Wes Anderson: The Archives, the Design Museum

If you’re a fan of Wes Anderson’s distinctive films, the Design Museum’s current exhibition is a must-see. Wes Anderson: The Archives is an excellent retrospective that charts the evolution of the director’s film catalogue. To create it, the museum in Kensington was given unprecedented access to Anderson’s personal archives, which the filmmaker has built up over three decades.

The exhibition starts with Wes Anderson’s early experiments in the 1990s and goes through his entire cinematic output. There are hundreds of items on display, and it’s the first time most of them can be seen in Britain. One of the first to catch my eye was a movie poster of Bottle Rocket, Anderson’s first short film and starring his long-time friends Owen and Luke Wilson. They look so young!

Wes Anderson studied philosophy at university, which is where he met Owen Wilson. They wrote Bottle Rocket together, and Anderson directed while the Wilson brothers performed. A spot at the Sundance Film Festival led to the development of a feature-length version of the film. And it was the start of many collaborations for Wes Anderson. If you’ve seen his films, you’ll know that many stars recur repeatedly. And it’s the same behind the scenes too.

Narrative and design are always intertwined in Wes Anderson films, and each one involves huge amounts of planning and attention to detail. His archives include storyboards, notebooks, sketches, props, costumes and set designs. While movie props are often outsourced, many of Anderson’s are designed specifically to relate to the films characters, such as books, playbills and posters.

The exhibition goes through each of the films in turn with detail about their development alongsides items to illustrate them. One of my favourite Wes Anderson films is the Grand Budapest Hotel. So it was brilliant to see a scale model of the hotel’s facade. It was used for the film’s exterior shots and started a long running collaboration with Atelier Simon Weisse in Berlin who built the model. I also loved seeing the film’s costumes, including for the iconic Lobby Boy.

Other favourite Wes Anderson films for me are The French Dispatch, the director’s love letter to The New Yorker magazine. And Asteroid City, which is staged as a play within a television programme within a film. The exhibition includes excellent pieces from both sets, including a row of 1950s vending machines from Asteroid City. Unsurprisingly, the cocktail one was my favourite!

Wes Anderson: The Archives is currently scheduled to be at the Design Museum until 16 August 2026, but has been extended twice already. So I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s there for longer. Even the marketing for it is great and very noticeable when you walk out of High Street Kensington tube station!