across social media, from the knitting community site Ravelry to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. It even featured on the cover of Time magazine in February 2017. While materially the Pussyhat is a modest object made of wool, it is also a product of digital design and culture. The scale of its success reflects the impact digital communication platforms have had on the evolving relationship between craft and objects of contemporary protest.

Marie Foulston is a curator in the Design, Architecture and Digital Department

2017

Above: Pussyhat on display in the Rapid Response Collecting gallery © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Facing page: view of the Women’s March on Washington from the roof of the Voice of America building on 21 January

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A tr ibute to Moir a Gemmill

– Christine Murray celebrates the achievements of the former V&A director of projects and design, who died in a bicycle accident in April

Before I met Moira Gemmill, I had already fallen in love with her V&A: the new galleries, flooded with daylight; fusty glass cases banished in favour of artefacts proudly on show, up close where you can see them; new architecture boldly colliding with the historic, enhancing both and emasculating neither. That was Moira – the V&A director of projects and design who died in a tragic bicycle accident in London in April.

As I grew to know Moira, I saw how much of the work commissioned under V&A FuturePlan embodied her own values, her spirit. She shone brightly in any room, and she had a way of letting fresh ideas in. What Moira accomplished over her thirteen years at the museum feels a natural part of the V&A now, but her work was nothing short of visionary. Seventy per cent of the museum has been transformed over the past decade through the work she commissioned from a wide range of architects and designers. Imagine the dust from the constant construction; the fear of disruption or damage by conservationists; the hesitancy in combining contemporary architecture with a Grade I-listed building. But Moira’s fearless approach has been proven again and again – by the V&A’s soaring visitor numbers and its influence as the world’s leading museum of art and design.

Over lunch some years ago, Moira asked what I thought about the way the V&A exhibits architecture. She was speaking about its collection of drawings and models, but I said its greatest collection was now the building itself, with her as curator, collecting galleries designed by leading talents, while preserving the best of the historic elements. Hers is a legacy fitting to the ambitions of the V&A. From the Sackler Centre to the Medieval & Renaissance Galleries, Moira’s

contribution to this collection will culminate in the opening of its most ambitious projects: the new V&A space adjacent to Exhibition Road, designed by A_LA architects, in 2017; and V&A Dundee, designed by Kengo Kuma, in 2018.

If the pressure ever got to her, I never saw her falter or sweat – but she would argue. We came to loggerheads once over a news story I’d written about one of her projects at the V&A. She was angry when it went to press, but she never held a grudge. Moira had a rare combination of grace and purpose. She grew up in a farming family in Kintyre, Scotland, and went on to study graphic design and photography at the Glasgow School of Art. As director of projects and design, her work was an extension of the V&A’s original mission, which in her own words was: “To educate designers, manufacturers and the public in the principles of good design. From the very beginning, the building was integral to this mission. As much a part of the exhibits as the objects it housed, it was intended to delight and inspire.”

What would the V&A be without its lovely café, the redeveloped Cast Courts, the Ceramics Galleries, even the wonderful toilets – Moira always insisted on “award-winning loos”. Before her death, she had recently taken up a new job for the Royal Collection Trust, to oversee the redevelopment of places such as Windsor and Balmoral Castle. She would have done brilliantly, making these castles feel relevant, contemporary and open to their visitors.

Moira was not only a champion of design, believing in its power to make the world a better place to live in, she also believed in people, and knew how to inspire them to do their best work. She was a generous supporter of young talent, and gave many architects their first significant commissions.

In 2010 I asked Moira if she would join the jury for the Women in Architecture Awards, founded to help to redress the gender imbalance among architects (the profession is just 30 per cent female). She didn’t hesitate. We would work together over the next four years, with Moira as a passionate member of the jury and a spokesperson for the cause – even giving women architects work through the V&A. Her support inspired me to work harder, and her last email to me was one of encouragement: “Women in architecture need you.”

And we need you, Moira, to help us to see the best and most sustainable way to reinvigorate great buildings. I will miss your vision of a bright future carried forth with the best of the past. I will miss all the ways in which you had yet to change the world. I will miss laughing with you, arguing with you and looking up to you as a role model. As for your professional legacy and its power to delight and inspire, well done. Every time I enter those lovely, lightfilled galleries I’ll think of you.

Christine Murray is editor of The Architectural Review and founder of the Women in Architecture Awards

Left: Moira Gemmill. Photo: Peter Kelleher © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Right: the Medieval & Renaissance Galleries at the V&A.

Photo: Thierry Bal © V&A Magazine/Thierry Bal

“Her work was nothing short of visionary”

“As much a part of the exhibits as the objects it housed, from the very beginning the building was intended to delight and inspire”

shoes: pleasure and pain

Of all the non-reproductive body parts arousing sexual interest, the most common, by far, is the foot. And just as lingerie is to the genitalia, footwear is also frequently eroticised, becoming for many fetishists “an aid to tumescence”, as the British sexologist Havelock Ellis rather indelicately put it. “In a small but not inconsiderable minority of persons,” wrote Ellis in his 1927 book Studies in the Psychology of Sex, “the foot or boot becomes the most attractive part of a woman, and in some morbid cases the woman herself is regarded as a comparatively unimportant appendage.”

Consider, for instance, the case of the eighteenth-century French novelist Rétif de la Bretonne, whose irreverent works are filled with sordid tales of his foot-related fancies. (The eponymous “retifism” is an arcane term for foot fetishism.) “This taste for the beauty of the feet,” reflects Rétif of his upbringing in Burgundy, “was so powerful in me that it unfailingly aroused desire… When I entered a house and saw the boots arranged in a row, as is the custom, I would tremble with pleasure; I blushed and lowered my eyes as if in the presence of the girls themselves.”

What was especially enticing about shoes to Rétif, Ellis tells us, was his knowledge that they had absorbed the essence of the feet he so desired. “He would kiss with rage and transport whatever had come in close contact with the woman he adored.” In fact, he wished desperately to be buried with a distinctive pair of green slippers with rose heels and borders worn by a woman whose feet he’d long been enamoured by.

This intense craving for objects that have made intimate physical contact with the real subject of desire lies at the heart of sexual fetishism. For those who are aroused by feet, a pair of brand new, unworn, store-bought shoes is far less desirable than footwear still warm from an attractive owner’s aromatic soles. In order for the object to become a sexual surrogate, in other words, it must first be imbued

(as if by contagion or magic) with the singular characteristics of the person who inspires lust.

Like most patterns of atypical sexual desire, there are far more men who are self-professed foot fetishists than there are females. Many of these men believe that the seeds of their yearnings were planted through some innocuous encounter with feet or shoes at a young age. And within this “podophilic” group there is also considerable diversity, including gay and bisexual shoe lovers. In a study of gay male foot fetishists, subjects reported becoming most excited by the sensory tapestry they’d come to associate with the stereotypical shoe styles of their preferred sexual partners. “[It’s] the odours and the corresponding image,” explained one of the interviewees, “docksiders and preppies, sneakers and young punks, boots and dominant men.”

For straight men, however, it is most often the petite female foot that serves as the aesthetic ideal, and so it is the small, delicate shoe that has captured the male imagination in both myth and reality. The famous story of Cinderella’s glass slipper has its roots in an ancient Egyptian legend in which a courtesan’s sandal is carried off by an eagle and dropped in the king’s lap, who would not rest until he made the owner of that impossibly small shoe his queen. Perhaps nowhere were women’s demure feet appreciated more than in China, with its ancient practice of female “foot binding” (there are still ageing survivors of it in some rural areas). Although the precise origins behind this painful ritual – one in which young girls’ feet were tightly bound so that they atrophied permanently into small stumps – are hotly debated, the earliest examples of Chinese pornography show men fondling women’s tiny feet. Some scholars have likened it to the use of corsets by European women in the Victorian era, whereby an inherently desirable attribute (whether a slim waist or small foot) is further accentuated through a contemporary, if cruel, fashion trend.

It may not be as inhumane as foot binding, but women’s wearing of high heels, which has the effect of making their feet appear smaller, can be painful in its own right. With too-frequent use, these stylish yet merciless must-haves have been known to convert the perfect female foot into a hammer-toed, callused appendage replete with bunions and corns. In some women, they’ve led to shattered ankle bones, chronic lower back pain and even osteoarthritis of the knees.

Left: shocking-pink leather stiletto heeled boots, by Jimmy Choo, 2005. Photo: Jaron James, V&A Photographic Studio © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

“When I entered a house and saw the boots arranged in a row, I would tremble with pleasure.” Why do women’s shoes become an erotic object in the minds of so many men? Jesse Bering uncovers the essence of foot fetishism

Creating layouts Type Images White space Grid

Scale CONTRAST Colour

Texture

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at his memorial service, held at St Paul’s Cathedral in 2010. It is the cutting and slashing that made his muse Isabella Blow liken him to a peeping Tom – and fascinates ‘Savage Beauty’ curator Claire Wilcox.

Like much of the unfortunate controversy surrounding McQueen’s personal life, obfuscation concerning his early years tended to be self-generated. The first and perhaps only reference a fashion student will have about his Savile Row training is the obscenities the designer told many sources he had scrawled inside the Prince of Wales’s suits. Whether real or imagined, Lee McQueen (as he was known to friends and family) created a smokescreen around those crucial times.

According to Judith Watt’s Alexander McQueen: Fashion Visionary (2012): “Lee’s mother Joyce saw a television programme on Savile Row that featured the need for apprentices [and] suggested he should try that option.” That he did showed the teenager had mettle when, aged sixteen, he presented himself at the door of Anderson & Sheppard. It was one of the “big four” British bespoke tailors, alongside Henry Poole, Kilgour, French and Stanbury and Gieves & Hawkes, so he also demonstrated discernment if – as I suspect was the case – he’d done his homework.

Founded in 1906 by Per Anderson, Anderson & Sheppard had found a niche as a civilian tailor and a particular popularity with Hollywood leading men, having been first to welcome idols such as Rudolph Valentino, Fred Astaire, Noël Coward and Cary Grant in the 1920s and 1930s when royal and military tailors rejected their custom. By the early 1980s the firm’s signature softly tailored, elegantly draped interpretation of the “London Cut” was admired and worn by the Prince of Wales. When McQueen arrived in 1984 it had the largest and most forbidding premises on Savile Row at No 30 and a holy terror of a managing director called Mr Halsey. Halsey would later say of McQueen: “The problem is that people bandy our name about, but nobody in this building remembers him.” The firm later revised its opinion. Anderson & Sheppard had a reputation for being aloof, strict and riven by protocol and hierarchy. It was Sandhurst for tailors and the apprentices were drilled like cadets. McQueen told me in a 2002 Financial Times interview that he’d “blagged” his way in: “Everything was planned, but that doesn’t mean it’s been easy. I come from a rough neighbourhood and I have a shit education. But I saw other routes into fashion design.” As he explained it, Savile Row was like his National Service: an intensive tutorial in cutting, construction and finishing a coat (jacket) to a world-class standard. Anderson & Sheppard was, and is, one of the world’s great

tailors. To be taught by its master tailor (Cornelius O’Callaghan was McQueen’s) how to set a sleeve, sculpt a shoulder line and cut so the cloth follows the curvature of the spine from collar to seat, its drape masking a man’s every imperfection, put him among the elite. In addition, he would have learned how to handle and sew the finest cloths, such as flannel, worsted, velvet, jacquard and tweed. McQueen professed boredom. As he said: “I sat for two months padding collars, and two years learning how to cut a jacket.” He told numerous journalists that he’d scrawled on the canvas inside the Prince of Wales’s suits. (As Susannah Frankel reported in the Independent “without him knowing it the Prince of Wales has worn a jacket with ‘I’m a cunt’ written on the front of it”.) Recently retired Anderson & Sheppard MD John Hitchcock says that he has since opened up HRH’s coats and found no such profanities. That said, 30 years of valeting might have erased the graffiti. The designer told me he wasn’t intimidated by Savile Row as a teenager: “Behind the façade of the Savile Row tailor’s shop front, it’s actually a bunch of working-class craftsmen trained to do that one job. It’s no different from a bunch of men working hard in any trade – like plumbers.” He was speaking at a time when the house of McQueen was launching a short-lived bespoke collaboration with Huntsman in 2002 (his first adventure in menswear), and the truth as told to Lynn Barber in 1995 in the Observer was a little less glib: “It was a weird time for me because at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, I was going through the situation of coming to terms with my sexuality, and I was surrounded by heterosexuals and quite a few homophobic people and every day there would be some sort of remark… so I was trying to keep my mouth shut most of the time, because I’ve got quite a mouth on me.” Here, he was referring to when he was an apprentice trouser maker at Gieves & Hawkes in 1987. McQueen and Anderson & Sheppard had parted company when the firm decided that “he was not committed or reliable and not suitable as a long-term Anderson & Sheppard coat maker”. Perhaps he’d have been the first to agree. He moved on to Gieves & Hawkes, but walked out on his twentieth birthday on 17 March 1989, telling Barber that his exit was the result of a homophobic comment reported to the bosses but not acted upon. What seems apparent today is that he never expected to stay on Savile Row for longer than necessary. As he told Harper’s Bazaar in 2007: “I came to terms with not fitting in a long time ago… I never really fitted in. I don’t want to fit in, and now people are buying into that.” The logical answer to why Lee McQueen walked away from the Row was that he had taken precisely what he needed from traditional bespoke tailoring. Speaking to GQ in 2004, he said: “You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what I’m here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.” He told Susannah Frankel in a 2003 SHOWstudio interview: “I always, always wanted to be a designer. I read books on fashion from the age of twelve.” He even mentioned Parisian couturier Emanuel Ungaro’s beginning as a tailor. For him to walk brazenly on to Savile Row knowing he needed information rather than a vocation was,

“i come from savile row. What i learned at sixteen is that to change menswear, you have to be like an architect; you work on the cut and the proportion. You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what i’m here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.”

Alexander McQueen (GQ May 2004)

in retrospect, typical. He did tell Frankel that being a designer was innate – “to know about colour, proportion, shape, cut, balance is genetic” – but nurture, however tough, on the Row doubtless helped to support this illusion that his talent was entirely natural.

“Savile Row stood him in terribly good stead,” says Bobby Hillson, founder and director of the Central Saint Martins MA fashion course, who offered McQueen a place on the strength of his sketches, though he was actually applying to teach pattern cutting.

“I knew nothing about the tailoring talent, but what I saw and what I heard was really interesting,” she says. His training set him apart from his fellow students and made him attractive to employers such as theatrical costumers Berman’s and Nathan’s and designers Koji Tatsuno and Romeo Gigli, for whom he worked before Central Saint Martins. Tatsuno told fashion historian Judith Watt that McQueen “came to me because I had a classic Savile Row tailor working for me and he wanted to learn how to cut a frock coat”. Tatsuno, in turn, showed McQueen how fashion could ignore the methodical, logical measurements of the tailor’s trade and soar in the pursuit of the illogical, the fantastical and the sublime.

Gigli’s contribution to his education was short-lived but important. “The detail that most interested me was his training on Savile Row, because Romeo loved all aspects of traditional menswear tailoring,” former Gigli studio member Lise Strathdee told Watt. “It was unusual for someone so young to have come with such handson practical experience.” Gigli’s romantic “Pre-Raphaelite déshabillé” aesthetic couldn’t be further removed from the severity of Savile Row tailoring. But as McQueen said to the Pink Paper in 1994: “I’ve been in the business since I was sixteen… I can do it [deconstruction] because I can construct in the first place.”

“There are a lot of tales about him grabbing shears and cutting instinctively, using his eye rather than measurements [what would be known as a straight finish in tailoring],” says Claire Wilcox. “There is almost an arrogance and swagger in the way McQueen cuts. On the occasions that I showed him tailoring pieces from the archive at the V&A he would spend a very short time looking. He understood their construction in an instant. He also loved books. He wanted to learn, to absorb, and then to interpret his references in his own unique, often macabre way.”

McQueen’s Central Saint Martins graduate collection “Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims” (July 1992) shows how far he had moved from Savile Row in four years. Of the two pieces on display in ‘Savage Beauty’, a black silk bustle-backed coat is one of the first examples of him playing with asymmetry and perspective. Head on we see a traditional peak lapel that falls into long, bias cut ribbons lined with

“Koji Tatsuno showed McQueen how fashion could soar in the pursuit of the illogical, the fantastical and the sublime”

but what maintained is a change and

Alexey Brodovitch

“There is no recipe layout

contrast.”

recipe for good what must be a feeling of contrast.”

Alexey Brodovitch

Fabien Baron

David Hillman

Vince Frost

Fernando Gutierrez

Fernando Gutierrez

David McKendrick