While the V&A is ever the place to move with the times, it values its traditions and knows what it does best. The museum’s major forthcoming Autumn exhibition, Hollywood Costume, promises to be a crowd pleaser. In many ways it will hark back to the groundbreaking 1979 V&A exhibition, The Art of Hollywood, which focused on film set — as opposed to fashion — design. Orson Welles wrote the foreword to the earlier exhibition’s catalogue:
‘Dear John Hambley,
Thanks, but I don’t think I’m a good choice for the foreword to your catalogue. Menzies is the only name on your list I could enthuse over. You should realize that in Hollywood, until the collapse of the studio system, the head of the Art Department was essentially a bureaucratic functionary and did little or none of the actual designing for which he took credit and received awards.
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