When Kim Kardashian arrived at this year’s Met Gala in a gleaming tangerine fibreglass breastplate, anyone familiar with the work of Allen Jones would have recognised its language at once: the moulded torso, the body translated into sculptural form. The look drew on his Body Armour works , but it was more than a revival.

As Jones recalls it, Kardashian flew from Los Angeles to rural Oxfordshire within a day or two of their conversation and spent around five hours in his studio. “I think what she really wanted to do was to wear one of the sculptures,” he tells me. Since an existing work could not simply be worn, a new cast was made for her. On Kardashian, the sculptural form moved into a different context while retaining its history.

© Allen Jones / Photo: Nadia Lee Cohen

At 88, Jones stands among the defining figures of British Pop Art. Taking Shape, newly opened at Camden Arts Projects in London, brings together works spanning two decades alongside Aerial (2026), a new aluminium sculpture created specifically for the space.

Photo: Yuki Kos Aerial (2026), suspended above the main exhibition space, and Large Swivel (2024), positioned below.

Photo: Yuki Kos 　Belle of Shoreditch (2020) on the left, Red Queen (2014) on the right

I ask what first drew him to the female form. “Life-drawing class,” he says. As an art student in the late 1950s, he found himself in a climate where figurative art was regarded as passé and abstraction seemed to offer the future. But the problem, he decided, was never the figure. It was the visual language being used. “It had run out of steam,” he says.

So he looked elsewhere: to advertising, to comics, to the graphic language of popular culture. These offered other ways of representing the figure, sharper in outline and more attuned to the visual world around him.

Jones is less interested in neat explanations. “You don’t know what history has in store for you,” he says. A life, as he sees it, is shaped by chance: where one grows up, the people one meets, the first job one takes, and whether encouragement arrives at the right moment. He remembers his father, an amateur Sunday painter, who supported his interest in art from childhood.

“The world is a permanent cycle,” Jones tells me. “What is seen as difficult by one generation is a way of life to another.”
Across six decades, the female image has remained a shifting presence in Jones’s practice: polished, stylised and never entirely available to a single interpretation. It can lend definition without closing anything down. Seen in this light, armour is not simply a means of protection. It can also be a way of meeting the world on one’s own terms.

Allen Jones: TAKING SHAPE runs until 30 August at Camden Arts Projects, 176 Prince of Wales Road, London, NW5 3PT