She stands next to a stained, threadbare chair, a naked lightbulb dangling behind her. And as she raises her pink crinoline to her waist — flashing her fishnet smalls — she fixes the viewer with that familiar, defiant stare.

The sight of Kate Moss in her knickers is the first thing that greets visitors to the Vogue 100 show, which opened this week at the National Portrait Gallery in London, marking the centenary of the feted fashion magazine.

The picture of Moss, shot in 2008 by Mario Testino, is simultaneously beautiful and grotesque. The colours are those of a Renaissance painting, sullied only by the sleazy backroom atmosphere. Moss’s tanned, flawless legs, invitingly open, end in a rough pair of workboots. The elegance and femininity of the skirt’s pink cloud of tulle clashes with her military-style jacket.

Scroll down for video

Fashion: The sight of Kate Moss in her knickers is the first thing that greets visitors to the Vogue 100 show, which opened this week at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The picture of Moss, shot in 2008 by Mario Testino, is simultaneously beautiful and grotesque

It’s an uneasy mixture of vulgarity and style, of arrogance and vulnerability. It also captures the way most ordinary people feel about how modern fashion presents itself: a kind of voyeuristic confusion, an unsettling sense of alienation, a sneaking sensation that someone, somewhere, is having a grand old laugh at our expense.

Like the Kate of this picture, fashion beckons us in only to cruelly slam the door in our faces the moment we presume to approach.

A magazine on a newsstand is a very ordinary sort of thing. While an invaluable platform for advertisers and celebrities, for most of us, it is something to flick through on the train home, or with which to pass the time in a doctors’ surgery. But in the august setting of a museum, such as the National Portrait Gallery, it takes on an another dimension entirely.

Here, it becomes a matter of historical record, a social monitor, a timeline not only of our changing tastes in clothing, but also — and far more compellingly — of our changing mores and attitudes.

That is the aim, and ultimately the achievement, of this show, which charts 100 years of British Vogue, from its first, gentle, scholarly appearance in September 1916, followed by Twenties ascendancy under the editorship of Dorothy Todd (a lesbian and leading light of the Bloomsbury set) to its current incarnation under the hugely successful Alexandra Shulman, at the helm since 1992, its longest-serving editor.

Where there is subversion, it is clever, it has purpose: Linda Evangelista, a vision of cartoonish Fifties elegance in elegant green and mauve, shot by Patrick Demarchelier in 1991

Here, it becomes a matter of historical record, a social monitor, a timeline not only of our changing tastes in clothing, but also — and far more compellingly — of our changing mores and attitudes

Seen like this, across the decades in all its glory, Vogue sheds its mantle of a fickle fashion bible, in thrall to the changing seasons and passing whims of powerful advertisers and egomaniacal designers, and takes on a far more noble bearing.

The roll-call of writers and celebrity interviews is as impressive as it is eclectic. Tallulah Bankhead, Kingsley Amis, Alfred Hitchcock, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, Charlie Chaplin, Aldous Huxley, to name but a few.

Then there are the photographers: Snowdon, Beaton, Demarchelier, Testino, Donovan, Parkinson and many whose fame is lost in the mists of time, such as the improbably named Baron Adolph de Meyer, Vogue’s first staff photographer.

There’s also Lee Miller, a former American model who, during World War II, became the magazine’s battle-hardened war photographer, capturing Hitler’s Bavarian hideaway as it burned to the ground in 1945 and documenting first-hand the Nazi atrocities at the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps.

The story of how we descended from class acts such as these to the likes of Kate Moss, known as much for her tawdry behaviour as her undeniable beauty, is as much a tale of changing fashions as it is of changing values.

Not one of these pictures bear the slightest relation to style. They have no intrinsic value as fashion photography, they offer no useful service to the viewer. Pictured, Claudia Schiffer in Paris by Herb Ritts, 1989

It becomes more about the fashion and less about the famous faces displaying it — or not, as the case may be. For most striking aspect about 21st-century imagery is the abundance of nudity

Journeying back through the years (the exhibition is played out simply but effectively, each room representing a decade), the visitor is treated to a century of social and cultural change, seen through a gilded filter of fashion and fame.

As the present gives way to the past, not only do the tone and quality of the Vogue pictures change, with digital reverting to film and old-fashioned lighting replacing Photoshop, so do style and beauty take the centre stage, casting out modern-day cynicism and arrogance.

Curiously, the past feels more real, less staged and self-conscious — which is odd since the poses are more rigid, the clothes less fluid. But there’s an honesty, an absence of artificiality.

In particular, it becomes more about the fashion and less about the famous faces displaying it — or not, as the case may be. For most striking aspect about 21st-century imagery is the abundance of nudity.

Here’s Moss again in 2012 on some far-flung beach, in nothing but a Valentino micro-mini; and in 2001, riding starkers and bareback on a white stallion, allegedly ‘styled’ by Stella McCartney (although quite what there is to style when there’s not a scrap of clothing to be seen is a mystery).

Here’s Lara Stone, for reasons that are unclear, wearing a giant bin-liner. Or take Cara Delevingne scowling next to someone dressed as a duck. Someone else rides a yak, dressed herself as a yak — pure Ab Fab, but without the irony.

Curiously, the past feels more real, less staged and self-conscious. Here’s Lara Stone, for reasons that are unclear, wearing a giant bin-liner

As the present gives way to the past, not only do the tone and quality of the Vogue pictures change, with digital reverting to film and old-fashioned lighting replacing Photoshop, so do style and beauty take the centre stage, casting out modern-day cynicism and arrogance

Women walk by framed photos at the press preview for 'Vogue 100: A Century of Style' exhibiting the photographs that has been commissioned by British Vogue since it was founded in 1916 at National Portrait Gallery

Alexander McQueen glares down from a giant canvas, a cigarette in his mouth, his chin resting on a skull that’s also, ho-ho, smoking.

Not one of these pictures bear the slightest relation to style. They have no intrinsic value as fashion photography, they offer no useful service to the viewer.

They are mere statements, the fashion equivalent of conceptual art, and equally as superficial. They are vanity, pure and unadulterated, filling a cultural space utterly devoid of ideas.

As the decades roll back, however, something begins to happen. The egos recede, and fashion once again becomes something real, tangible, more a true craft and less a series of half-baked concepts.

Where there is subversion, it is clever, it has purpose: Linda Evangelista, a vision of cartoonish Fifties elegance in elegant green and mauve, shot by Patrick Demarchelier in 1991.

A 1941 picture by Beaton entitled Fashion Is Indestructible shows the back of an exquisite figure in gloves and hat, silhouetted between two pillars on a bombsite; Clifford Coffin’s 1947 Renaissance, an austere-looking model clad in a lavish ballgown standing at the bottom of a once grand staircase, now crumbling and pockmarked by shrapnel, has real meaning in the context of a post-war Britain struggling with deprivation.

As the decades roll back, however, something begins to happen. The egos recede, and fashion once again becomes something real, tangible, more a true craft and less a series of half-baked concepts

So much of modern fashion despises the wearer. Caught up in an endless search for newness, it retreats into itself, replacing creativity with pretentiousness, artistry with attitude

Journalists look at a photo of famous models at the press preview for 'Vogue 100: A Century of Style'

Contrast that with that opening shot of Moss flashing her knickers — similar dishevelled settings, similar styling — and you see opposite sides of the same coin, one elegant and meaningful, the other over-stylised and empty.

Twiggy, shot in 1967 by Ronald Traeger, captures all the exuberance of the era; as does Demarchelier’s 1987 The Romance Of Lacroix, in which a group of brightly dressed young things, all in matching black stilettos and sheer black tights, skip along the streets of Paris.

Striking also is a picture by Norman Parkinson of his model wife, Wenda, wearing a 1951 Hardy Amies suit. The stunning elegance and simplicity of the suit, set against a rainy Hyde Park, is the very image of post-war austerity, yet the clear rapport between husband and wife suffuses the portrait with an unmistakable sense of hope and romance.

My favourite room is the Forties, a rich boudoir-red, the pictures smaller but with so much more content than their modern counterparts. It is an era when Truman Capote and Cecil Beaton were the figures of the day.

Elsewhere a line of beautiful airmen climb aboard a plane, captured in all the luminescence of youth as they proceed to their deaths. Nearby, a whimsical 1944 Carl Erickson drawing, ‘Bright fashion for dark days’, catches the eye.

An image of Princess Diana is inspected at the press preview for 'Vogue 100: A Century of Style'

Clothes, style, fashion, these things are not frivolities. They are a source of dignity, humanity and sanity

It’s not nostalgia that draws us back to the Vogues of years gone by. It is a yearning for something that fashion has too long denied us: style

The striking thing about the Vogue of this era, in contrast to the magazine of latter years, is that — like the world it reflected — it is a place of utter certainty. Against the bleakest of backdrops, there was still comfort and aspiration to be had in knowing precisely which hat and gloves to wear for any given occasion.

So much of modern fashion despises the wearer. Caught up in an endless search for newness, it retreats into itself, replacing creativity with pretentiousness, artistry with attitude. It tries to break free of the confines of the human form, so dreary and restrictive with its bourgeois concerns of cost, comfort and the like — and in so doing too often ceases to be relevant.

Because the truth is that in a world of uncertainty the simple boundaries of a well-cut skirt or jacket are sometimes all that hold a person together.

Clothes, style, fashion, these things are not frivolities. They are a source of dignity, humanity and sanity.

It’s only in the graceless hedonism of the 21st century that such ideals are being lost.