With Asha Bhosle’s passing in April 2026 the grand age of ninety-two, Bollywood’s most deliciously counter-cultural voice – the voice of an entire era, for millions upon millions of fans – has gone quiet. For this particular Englishman, the loss hits close to home.

Tate Britain has launched Europe’s largest Whistler retrospective in a generation, and to undeniably stunning effect. Step into the hallowed gallery off an overcast Pimlico street this summer, and you’ll uncover a sweeping, one hundred and fifty work exhibition that successfully rescues the artist from his own fame.

As London begins its yearly tilt into the frantic self-importance of the summer season,  Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art has opened at the V&A like a sharp, surrealist elbow to the ribs. It’s a potent reminder of the lasting allure of one of high fashion’s true originals.

I first discovered Darling’s (Haus Of Beau) work at the turbulent start to our decade. Her latest collection, ‘A Series of Decisions’, comes from more external questions. “I realised that everyone's life, no matter who they are, where they're from, or what start they have, eventually, when you look back, becomes the sum of all of their choices.”

You don’t just walk into a Vivienne Westwood exhibition. You sidle in cautiously, because her clothes have a reputation — and a presence — that can be intimidating. At the Bowes Museum this spring, it’s not just the collection that hits you. It’s the attitude.

A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting isn’t trying to summarise a career. It’s more interested in where Hockney is now, and what continues to hold his attention. At 88, that turns out, rather joyously, to be the same things it’s always been.

A Second Life doesn’t present a neat chronology so much as an emotional landscape. Early works carry the restless energy of the 1990s with neon declarations scrawled in Emin’s unmistakable handwriting, textiles that read like diary pages stitched into permanence and all the shock and awe of the decade.

It’s barely possible for any museum exhibition to really do justice to such a cultural phenomenon as The Blitz Club, but “Blitz: The Club That Shaped the 80s” at London’s Design Museum does a sterling job of showcasing many of its highlights and hidden gems. 

It may be pouring rain in Central London, but the chance to get up-close-and-personal with a beautiful array of Vietnamese handicrafts - created by artisans from tribal communities and using time-honoured techniques - is an opportunity that simply couldn’t be overlooked.

The fact that Wes Anderson carved out a niche so instantly familiar and enduring absolutely is something to celebrate in an otherwise bland, cookie-cutter movie landscape, and that’s precisely the impetus and drive behind Wes Anderson: The Archives.

The Burrell Collection fits squarely into one of my all-time favourite categories of museum, which is ‘Victorian gentleman with more time and money than sense collects random artefacts from around the world’. As such, The Burrell Collection sits happily alongside Pitt Rivers in Oxford and The Horniman or Wellcome Collection in London, a treasure trove of the beautiful and bizarre.

Whether you’re profoundly acquainted with the work and output of Cecil Beaton or not, the impact and influence he had over the visual idioms and vocabulary of the 20th century means his work remains utterly recognisable.

Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion, currently hosted within the environs of The Barbican’s postmodern brutalist magnificence, isn’t an exhibition of gothic fashion in the literal sense, but it most definitely occupies the same dark corners of culture. The good news? It’s absolutely fantastic.

Gilbert and George sift through absolutely everything in their search for visual and poetic impact: overheard whispers of conversation are transmuted into raw material. Graffitied filth on toilet walls acts as an unfiltered call to arms, politics with its trousers down. By refusing to discard anything as evidence, they’re left with a bricolage that speaks of more than the sum of its parts.