Wes Anderson: The Archives
Design Museum, London
From November 21st, 2025 to July 26th, 2026
This winter, the Design Museum opens its doors to something that has film lovers in a spin: the contents of Wes Anderson’s archive. More than 600 objects from three decades of filmmaking will be shown in London in the first full retrospective devoted to his work in Britain.
The headline piece is the enormous candy pink model of the Grand Budapest Hotel. The real thing is over three metres wide and was built to shoot the façade for the 2014 feature, and this sits among an almost bewildering mix of storyboards, Polaroids, sketches, puppets, sets, notebooks, and costumes that track Anderson’s output from Bottle Rocket in the mid-‘90s to The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar in 2023.
Much of the material has never been seen publicly in the UK before, and behind the scenes, Anderson has been squirreling away and storing film objects since realising that everything made for Bottle Rocket had been sold off after production. From Rushmore onward, he kept hold of everything, which is how this show has ended up with a catalogue that spans vending machines from Asteroid City, the infamous Fendi fur coat worn by Gwyneth Paltrow as Margot Tenenbaum, and the original sea creature puppets from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. There is also “Boy with Apple,” the supposedly Renaissance portrait at the centre of The Grand Budapest Hotel. In reality, it’s a contemporary canvas by British artist Michael Taylor, commissioned specifically for the film, and it appears here with Gustave H’s concierge uniform and the sharply tailored wardrobe of Tilda Swinton’s Madame D.
“It is an absolute gift that even as a young film-maker Wes Anderson had the vision and foresight to save all his props and beautifully crafted objects for his own archive. We are thrilled to be the first to fully dive into the archive’s full riches.”
Enthusiasts of his early work will be able to watch Anderson’s original Bottle Rocket short from 1993, starring Owen Wilson and at 14 minutes, it’s a chance to compare the bones of an idea with the finished feature. Even better, several of Anderson’s spiral notebooks sit in vitrines nearby. They show outlines, sketches and early dialogue in the director’s handwriting, all of which gives the exhibition a personal touch, perhaps too personal…a sense of peering over a shoulder.
As one would expect the stop motion sections are particularly rich with Fantastic Mr Fox and Isle of Dogs having large dedicated spaces, filled with puppets of various scales, including Mr Fox in his corduroy suit and show dog Nutmeg. The surrounding miniature sets highlight how much of Anderson’s style rests on physical craft rather than digital trickery.
A good portion of the show features long standing collaborators in the form of Eric Chase Anderson, Milena Canonero, Roman Coppola, Alexandre Desplat, Erica Dorn, Mark Friedberg and Juman Malouf who appear throughout. Their work sits beside prep material, maquettes and design studies that sketch out the slow build of an Anderson film world from first concepts to what we see on screen. This London edition expands on the version premiered at la Cinémathèque française earlier this year, offering more than 100 additional objects, with the Design Museum delving into the intricacies of Anderson’s world, and the design process behind each film. The exhibition is accompanied by a substantial new catalogue made with Anderson, featuring essays, photography and interviews with collaborators including Owen Wilson, Scarlett Johansson, Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Alexandre Desplat, Seu Jorge and Randall Poster.
For further information designmuseum.org.
