Vintage Poster collector, Charlie Jeffreys, in conjunction with the Museum of Soho have mounted an exhibition on Murray’s Cabaret Club at the Century Club on Shaftesbury Avenue.
The club in London’s Soho was a notorious jazz and revue club which opened in 1913 on Beak Street. It was known for its extravagant dance shows and risqué costumes. The Club’s hostesses included Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies who were both at the heart of the most enduring political scandals of our time, the Profumo Affair in the 1960s.
The exhibition features a selection of costume designs by the illustrator Ronald Cobb (1909-1997) whose risqué gouaches combine ingenuity and style. They are an amusing assortment of witty French maid fantasies, macabre mannequins in sweeping cloaks, and startling space-age headdresses.
G-strings and period humour abound, but Cobb’s bizarre confections of plastic, gauze and body paint are always on the right side of kitsch. There are also a few designs by Michael Bronze (1916-1979) whose sketches are intricate and lavish. Some costumes by Hilda Wetton (1896-1980), the legendary designer with The Windmill Theatre will also be on display along with some original programmes and ephemera lent my me.
The exhibition is free but as it is a private members club you have to book a time slot. Click to book.
Cabaret Girl (1956) is a gleefully gaudy ’50s kitsch fly-on-the-wall documentary about the club in which club owner Percival ‘Pops’ Murray is seen lecturing would-be showgirls, inspecting their costumes and smoking endless cigarettes.
