Recent phenomena rarely get important historical surveys. Postmodernism appears to escape the rule, and a behemoth exhibition, soberly yet ambitiously titled "Postmodernism, Style and Subversion, 1970-1990," has just opened at London's Victoria & Albert Museum. The mere 20 years separating us from the end of postmodernism — if we choose to agree with the dates selected by the V&A's co-curators to bookend the period — may seem hardly enough to allow for a critical reappraisal of a "style" (for lack of a better word) that, in its late incarnation, was as derided as it was ubiquitous. And yet the monumental exhibition is exactly that: an in-depth analysis of a stylistic epoch, which manages to be at once scholarly, unabashedly subjective, and fun.

It kicks off with a slide show of Alessandro Mendini's 1974 "Destruction of a Lassù chair," an event (or a performance?) in which the celebrated Italian designer burnt a geometric chair of his creation on a funeral pyre, dramatically staging the end of an era. Mendini crops up throughout the show, the last piece of his on display being the 2004 "Logo Suit," a three-piece ensemble featuring a dazzling collection of corporate brands. A radical impulse had been swallowed by capitalism, and it is this story that the "Postmodernism" exhibition tells, navigating from the intellectual and architectural freedom of the early 1970s to the production of luxury goods servicing the hyped up lifestyle of the hyper-rich in the early 1990s.

This necessarily kaleidoscopic narrative takes us from the garden-shed-turned-historicist-structure by the star theorist of postmodernism Charles Jencks (rebuilt on a 1:1 scale for the exhibition), to the creative frenzy of the Italian collective Studio Alchemya, and its more commercial development Memphis. Architecture, the font of postmodernism, is very well represented with (among dozens of other exhibits) models and drawings of pre-ruined buildings by Arata Isozaki and documentation of James Stirling's both historicist and futuristic Stuttgart Staatgalerie. There are Vivienne Westwood's post-punk designs and Rei Kawakubo's clothes displayed on a mannequin bending her upper body like an old woman, infused, in one of the curator's words , with a "tragic, post-human mood." Pop music gets its own, club-like chambers dedicated to Grace Jones, Klaus Nomi, and Laurie Anderson. It is given credit, said Adamson, "for the delivery of postmodernism to a much wider audience than architects and designers ever reached." The show finishes with the late 1980s triumph of capitalism, epitomized by an Andreas Gursky photograph of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It is, somewhat ironically, more topical than ever.

Below, ARTINFO UK presents some thoughts on some of the choicer exhibits in the V&A's "Postmodernism" show, courtesy curator Glenn Adamsoon, who co-organized the show alongside Jane Pavitt. (To read Adamsoon's commentary alongside images of the works he is describing, click on the slide show at the left.)

Jean-Paul Goude and Antonio Lopez, Maternity dress for Grace Jones, 1979

"Grace Jones and Jean-Paul Goude were lovers. It was a transient thing but he was, in a way, her self-appointed stylist for six years, from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. This is a maternity dress that she wore to her own baby shower in 1977, at 4 am in a gay club in New York. She was carrying Goude's child, so he was very involved in every aspect of this. The reason we chose it (as poster for the show) was partly because of its amazing realization of high postmodern style at such an early date. What Jean-Claude Goude and Antonio Lopez — his collaborator on the design — were thinking about was Russian Constructivism, updating it and turning it into a kind of stylization. We were interested in this partly because it's a great image, partly because we thought that it was really important to show that postmodernism, even if it had originally been a story that was invented by white men like Charles Jencks, rapidly became something that everybody could participate in. We thought it was important that we had the opportunity to put a black woman on the poster. That says something in its own way. And pop music was a vector, or a delivery system for postmodernism. Music, art fine, fashion, performance, all these things mix together in this image.

"I would almost describe Grace Jones as a very intelligent actress in the leading role, with Goude as the director and stylist. They have different parts to play, but she was certainly highly conscious of what she was doing. She was adopting poses and doing shocking, sometimes self-primitivizing things like putting herself in a cage. I would imagine that she was filled with the sense of her own diva majesty and was looking for ways to present herself that were striking, shocking, smart, edgy."

Ai Weiwei, "Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo," 1994

"Ai Weiwei combines two things held apart by millennia: you have this ancient object and Coca-Cola, which was at that time (and maybe still is), the foreign brand with most presence in China economically. This object takes the two ends of Chinese history and links them. It's almost like taking a line and turning it into a circle. Maybe more pertinently to the 'Postmodernism' show, Ai Weiwei uses a brand as a motif of defacement, and by doing so he shows the destructive impact of capital. What's also really ingenious is that the act of defacement actually creates value. The piece is more valuable as an Ai Weiwei than it is as an urn from the Han dynasty era. So you have this really complicated, backwards quality when you start thinking about the way value operates in the work. The urn itself is likely to be a fake. Ai Weiwei doesn't actually know if it's real or not, and he's very interested in the elasticity and the elusiveness of authenticity. He buys the urns in street markets in Beijing, so they are more likely to be fake than not. This uncertainty is part of the piece's content."

Stanley Tigerman, "The Titanic," 1978.

"Tigerman lives in Chicago and has strong ties to the Illinois Institute of Technology. This is the campus's Crown Hall, designed by Mies van der Rohe. Tigerman is showing not only modernism and modernist architecture, but also his own place of education and training, and this father figure, Mies van der Rohe, sinking. This idea of casting modernist architecture as the Titanic — as this thing that's hubristic, can't sustain its own intentions and almost sinks under its own weight — is very humorous and deft. Of course, it's also a collage, entirely made up of existing imagery, so it's appropriate in that way as a postmodern emblem."

James Wines (for SITE), Indeterminate Façade Building showroom for BEST products, 1975. Houston, Texas.

"This is a great example of architecture that is meant to be viewed from a car. It's one of a series of buildings that Wines did for BEST stores, which were these kind of big-box stores. They were a mass-market chain, sort of like Walmart, but had very enlightened owners, Sydney and Francis Lewis, who were big collectors of pop art. They took on this architectural firm, SITE, which functioned almost like a conceptual art group. The name stands for 'sculpture in the environment.' They wanted to make architecture that reflected principles that you would be more likely to associate with conceptual art. Of course, we were interested in it because of the idea of pre-ruination. And again, there is this idea of appropriating something and distorting it, or deflecting it. In this case, you could say that the found object is the big box store itself. They are doing something to the surface, cladding it, and transforming the façade in a way that totally changes its meaning."

Wet magazine, no.20, September/November 1979, design by April Greiman and Jayme Odgers

"This is a collaborative design by Jayme Odgers and April Greiman. Greiman became the first designer to use the Macintosh professionally, but she wasn't using a computer in the late 1970s. This design looks like Photoshop and it's made by hand. It uses the bricolage strategy, with all these floating motifs — a Noh mask, a minor celebrity, a fish, a sword, these frames upon frames, these geometries — but it combines into a unified impression of dissonance, diversity, and pluralism. The idea that it was actually composed with scissors and glue and re-photographed is very evocative for me. This is a visual equivalent of what hip-hop was doing with music. What Greiman is doing on her light table with Jayme Odgers, Grandmaster Flash is doing on its turntables.

"WET was a cultural, lifestyle magazine, called 'WET, the Magazine of Gourmet Bathing.' It was founded and edited by this character named Leonard Koren and basically it was like a Who's Who of the West Coast Postmodern set. Peter Shire had an article on his teapots in that magazine, Barbara Radice, Ettore Sottsass's wife was writing for it at the time. Sottsass saw the article in WET and that's why he invited Shire to join Memphis. It wasn't all about bathing, but a lot of it was. And of course, a lot of it was about sex and drugs, but in a tasteful, funny way."

Frank Schreiner (for Stiletto Studios), Consumer's Rest chair, 1990

"This is a good example of postmodernism critiquing something. It's an ironic, rather piss-taking object about commodities and shopping. Originally, it was made by taking real parts of a shopping cart and welding them into a chair. Frank Schreiner, the designer, and a lot of his post-punk friends in Germany, these young radical designers, were using shopping carts in their houses as free furniture. But once it was made, it was the typical story: the chair got out there in the press as an image and it became so famous that they were able to put it into production. They hired a shopping cart manufacturer to make them. It's an example of this loop where you have provocation, going through a stage of mediation, which then becomes a commercialization. It does that whole story in one object. It's also really wonderful and funny. You sit down and then, where are you going? To the supermarket? Or are you the product of the capitalist environment? In a really strange way, it almost reflects this idea that's familiar from 'Blade Runner' that we are all manufactured by the images that we see, and that we are now the ultimate commodity."