CRUISING WITH STYLE

Diamond and pearl tiara saved from the Lusitania, Cartier, 1909, France. Marian Gerard, Cartier Collection. © Cartier. No mistaking which frequent traveller this luggage belonged to © Miottel Museum, Berkeley, California. RMS Titanic departing Southampton on April 10, 1912.

were just sheep queuing to be slaughtered to the tune of RM100 for the privilege of seeing and hearing the sort of music that never gets played on the radio any more. The most interesting thing about Pink Floyd would have been the Malaysian connection with the famous Battersea Power Station. Instead, the emphasis was on the giant inflatable pig that got out of control and had to be shot down.

‘Ocean Liners’ is altogether more refined. A haven of comfort in the snowy wastes of a London March. Anyone under 60 rarely contemplates cruises. You need a lot of time on your hands and a fair amount of money. In the past, it was an inevitable part of getting from A to B and was done with levels of graciousness that corresponded with the traveller’s budget. Nowadays, when we hear from our captain on the plane, we know that his weather report will be the full extent of communication. Sea captains had to sit with their customers, day after day, and listen to their complaints and compliments.

From the moment visitors leave the dark and draughty corridor of the V&A’s east wing on their way into the exhibition, they enter a different world. Not the one that Harrods up the road promises. This is a world that doesn’t exist these days although the main sponsor of the exhibition, Viking Cruises, does a good job pretending that their vessels are the heirs to what were, at the time, the largest man-made constructions in existence.

Ocean liners weren’t all about deck quoits and furtive romances. They were the personification of style. They were floating fashion shows in which most of the female passengers tried to compete with others on these borderless meeting places of the world’s Beautiful People. Just to keep us grounded though, the curators of the exhibition give us some videos of Adolf Hitler too. He seems to have been very proud of the German achievement in One of the women who put glamour into travel, Marlene Dietrich.

ocean-going luxury and technology, even if history has largely forgotten this part of Nazi folklore. The airborne version of it is visible in Indiana Jones III.

There are videos all over the place, including an enormous screen of a ship that does nothing but glide effortlessly before our eyes before disappearing and reappearing on the other side. These steel beasts were not just massive but graceful too. The one effect that the exhibition doesn’t re-create is choppy water. There are still disasters aplenty. The Titanic features