If you’ve ever longed for a stay at candy-floss coloured hotel, vowed vengeance on a mythical stop-motion shark, or simply posed for a perfectly symmetrical selfie between some mid century furniture dressed in your finest tweeds, you won’t want to miss the Design Museum’s latest exhibition, Wes Anderson: The Archive. It opens this week, and Shortlist went along for an early sneak-peek.
Pulling together more than 700 items from the director’s personal archive, the museum’s big new exhibition opens to the public this Friday, and lets you peek behind the curtain at the filmmaker’s meticulously crafted universe.
For fans of Anderson’s instantly-recogniseable aesthetic, it's a landmark moment: it’s the largest ever showing of Anderson props, costumes, puppets, production art work and behind-the-scenes materials, made possible thanks to Anderson’s own precise archiving process.
“The beginning of our curatorial journey for this exhibition started on a very cold December morning two years ago when we first visited the archives in Kent,” co-curator Johanna Agerman Ross told Shortlist.
“At that point, we couldn't quite believe our eyes — shelves upon shelves, box upon box, dedicated to the filmic world of Wes Anderson. Costumes, props, notes, parts of sets, puppets, all of it was there.”
From behind the scenes to on the screen
The exhibition runs until 26th July 2026, and pulls together three decades of Anderson’s creative life — from the scrappy early days of the prototype Bottle Rocket short film all the way to his newest film, 2025’s The Phoenician Scheme.
And it’s not just curios in glass cases. The museum is also screening four Anderson short films in full — Bottle Rocket (the original 1993 version), Hotel Chevalier, Castello Cavalcanti, and The Swan from The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More. It’s the first time they’ve ever been projected together in Britain, offering visitors a neat side-by-side look at how Anderson uses the short-film format to experiment, refine and often expand his ideas into feature length projects.
Walking through the large exhibition space is a bit like wandering into a chronological diorama of Anderson’s mind. You’ll find polaroids (including a fetching triptych of topless Bill Murray shots from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), storyboards (charming in their simplicity), early sketches, handwritten notebooks and scripts (letting you see exactly how iconic lines came to be, scratched out revisions and all), miniature sets, costumes and puppets from every era of his work.
Show-stopping models and props
One of the undeniable stars of the exhibition is the enormous three-metre-wide model of the Grand Budapest Hotel — yes, the very one used for exterior shots in the 2014 film. It’s joined by gems like the Asteroid City vending machines, Gwyneth Paltrow’s FENDI fur coat from The Royal Tenenbaums, the original sea-creature puppets from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and the infamous Grand Budapest’s Boy with Apple painting, shown next to Tilda Swinton’s fabulously opulent Madame D costume.
There’s plenty here for animation lovers, too. Entire sections are dedicated to Fantastic Mr Fox and Isle of Dogs, showcasing the tiny yet incredibly elaborate puppets — including Mr Fox himself in his corduroy suit and the elegant Nutmeg — along with fragments of the miniature worlds they inhabit. The stop motion animated films were filmed in East London’s own 3 Mills Studios, with Anderson championing the art form — and the studio — ever since.
A running thread through the exhibition is Anderson’s devotion to the art of collaboration. Much of the show highlights contributions from long-time creative partners: from composers and artists to sculptors, designers and family members. It’s a reminder that while Anderson’s films look like the product of a singular imagination, they’re built with a huge collective effort. Whether you’re a budding filmmaker, a cinephile or a sharp-suited aesthete, it’s an exhibition that can’t be missed.
5 items you can't afford to miss at Wes Anderson: The Archive
From: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) — The whole look of Bill Murray's underwater natural history team in The Life Aquatic, from the blue jumpsuits to the red beanies, has gone on to be iconic. But the custom 'Zissou'-stamped Adidas trainers have been on our wish-list for years. You can see the originals as part of the exhibition.
From Fantastic Mr Fox (2009) — The tiny stop-motion animals of Anderson's Roald Dahl adaptation came with a host of equally tiny props to bring his vision of the timeless children's story to life. So it was only fitting then that one included a thumb-sized copy of the original book itself.
From Rushmore (1998) — If one items really gives you a peek inside the mind of Wes Anderson, it's this script-in-progress for Rushmore. With overlapping dialogue, scribbled out ammendments and margin notes, you get a sense of how Anderson layers up the cutting, slightly-detached dialogue his characters are so fond of.
From The French Dispatch (2021) — Taking its cues from The New Yorker's iconic cover art, Spanish painter and illustrator Javi Aznarez made a host of covers for Anderson's fictional publishing homage, The French Dispatch. They're all on display at the exhibition.
From: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) — There's a whole host of polaroids and photos from Anderson's personal collection dotted around the exhibition, but this trio of topless shots of Bill Murray are enough to put any man-o-sphere influencer to shame.
Wes Anderson: The Archives is open from 21st November 2025 to 26th July 2026 at the Design Museum, London. Tickets are priced from £19.69.
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