Owing to a recent run of blockbuster fashion exhibitions, the V&A is gaining a fanbase among the creative dressers of London. The crowd lured in from the drizzle to see the solo exhibition of British fashion photographer Tim Walker is decked out in studs, platform shoes and fur, adding a further element to the breathtaking visual experience that already spills beyond the frames of Walker’s photographs. The staging of his luxurious images, the result of a long-term collaboration with the British creative director Shona Heath, is a work of Broadway theater design.

The curation of the first room packs a substantial sensory punch; it is walled on all sides by lightboxes, and is achingly bright. On view is a compilation of Walker’s achievements to date, a fleeting career survey for those of us who have just tuned in. Precociously talented, he shot his first series for Vogue aged only 25 – at which point of a career, junior photographers are often still fetching cappuccinos for Meryl Streep. His breakthrough series, entitled “Off With Their Heads,” look like stills from a live-action version of Yellow Submarine, starring an impossibly beautiful cast. The wall text – Walker’s own narration throughout – describes his imaginative debt to Cecil Beaton, the British high society photographer whose archive he spent a year working on before university. Beaton’s influence is evidenced by a collection of charismatic celebrity portraits: Grayson Perry’s alter-ego, Claire, in her poor-postured defiance; Tilda Swinton ascending a staircase to nowhere as a Leonora Carrington-esque elf; and, in a staging which looks a little rude, Joanna Lumley poised to light up a bunch of cigarettes the width of a thigh.

At the heart of the exhibition are 10 major new photographic series that the V&A commissioned for the show. In a project which lasted over three years, Walker was given free rein to mine the museum’s collection. It was an inspired prompt, as it is near impossible for any visitor to appreciate the full scope of the Victorian labyrinth’s treasures; to have highlights plucked out for further investigation is immensely helpful. As such, the exhibition is a conversation with a sprawling archive, rather than a monologue. A full-sized reproduction of the Bayeux Tapestry is shown alongside a series of woolen-clad models, distorted by a warped lens; an illuminated manuscript alongside a triptych of portraits which dialogue with its punchy colors. It is empowering to observe the thread of Walker’s ideas almost as lucidly as though they were one’s own.

At least two of the newly-commissioned series, inspired by artifacts from the age of empire, display a shocking lack of cultural awareness; notably, a series created in response to a watercolor depicting an episode in the life of the Hindu god, Krishna. Glitter-covered models frolic with pastel versions of Dali’s long-legged elephants, dressed in bell-sleeves and paisley. Intended to celebrate India’s “vibrancy and mysticism,” the series was shot in a field in Worcestershire. Fortunately, the artist notes in a wall text, it was a rare day of “intense Indian light” in the English countryside. When the bloody history of British imperialism is still absent from the mandatory curriculum of the nation’s schools, it seems inappropriate that its public institutions are commissioning artworks which appear to peddle patronizing tropes of the exotic East. Given the acquisition history of much of the V&A’s core collection, some rendezvous with the British Empire was inevitable. Can one blame Walker for studying a Hindu print and arriving at a late-1960s, Beatles-at-the-Ashram vision of India? Perhaps not entirely, when there is such a long visual history of tokenizing “The Orient,” but one is left wondering why no one on the curatorial team quietly pulled him aside. At a time when the global art market is slowly waking up to the need for genuine representation of non-Western perspectives, research into the long history of British fetishization of Indian culture, and more sustained collaboration with the country’s designers might have been more appropriate.

When Walker turns his gaze to questions of gender, the results are markedly more sensitive. In a series inspired by “News from Nowhere,” William Morris’s critically slated utopian novel of a socialist paradise where no one works more than four hours per day, beautiful men glide through the Dorset countryside in fish-eye roundels. One sits on a horse against a powdery blue sky, a peaceful inversion of a military statue; another sees three men slinking through fields in pastel dresses. Titled “The Land of the Living Men,” the series is so straightforwardly beautiful that that any notion of camp is curiously circumvented.

A room responding to the stylishly debauched prints of Aubrey Beardsley is another triumph. Walker’s series of intricate black-and-white photographs is displayed in an appropriately intimate white cube with Art Nouveau-style rounded corners. Rendered with Walker’s trademark warped lenses, the models appear liquid, as though rendered by a pen. As in Beardsley’s prints, rational perspective is gleefully disavowed; with wall, floor and ceiling seamlessly blended, the figures appear to float in their boneless poses. “It felt like we were drawing with wires and beads,” Walker recalls in the accompanying text.

For its ambitious scope and flawless execution, “Wonderful Things” deserves its popularity. Part art historical chocolate box, and part theme park, it is a profoundly democratic show with plenty of attention-grabbing tactics borrowed from the world of theater. Elements of the exhibition, however, do inadvertently highlight the V&A’s problems facing up to its colonial history, and the difficulty of its becoming a truly contemporary museum. During the age of empire, the practice of collecting was tangled up with the psychology of domination – any artist responding to the museum’s collection has a responsibility to consider a dark past with sensitivity. Walker’s commission glosses over this past – albeit, very beautifully indeed.

“Tim Walker: Wonderful Things” is on show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London through March 8, 2020.