DUNDEE'S £80m new V&A Museum will launch in September with a luxurious show which will examine the golden age of Ocean Liners.

The landmark new museum, which its director said will open ‪on September 15‬ on budget, will have Ocean Liners: Speed & Style as its inaugural show.

It will feature 250 items including a fragment of the Titanic found floating in the Atlantic, luggage belonging to the Duke of Windsor, and a diamond and pearl tiara, previously owned by Lady Marguerite Allan, and saved from the Lusitania, which was sunk by submarine in 1915.

There will be a model of a quadruple expansion tandem engine, designed by Walter Brock and made by David Carlaw for William Denny Brothers, Dumbarton, Scotland, in 1887 as well as an exhibit highlighting the ‘Empress of Britain’, constructed at John Brown & Co on Clydebank and launched in 1930.

The show, organised by the V&A in London and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, will allow visitors enter rooms on liners, experiencing the interior of the "great floating palaces", as well as paintings, sculptures, ship and engine models, wall panels, furniture, fashion and film.

The Titanic fragment decorated the over-door to the first-class lounge on the famous ship which sunk in 1912.

Rarely lent by the Maritime Museum in Halifax, Nova Scotia, it will be on display in Europe for the very first time.

The exhibition at the dramatic Kengo Kuma-designed museum on the Dundee waterfront will also explore Scotland’s important role in the design and development of ocean liners.

A major event will mark the official opening of the museum, Philip Long, the director said, with details still to be announced.

The September opening, he said, was chosen as it avoids clashing with the Festival season in Edinburgh.

"It will be an exciting day and an emotional day, and such a significant day for Dundee and Scotland," he said.

"I am sure there will be some corks popping - this is what we have been working for nearly seven years."

Mr Long said the building was still "within budget" which almost doubled to £80m in 2015.

Turner Prize-nominated artist Ciara Phillips has been commissioned to produce a new work for the gallery.

Mr Long added: "V&A Dundee brings something new to Scotland.

"It is the country’s first museum dedicated to design, which visitors will be able to experience and get involved with in very many ways. "Particularly important is that the new museum enables major V&A exhibitions to be seen more widely by more people across the UK."

Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, said: “The opening of V&A Dundee this year will be a remarkable moment for Dundee, the V&A and the UK. The V&A was founded to champion British design, showcase the greatest works of creative ingenuity and enrich everyone’s imagination."

The show is viewed as an example of how the new museum will work with the V&A in London.

Ghislaine Wood, exhibition curator, said that "from outset", the V&A Dundee project played a "key role in its development."

She added: "Ocean Liners: Speed & Style highlights how Scottish design and engineering innovation was at the centre of the spectacular evolution of the ocean liner. It is truly fitting that it will be the first V&A Dundee exhibition.”

Sophie McKinlay, the director of Exhibitions at V&A Dundee, said: "There is a lot to be said about the romance of these floating cities which are a wonderful example of a totally designed experience.

"As well as the glamour and hugely successful marketing of ocean liners, the exhibition will also venture into the engine rooms of these impressive vessels, exploring the innovations in engineering that so radically changed the way people travel."

It will include Stanley Spencer’s painting ‘The Riveters’ from the 1941 series Shipbuilding on the Clyde.

On display will also be the Christian Dior suit worn by actress Marlene Dietrich as she arrived in New York on board the Queen Elizabeth in 1950 and the Duke of Windsor’s 1940s Goyard luggage.