01/14/2026
"The truly fashionable are beyond fashion."
Cecil Beaton
– January 14, 1904
Cecil Beaton knew and photographed everyone that mattered for most of the 20th century. He was a chronicler of showbiz figures from Noël Coward to Mick Jagger, for whom Beaton had a special passion (Jagger dubbed him "Rip-Van-With-it").
Beaton is remembered for his influence on photography and fashion. His work is the essence of elegance and grace, but his personal behavior was anything but. He was not humble. In fact, his persona and image were fabricated to gain him access to a world that had been just beyond his reach. Still, everybody loved Beaton the photographer. He worked for VOGUE for 30+ years. Louise Dahl-Wolfe at HARPER'S BAZAAR wrote: "He was such a naughty man. You had to laugh at all the awful things he said about everybody, especially the people at VOGUE." Beaton laughed at everybody except himself, for whom he reserved total compassion and a dash of self-pity.
Clever, but not intellectual, good-looking, but not handsome, he always just missed making the grade in the things that he thought mattered the most. Beaton was vain. He had his clothes made one size too small to flatter his already skinny frame. He was never quite glamorous, despite an international jet-set lifestyle that brought him into the orbit of everyone who was anybody for more than six decades. He was what was known at the time, a "pansy".
Beaton was an arbiter of taste and fashion, a war photographer, a painter, and a wicked caricaturist. He mixed with actors, painters, musicians, film stars, society figures and, later in life, the figures of what he dubbed "The Peacock Revolution" of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
He enjoyed relationships with series of much younger men. His last lover was Olympic fencer Kin Hoitsma. The great love of his life was noted art collector Peter Watson, who held the rights to his photographs. He also loved the most beautiful woman of his era, Greta Garbo, to whom Beaton proposed marriage.
Beaton left this world in 1980 after spending a lifetime focusing his lens on the most interesting people and he made them look stunning.
Self-portrait
