Grace Kelly exhibition features famous battered handbags
A Van Cleef Arpels diamond tiara, a Chanel suit, an Yves Saint Laurent dress, a Balenciaga jacket and several pairs of Christian Dior sunglasses all feature in the exhibition Grace Kelly: Style Icon, which opens at the Victoria Albert museum tomorrow. But the star exhibit is a battered brown leather handbag.
On loan from the palace archives in Monaco is the original Hermes handbags with which Princess Grace tried to shield her early pregnancy bump from photographers in 1956. One photograph made the cover of Life magazine – and by holding the bag prominently Princess Grace made it so famous that the style, which had been known since 1935 as the Sac ? D?p?ches was renamed “the Kelly” in her honour.
The scuffs and marks on the handbags are evidence that, despite her high-maintenance image, Grace Kelly was surprisingly thrifty with her wardrobe. The signs of wear and tear make it clear she continued to carry the same handbags for many years – a sharp contrast to the habits of modern celebrities, who avoid wearing the same outfit twice. Victoria Beckham is believed to own more than 100 Hermes Birkin handbags in different sizes, styles and colours, a collection with a retail value of over $2m (?1.3m).
Kelly became sentimental about clothes she associated with good memories, and the exhibition includes several more examples of the surprisingly hard-working wardrobe which underpinned the Grace Kelly fairytale. A pale blue gown made for Kelly to wear to a 1954 premiere by Edith Head, the legendary Paramount studios costume designer, is the very same dress which Kelly wore to collect her Oscar for The Country Girl the following year, and then again for a cover of Life magazine.
Jenny Lister, the VA curator of fashion who has worked for 18 months to put the exhibition together, admitted she “thought very carefully” about giving the title of “Style Icon” to the show. “It’s an overused phrase. There are very few people who really deserve to be called a style icon – but Grace Kelly is one of them.”
The exhibition is already attracting international attention, a testament to the enduring appeal of Kelly’s classic, feminine style of dressing. Lister predicts visitors will be surprised by some of Kelly’s later wardrobe, which includes a brightly coloured Yves Saint Laurent “Mondrian” dress from 1965 and flowing, bohemian-era gowns by Christian Dior. “The look which Kelly fixed in the public imagination in the mid-1950s, the era of Rear Window and High Society and of her spectacular wedding, was so strong she will always be remembered looking the way she did at that moment,” notes Lister.