Punk to Pop opens at V&A South Kensington on Saturday 13 March 2027.
British popular music between 1976 and about 1985 produced the most concentrated run of visual invention of any national scene: punk’s ransom-note typography and safety-pinned clothing, then the immediate reaction to it — the New Romantics, the sleeve designers, the video directors, the art-school graduates who went into bands because a band was cheaper than a studio. Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren ran a shop. Peter Saville designed record covers that are now in design collections. The clothes, the graphics and the music were made by the same small number of people, mostly in London and Manchester, mostly in their twenties.
That is the V&A’s territory exactly: the museum has always argued that fashion, graphics and manufacture are one subject, and this is the decade that proves it hardest. The museum already holds the Sex Pistols material, a great deal of Westwood, and the graphic archives, so this is largely a collection show rather than a borrowing one.
Punk to Pop opens at V&A South Kensington on Saturday 13 March 2027. No closing date and no ticket price have been published. It is the first of three South Kensington exhibitions the museum has announced for 2027, before Sculpture in Clay in May and Chintz in September, and it lands in the month the London calendar starts filling again. March is when the London calendar starts filling again after the winter.