What timing! After blockbusters on art nouveau, art deco and modernism, how was the Victoria and Albert Museum going to frame its next stage of the journey through modernism? It might have been planned years ago but to use the theme of the cold war to embrace postwar design was inspired and fortuitous. Here we are, on the verge of a media-trumpeted new cold war with its roots in the renewed east-west power struggle, and here’s a show that covers the ideological battle between capitalist consumer and communist collective culture. This is a show steeped in politics, morality, militarism and economics.

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Exhibits from the V&A’s Cold War Modern

From the beginning, the exhibition, Cold War Modern, announces its intent to illustrate the way in which both sides, capitalism and communism, attempted to extend their empires into dominion of the future. It spreads its arms wide to embrace outer and built space, with a Sputnik hanging at its entrance above Richard Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Dome, the structure of the future designed by the American engineer-visionary.