Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy
of Fashion by Charlie Porter
'He makes
us see a subject we thought we knew so well from a completely different angle;
in writing that is deeply researched, but inviting, warm, and full of
personality' Katy Hessel
'Charlie
Porter is a magician' Olivia Laing
Why do we
wear what we wear? To answer this question, we must go back and unlock the
wardrobes of the early twentieth century, when fashion as we know it was born.
In Bring No
Clothes, acclaimed fashion writer Charlie Porter brings us face to face with
six members of the Bloomsbury Group, the collective of artists and thinkers who
were in the vanguard of a social and sartorial revolution. Each of them offers
fresh insight into the constraints and possibilities of fashion today: from the
stifling repression of E. M. Forster's top buttons to the creativity of Vanessa
Bell's wayward hems; from the sheer pleasure of Ottoline Morrell's lavish
dresses to the clashing self-consciousness of Virginia Woolf's orange
stockings. As Porter carefully unpicks what they wore and how they wore it, we
see how clothing can be a means of artistic, intellectual and sexual
liberation, or, conversely, a tool for patriarchal control.
Travelling
through libraries, archives, attics and studios, Porter uncovers fresh evidence
about his subjects, revealing them in a thrillingly intimate, vivid new light.
And, as he is inspired to begin making his own clothing, his perspective on
fashion - and on life - starts to change. In the end, he shows, we should all
'bring no clothes,' embracing a new philosophy of living: one which activates
the connections between the way we dress and the way we think, act and love.
Review
Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of
Fashion by Charlie Porter review – style revolution
A fashion journalist links the sartorial choices of
Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, TS Eliot et al to their avant garde outlook on
life
Kathryn
Hughes
Wed 6 Sep
2023 09.00 BST
When
Virginia Woolf invited TS Eliot down for a country weekend in 1920 she
concluded with “Please bring no clothes”. This was not a suggestion that “Tom”
should arrive in East Sussex naked. Such a possibility was unlikely anyway
since at this point the poet was still working as a buttoned-up clerk at Lloyds
Bank. Eliot was famously wedded to his three-piece suit to the point where,
Woolf joked, he would have worn a four-piece one if such a thing existed. What
she meant by “bring no clothes” was that at Monk’s House they did not dress for
dinner, change for church (there was no church), or worry about getting their
best clothes grubby in the garden. This was Bloomsbury, albeit a rural version,
and the clothing conventions to which the rest of upper-middle-class society
had returned after the first world war had no place there.
Fashion
journalist Charlie Porter is spot-on with his suggestion that the way the
circle thought about clothes was part of a wider revolt against the
late-Victorian society in which its members had been raised (Woolf was born in
1882, Eliot six years later). Choosing not to wear black tie for dinner or
gloves “in town” was all part of the code that also involved refusing to take
up arms against the Germans, or follow the usual rules about who could sleep
with whom, or adhere to inherited artistic forms – linear narrative in fiction,
mimesis in painting – in favour of something more impressionistic.
Virginia Woolf swapping Edwardian corsetry for a
flowing silhouette was the precondition of her sexual experimentation
According
to Porter’s analysis of Bloomsbury’s style preferences, Woolf swapping the
pinched-in Edwardian corsetry of her youth for of a loose, flowing silhouette
was the precondition of her sexual experimentation with Vita Sackville-West.
Likewise, this sartorial undoing enabled her to experiment typographically at
the Hogarth Press, co-founded with husband Leonard, which published Eliot’s
form-busting The Waste Land in 1923. Similarly, Duncan Grant’s near-constant
nudity was of a piece with his capacity to be both a lover of men and a steady
partner to Woolf’s sister Vanessa, who was officially still married to Clive
Bell.
Thanks to
his access to the contents of several Bloomsbury wardrobes, together with a
trove of previously unseen photographs, Porter is able to provide a detailed
illustration of how “Make it new” – the cry of modernists everywhere – played
out on the material level. He shows us Lady Ottoline Morrell’s frocks, which
are a form of Elizabethan cosplay with their puffed-up shoulders (useful for
balancing out Lady O’s 6ft frame), while Vanessa Bell knocked up pyjamas out of
the abstractly patterned cloth that she had originally designed for sofas.
There was
another type of Bloomsbury dressing, more Eliot than Grant. The obvious figure
here is EM Forster, who continued with the formal suit as a defensive armour
against his yearning for male bodies. The novelist did not lose his virginity
until he was 38, and even then he kept on with high-table manners. Porter
includes plenty of photographs of the novelist sweating in the noonday sun
while standing alongside the many lovely young men in dhotis or fezzes that he
encountered on his travels. The only time Forster looked unambiguously happy
was when photographed in “Indian court dress”, which resembles nothing so much
as a tea gown that Vanessa Bell might have repurposed with kitchen scissors.
Less deft
is Porter’s attempt to urge a clothing revolution for our own times. Suggesting
we should all be a bit more Bloomsbury in order to break out of the endless
churn of fast fashion misses the point that Woolf’s and Grant’s anti-fashion
stance was just that – a style that had been consciously crafted and refined
with a view to public performance. In doing so they were actually echoing their
parents and grandparents, who had been keen exponents of the Arts and Crafts
look of the 1880s (Julia Margaret Cameron, the photographer of all those
droopily dressed maidens, was Virginia and Vanessa’s great-aunt). The history
of dress is packed with such anti-fashion moments, and to suggest that
emulating Bloomsbury’s version would somehow allow us to “forge new ways of
being” seems a little naive.
Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the
Philosophy of Fashion by Charlie Porter is published by Particular (£20). To
support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com.
Delivery charges may apply.
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