'At the Exhibition': the 1948 open-air sculpture exhibition, Battersea Park, in British fashion magazines

This article considers the relationship between sculpture and its representation within the fashion magazines Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, published in post-war Britain. Featured within newspaper articles, radio broadcasts and television reports, sculpture and its public display, was further disseminated to a wider mass audience. This type of display is another form of public exhibition, one that sets the featured sculpture in particular systems of representation, value and meaning. Focusing upon fashion stories that feature the first London County Council Sculpture Exhibition held in Battersea Park in 1948, how this new, and socially constructed way of seeing ‘public’ art was promoted is analysed. How was this exhibition made fashionable in the pages of these magazines? This article examines the ways in which cultural identities and contexts are created and can be understood through modes of fashion and a wider visual culture.