Coco Chanel at the V&A

Unlike the Diva exhibition, which I'm keen to see at some point if only because it includes PJ Harvey memorabilia and Theda Bara's spangly Cleopatra bra from 1917, I'm not sure I would have enjoyed the V&A's show about Coco Chanel (who they insist on calling Gabrielle) had I been paying to get in. As it was, I went with Ms Mauritia and the Snappers (that's not a band, the Snappers are a couple) and because they have two Museum memberships between them that was four of us admitted for nothing. 

If nothing else, Chanel has to be celebrated for her colossal success in building a business that survived so long, and remaining actively designing clothes into her 80s. But it's that very commercial success which I think is possibly the more interesting story to be told, as opposed to the nature of her clothes as design artefacts, and of course it's that which the V&A necessarily focuses on: get a group of social history curators to plan the same show and they'd come up with something completely different. At first it seemed this exhibition didn't have much of a 'story' at all: it was only when we emerged from the War and dealt with Chanel's counterattack on the Dior style that things seemed to move forward at all, even in terms of design. But the show has a couple of dramatic visual set-pieces which will linger in my memory a long while. A turn from a dark corridor of jewellery leads to a vast space lined with a parade of airborne dresses which are slightly intimidating - haute couture doesn't get much higher than that - and the exhibition culminates in a mirrored staircase which recalls Chanel's final show in 1970 (I think). Rather a triumph of the curator's art, that.