London calling: Escape to the U.K. this summer for a bounty of style and design | Canada Voices

DIVE IN

At the Design Museum until Aug. 17, Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style incorporates three spaces (pool, lido and nature) to tell the story of how design has shaped our relationship with water. The early 20th century advent of physical fitness and the newly fashionable suntan spurred a boom in outdoor swimming facilities, while advances in textile technology such as stretch Lycra streamlined suits. Splash! also wades into the politics of segregated swimming and the influence of physique magazines and gay culture on swimwear. It also considers “beach body” objectification, illustrated by objects such as the iconic red suit worn by Pamela Anderson’s Baywatch lifeguard.

SPARKLE AND SHINE

Awash in sequins, Leigh Bowery!, at Tate Modern through Aug. 31, celebrates the Australian-born fashion designer and performance artist who lived at the intersection of costume, music and art. Since Bowery died in 1994 from AIDS-related illness at age 33, he has influenced talents from Alexander McQueen to Lady Gaga. Moving chronologically from a home-themed gallery (lined in the garish Star Trek wallpaper of his East London flat) to club and stage, each gallery charts a phase of queer mythology and body transformation. Legendary cloaked and bustled costumes, with the headpieces, masks and towering platforms that completed his capital-L Looks, loom large among the ephemera, archive footage and portraits by Fergus Greer, Nick Knight and Lucian Freud.

PATTERN PLAY

Since his 19th century heyday, William Morris’s botanical motifs have become ubiquitous. He was one of Britain’s greatest designers and thinkers, a radical social activist against Victorian-era industrialization who championed both handmade sustainable production and equitable access to beauty and quality. Morris Mania, on at William Morris Gallery until Sept. 21, tackles the contradiction of the more recent mass-production of the Morris legacy. Lined floor to ceiling with items derived from his work, from artist Kehinde Wiley portraits with patterned backdrops to junky iPhone cases, Dr. Martens boots, shopping trolleys and AI-generated merch, where the exhibition ends and the museum gift shop begins is a blur – and that’s the point.

GRAND DESIGNS

The Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry plumbs the Wallace Collection’s celebrated holdings of Velazquez, Fragonard and French ancien régime decorative arts to shape Delusions of Grandeur. Running until Oct. 26, his critique of rarified culture is filtered in part through fictional alter ego Shirley Smith, a self-taught artist who spent time in a mental institution and believes herself the rightful Wallace heiress. Smith’s candy-coloured works are presented among Sir Grayson’s own and put into conversation with the collection – her crafty interpretation hangs alongside Boucher’s masterwork Madame de Pompadour, for example, and classical tapestry is reimagined in neon as a virtue-signaling logo wall. Glazed ceramics and a chest of drawers channel her autobiography, as do flouncy dresses sewed from fabric of her drawings printed by Liberty London. The witty and tender juxtapositions yield richly pointed commentary, as when the Wallace’s famed aristocratic portrait miniatures are rearranged into a family tree of Shirley’s mental health diagnoses.

POP UP GALLERY

The annual outdoor commission in Kensington Gardens, The Serpentine Pavilion, has been a must-visit since Zaha Hadid’s 2000 debut rendition. It now spotlights emerging talent. This year, Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum and her firm’s project, A Capsule in Time, will be unveiled on June 6 and stand until Oct. 26. The elongated structure’s central court aligns with the gallery bell tower and is inspired by the tradition of park-going. Its walls are curved garden canopies, in four segments, and translucent to allow shadows of daylight to play on its form throughout the day.

BLING RING

A darkened room opens the V&A’s Cartier show, the dazzle of a thousand cut diamonds in the 1903 Manchester tiara luring visitors in. Another space curated with 18 diadems closes it. Lest the Paris jeweller’s retrospective lag in between, the Maharaja of Patiala said, “hold my De Beers.” His 1928 breastplate commission boasts two huge rubies and nearly 3,000 diamonds flanking a 234.65-carat yellow diamond. Jewels, timepieces and signature panthers belonging to clients such as Queen Elizabeth II, Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor and the Duchess of Windsor glitter in vitrines. This once-in-a-lifetime gathering of more than 350 twinkling objects form the timeline of Cartier’s aesthetic and craft evolution through its ties to high society, royalty and celebrity. For those who prefer London in the fall, this show continues until Nov. 16.