Kylie - The Exhibition, V&A

On Friday it was announced that Kylie Minogue had separated from the actor Olivier Martinez. There was a public statement about it being “amicable”, but little else. The star has always guarded her privacy. Her battle against, and recovery from, breast cancer was conducted mostly away from the public eye.

The image that she’d rather project is enshrined in the V&A’s guaranteed crowd-buster of a show of her stage outfits: glitter, glitter everywhere, plus feathers, spangles, intricate beading, head-dresses, silver and even more glitter. It is like raiding a drag queen’s wardrobe while under the influence of every drug ever invented. In fact, even the most hardened drag queen might be begging for a Nurofen by the end.

This is not art, but that’s not the issue. The V&A has mounted accomplished fashion-related shows, like Vivienne Westwood a few years ago. A “golden age of cou-ture” exhibition is forthcoming. The real problem is that it is not a successful museum show about fashion and celebrity. At the very least Kylie – The Exhibition should attempt to deconstruct the Kylie phenomenon. If you want an afternoon of simple fun, then fine, this is the show for you. The problem is that this exhibition does not interrogate its subject. It is just pretty dresses and pop.

The show opens with “the museum dress”, co-designed by Kylie herself. This is the frock on the front of the catalogue, created when the exhibition was originally in Mel-bourne and designed as a mishmash of Kylie images – magazine covers, single and album designs. In a funny way it signposts the sheer vacuity about to envelop you: all image, nothing deeper. We learn who designed each dress, and what each dress is made of, but that’s it: the show becomes like an endless fashion magazine spread.

In the first room are three podiums with about eight dresses on each, all mounted on black mannequins. The thing that truly surprises you is the size of dear Kylie herself. Man, she is tiny, beyond tiny; a robin redbreast would look like a hulking trucker next to her. The dresses are like glittery hankies, strips of material scythed and slashed to fit a micro-body (UK size six), and the shoes – all Manolos – are also tiny (size 4) though precipitously high.

But the Stella McCartney white shorts, the white silk mini-dress designed by Anto-nio Berardi and the yellow faux-fur cropped jacket and orange hotpants that she wore on the Confide in Me video don’t hum with greatness. In truth – despite all the slavering advance publicity that the show has attracted – they look lost on the mannequins. They belong on video or on CD sleeves, precisely because they need styling, lighting and the presence of KM herself to give them vibrancy and sexiness. Kylie is not ready to be made in to a museum piece.

Her dresses seem forlorn, a bit tatty, better suited to the lights and pizzazz of performance than a sober museum space. The multistrap leather number that she wore on In Your Eyes looked amazing in the video, swinging and whipping to the beat of the music, but it offers nothing on static display. The Can’t You Get Out of My Head white hooded jump-suit is denuded of glamour. A shimmering mini-dress that she wore later in the same song here in repose has all the life of a table mat.

Mark Jones, the director of the V&A, claims that the show is “one way of understanding this kind of celebrity. We are a museum for design in all its forms. The V&A is not an art gallery. It is a museum of contemporary and historic design. The underlying assumption, which I don’t think is necessarily the right assumption, is that everything you see in a museum is a tribute to the individual involved. That may not be the case.” Is he implying that this show is somehow a subversive analysis of the Kylie phenomenon? “It’s clearly the case that celebrity plays an incredibly important part in 21st-centu-ry culture,” says Jones. “The V&A tries to understand mega-celebrity from the point of view of design.”

But these are just dresses, hanging limply, there for us to coo over and covet. The V&A is renowned for its collection of costume. Where are the connections being drawn with fashion history? What were the inspirations for these dresses? Kylie is a national treasure and this is an uncritical veneration of her, a massive, joyously silly game of dress-up – wonderful for fans but utterly lacking in artistic and critical rigour. Still, at least the videos of all Kylie’s songs play on one wall of the first room; I waited for my favourite to come on.

Along the room’s other wall are all her single and album covers as well as a selection of photography. It’s diverting, watching post- Neigh-bours Kylie turn into Sex Kylie turn into Indie Kylie turn into Disco Kylie. But these transformations have been well documented. What about her career before Neigh-bours? What about her private life? Family? Where’s the wedding dress her character, Charlene, wore when she married Scott? (A burst of Angry Anderson would be nice.)

Still, here are Charlene’s overalls and the hotpants Kylie wore in the Spinning Around video, the latter in a glass cabinet. Are these hotpants really “iconic” though? They may have a colourful history (purchased in a flea market) and they certainly symbolise the resurrection of Kylie’s career. But are we really supposed to sigh awe-struck over them as if they were the Elgin Marbles or the Mona Lisa? Get a grip, you want to say. Love Kylie’s music, her spirit . . . but this? It’s drooling fan worship, in one of our leading museums.

A couple of years ago, in Chicago, I went to an exhibition of Jacqueline Onassis’s dresses. This had all the same camp appeal of the Kylie show, yet it was rigorous too – the occasions on which she wore each frock were related, alongside fascinating video material and objects from the Kennedy White House. There is none of that at the V&A: there are no outfits personal to Kylie. None of her off-duty wear. Something else nags: yes, Kylie sings utterly brilliant pop songs and looks great, but does she really deserve a show of this stature? Is she really up there with Jackie O?

In the last part of the show, focusing on her most recent Showgirl incarnation, we are welcomed “backstage”, and here, at last, is some grit in the pearl. We read notes composed by William Baker, Kylie’s stylist. There are sketches showing the genesis of her dresses and insight into the great engine of creative energy behind her. There is one really stunning dress that does benefit from the museum’s setting: a towering Dolce and Gabbana swirling mass of silks in which Kylie hid ten dancers during one concert – monumental and sumptuous. Best of all is a recreation of her dressing room for the most recent Wembley concert: drawers overflowing with glittery wedge shoes and beaded bodices, towels, Kylie-branded teddy bears, wigs, make-up, candles. It’s the ultimate little girl (or drag queen’s) bedroom, complete with a recording of the lady herself joshing with Baker as she prepares to go on stage. A revealing list details the 500,000 Swarovski crystals required for her costumes down to the half a truck required to transport feathers.

Information is otherwise lacking. What about a potted history of the showgirl or – let’s do shallow – a chronology of Charlene’s Ramsay Street life? Kylie’s breast cancer is only glancingly referred to. There are hints of what this show could and should have been in a caption written by Minogue herself. She writes: “What I imagine people will want to see is the wear and tear, the ingrained make-up after 50 shows . . . these are the things that, to me, bring costumes to life.” She’s right, but this sanitised show doesn’t really go there.

At the end visitors are encouraged to leave their messages on Postit Notes on a special notice board: my early favourite was “Hi, Kylie, my girlfriend would love to be your dress size”. Baz Luhr-mann writes that “she manifests [a] warm-hearted yet dazzling sensuous glamour”.

If that is true the exhibition doesn’t capture it and so, for all its feathers and glitter, doesn’t do Minogue (or her brilliance) proper justice. Does Kylie really want to be seen as nothing more than a bunch of pretty dresses? Maybe so. Maybe it’s what her fans want too. But surely, especially from the V&A, we should expect something deeper and more inquiring than a quick shimmy through Better the Devil You Know?

Kylie – the Exhibition is at the V&A, SW7 (020-7942 2000; www.vam.ac.uk), from tomorrow

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