To
celebrate the launch of 'Bring No Clothes', Charlie Porter unpacks how London's
Bloomsbury group still influence young designers.
Imagine you are not able to express yourself. But wait: maybe, right now, you feel unable to express yourself. What can you do about it? Could clothing help you change?
This was the experience of the Bloomsbury group, a loose collective of writers, artists and thinkers, which formed in London over a century ago. Recently, members of Bloomsbury have inspired a number of 21st century fashion designers, such as Kim Jones at both Dior Men and Fendi, Comme des Garçons and S.S. Daley. What influences these designers isn’t so much a Bloomsbury look. What matters are their ideas, and what they can mean to us today.
Core members of the Bloomsbury group were queer, such as writer Virginia Woolf and artist Duncan Grant. Together with their allies, such as Woolf’s sister and artist in her own right Vanessa Bell, they tried to forge new ways of living and loving.
Virginia and Vanessa had escaped abuse and psychological control of their lives, where they were expected to dress pretty and suffer in silence well into their twenties. As they revolutionised their lives, they revolutionised their clothing, creating their own vocabulary of loose, long-line, non-restrictive garments. Suddenly, they had agency.
To change our future, we must understand our past. It’s why I’ve written a book, and curated an exhibition at Charleston in Lewes, about what we can learn from the clothing of the Bloomsbury group. It’s called Bring No Clothes, words Woolf used to say to guests: we reject tradition and the conventions that trapped us. The phrase “bring no clothes” are also an invitation to us today: can we shed preconceptions about what we wear, to construct new forms of living and being?
Crucially, Woolf was not able to fully express herself. It’s known that she self-censored queer narratives from her novels, particularly her debut novel The Voyage Out, published in 1915. But also, the language did not yet exist for her to describe her style. In her diary, she described herself as “badly dressed”, words which since been taken literally, and used to mock her.
Around fifty years after she wrote those words, bad taste became the powerful fashion weapon that we know today. It happened in the seventies with punk in New York and London, with John Waters and his friends such as Divine in Baltimore, and the Cockettes, such as Sylvester, in San Francisco. i-D itself was born in 1980 to champion London club cultures that revelled in good taste/bad taste.
Today, bad taste is an understood and even sophisticated part of luxury fashion. Miuccia Prada’s work is regularly described as ugly, which is meant as a compliment. Glenn Martens gleefully pushes at taste for his work at Y Project and Diesel. We know that bad can be very, very good.
In Virginia Woolf’s time, she had no way to express this, or even recognise herself her actions. Today, we are so saturated by fashion that we can feel jaded, like there’s nothing more to learn. But what if, right now, we’re in a similar state – that we don’t even realise there are other ways we can express ourselves.
As I was writing the book, I started to make my own clothes. It was because of Vanessa Bell, who made what she wore throughout her life. I’d never tried it before, even though I’ve written about fashion for over 20 years. I presumed it was going to be impossible, but if I was going to try and understand Bell, I thought I should give it a go.
It was easy. From the beginning, I had no interest in finishing what I made properly, because Bell didn’t either. She was said to finish her pieces with safety pins, just like Jawara Alleyne, the London-based designer from Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, who has made new works in response to Vanessa Bell for my exhibition. If you free yourself from thinking you have to finish garments like they were made for a shop, you open up the possibility of intuitive design, rather than just following a pattern.
The first piece I made was a linen T-shirt with a tail like a frock coat, its collar ribbed and crewneck. The front is grey, the back in yellow check. I accidentally sewed the shoulder seams inside out. Who cares? It set my way of working, where imperfections became part of the plan. I made it over a year ago, and still wear it today.
I made other versions of the top, and kept all the scraps. Once I had enough, I patchworked them to make another, where the tail is more like entrails. I now love scraps. After I made some deadstock denim joggers, I patchworked the scraps to make an angular top, which has a protrusion like a shelf from out the back of the neck. I made no pattern, just trusted my eye. It fits me just how I like it: close but not tight, slightly awkward, a bit like it shouldn’t exist.
This is the thing: if I went into most shops and asked for something that looks “a bit like it shouldn’t exist”, I’m not sure I’d get very far. What I’m wearing only exists because I’ve actively chosen to make it. I’ve no interest in starting a fashion label. I don’t want to dress others. What matters to me right now is being in communication with myself.
For the first time in my life, my relationship with my clothing is elemental. By writing the book, it’s been like breathing sudden clear air. Fashion has often made me feel at a remove, even though I’ve worked within the industry for much of my adult life. It made me think about that cliché of fashion, the sense of je ne sais quoi. It implies that a key quality of being fashionable is something that can’t be known.
This not-knowing has long been a tool of consumerism: we keep buying more in the hope that the next thing will finally give us, too, that je ne sais quoi. But what if all the mystery of fashion is just an illusion. What if we can know, and have agency over what we wear.
This led me to find another way of looking at fashion, other than the usual cycle of seasons which create their own remove, because fashion seems perpetually one step ahead. Instead, at the end of the book, I suggest a new philosophy of fashion based around the tension that is inherent in every single garment.
It’s the tension that’s built into garments through the weave of the fabric, the way it’s cut and constructed. But then it’s also the tensions that we feel: interpersonal tension, sexual tension, the societal tension of if we fit in or stand out. There’s class tension, socio-political tension, environmental tension. All of these tensions are within the garments that we wear, yet they mostly go unnoticed. It’s the same as Woolf, not even knowing that being badly dressed could be a very good thing.
If we can begin to understand these tensions, maybe we can break free from preconceptions about what we wear, bring no clothes, and begin to feel more able to fully express ourselves.
Bring No
Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion will be available from Dover
Street Market and all good bookstores on September 7; Bring No Clothes:
Bloomsbury and Fashion will open at Charleston Lewes on September 13.
How Virginia Woolf changed the philosophy of fashion. By Charlie Porter. i-D September 5, 2023.
Ahead of his upcoming exhibition and book Bring No Clothes, Charlie Porter delves into the clothing of the Bloomsbury Set, unpacking questions of class, Empire and queerness in the process.
The famous literary circle – composed of creatives such as Woolf, her artist sister Vanessa Bell and novelist EM Forster – has taken on a somewhat dowdy image in our cultural conscience, writes Patrick Sproull. But a revealing new book and exhibition unearth deeper meanings to their sartorial choices.
When Dorothy Parker described the Bloomsbury Group as having “lived in squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles”, she didn’t say anything about how they dressed. There’s a good reason for that. When most people think of the Bloomsbury Group, the informal assemblage of artists, poets and writers established in the early 1900s, we think of their art, their cultural clout, their influence, their incestuousness. What they wore has seldom featured prominently in their legacy. The acclaimed fashion journalist Charlie Porter, though, is eager to rectify that with his excellent new book Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion.
Among the Group’s numbers were Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, author EM Forster as well as economist John Maynard Keynes and the painter Duncan Grant. Their heady existence in the early 1900s is an early example of an enviably cosmopolitan literary social scene that was popularised in the latter half of the century by American writers like Truman Capote and James Baldwin. Their clubhouse was the East Sussex farmhouse, Charleston, and in conjunction with Porter’s book, an exhibition, Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and Fashion, opens this month at Charleston’s new gallery in Lewes. The exhibition will draw together original items worn by its members as well as pieces inspired by the Group from contemporary fashion houses, such as Commes des Garcons and Dior.
The more famous members of the group, authors Woolf and Forster, have taken on somewhat dowdy images in our cultural conscience, arising from a presumption that because they were so dexterous with words, they couldn’t have a similar command of their wardrobe. Porter, admittedly, is not out to claim that someone like Virginia Woolf was actually a Coco Chanel-esque style maven. But her clothes shouldn’t be dismissed; instead, they are simply another avenue to explore her well-documented complicated genius.
“The thing with clothes is that it allows you to get close to an individual and it allows you to get close to their experience,” Porter says. “By looking at their clothes, in particular their actions and what they did at the point where Bloomsbury formed, what emerges is this sense of queer humans and their allies attempting to live life.”
That sense of the Bloomsbury Group as a coterie of queer (and queer adjacent) artists forms the main, most vital artery of Bring No Clothes. Porter’s generous, empathetic eye feels like a corrective for the more salacious historical depictions of the Group’s affairs.
“Because they’re upper class it’s [seen as possessing] this poshness or eccentricity, and as soon as something becomes titillation it casts queer people as purely people whose lives are there for entertainment value,” Porter says. “By starting with their clothes, it allows you to be with them and talk about them in non-prurient ways.”
As children, Woolf and Bell experienced abuse from their father and half-brother, and they were repressed, like so many women of the time, by constrictive Victorian attire, cinched and pulled and tightened into submission. In adulthood, they found freedom in more liberating clothes: flowing summer dresses, outsized knitted cardigans, long, loose overcoats.
They experimented with pattern and colour, and Bell even made her own clothes, often using safety pins to secure garments. Safety pins have now become an enduring staple in contemporary fashion, used by Vivienne Westwood, Jean Paul Gaultier and John Galliano. When safety pins first gained prominence under Westwood, they were a sign of punkish rebellion. That’s precisely how Bell used them at the time; breaking conventions on how fashion operates and telegraphing her own queerness.
Porter dedicates considerable time to the men of the Bloomsbury Group and what their fashion tells us. Having written mostly about menswear, he notes that the vast majority of fashion journalism focuses on women’s clothing. “If there are any stories on the clothes that men wear, it’s normally mocking,” he says. Like when Barack Obama wore a tan-coloured suit and had Fox News enraged for weeks. Or when Emmanuel Macron was photographed with his shirt unbuttoned to reveal his chest hair.
“What that actually covers up is that the patriarchal hold of tailoring is so strong, you’re not meant to question it,” he says. “It never changes. It’s a language of power that’s so entrenched that those in power who wear suits see it as facile to even talk about what they’re wearing. If you question it, it starts to chip away at their patriarchal power.”
Porter is a queer man, and his empathy for the Bloomsbury Group’s men makes for the book’s strongest passages. Within the confines of men’s clothing – simple, rigid, unforgiving – the painter Duncan Grant found ways to display his true self; he would wear a vest top hanging off one shoulder, exposing his nipple in an undoubtedly feminising gesture. On other occasions, he would wear a shirt and tie knotted into a messy, unkempt stub, thumbing his nose at the refined presentation expected from men. Sometimes Grant would simply wear nothing at all, as he was frequently photographed naked.
If Grant is an example of a queer man completely unburdened by societal expectations, his obverse is EM Forster, the author known for Howards End and A Room with a View. There was a man whose body was for no one but himself, tightly hidden under cotton and wool suits. Forster’s entire life was constrained by homophobia; his greatest, queerest work, the gay love story Maurice, was written between 1913 and 1914 but not published until 1971. Forster’s presentation, in the model of the neat, prim English gentleman, was a tourniquet for his queer identity, much like any inhibitive corset.
Porter’s treatise on the clothes of the Bloomsbury Group feels like it doesn’t just introduce a new frame of thinking, it adds a fresh layer of humanity to the collective. He approaches them like peers, offering theories and speculation he admits could be wrong, but his level of thoughtfulness and care would have you believe it all. Porter is aware that fashion can often serve as a distraction – he comments on a shallow reading of the Group that he finds “completely uninteresting”, that of the so-called “Bloomsbury look”, an imprecise, gift shop-ready understanding of their aesthetic. “Anyone can look at a photo and copy it,” he says. “It’s not interesting.”
It’s not just the Group that has fallen victim to reductionism – think of Frida Kahlo socks, Van Gogh magnets or Sylvia Plath tote bags. Yes, it’s entirely possible to patronise an artist’s talent through their clothes, but only if you lack the capability to understand that clothes are an essential part of their identity and offer more than mere aesthetic value. I mention to Porter a recent profile of Zadie Smith in Vogue, where the novelist was vividly photographed wearing Alexander McQueen and Maison Margiela. Allowing Smith the opportunity to express herself away from the page doesn’t diminish her writing, and clothes can often be as important a way to access a person’s complexities as their art or writing.
“I think their clothes allow you to look at their literature or art or political and economic thinking with honesty and clear, fresh eyes, rather than layers of academic thinking,” Porter says. “For me, it’s expansive, not reductive.”
‘Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion’ by Charlie Porter is out now. Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and Fashion is at Charleston in Lewes from 13 September
Loved in triangles, dressed for liberation: The queer fashion secrets of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. By Patrick Sproull. The Independent, September 11, 2023.
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.
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From Virginia Woolf and her circle to Kate Moss’s Vogue shoot, the unconventional Sussex farmhouse has captured imaginations across the decades
The most fashionable house in England isn’t on an elegant London street or in a chocolate-box Cotswolds village, but at the end of a long, narrow, often muddy country lane riven deep in a fold of the Sussex Downs. Inside, there is not a single midcentury cocktail cabinet, rainforest shower or Italian designer sofa to be found. Instead, Charleston is a thickset farmhouse of doughty 17th-century stone, scrambled with roses, dormer windows nosing from a slope of weathered tile.
The layout is warren-like rather than open plan, the floors unevenly boarded. As is the way with country houses that were built to keep out the chill, the windows are on the small side, the light a little gloomy. But every room is decorated by hand, in dizzying detail – sponge-painted diamonds on wood panelling, a still life of hollyhocks and poppies on a wooden door, nude figures either side of a fireplace encrusted with colourful tiles – so that the house sings with colour and with life.
The fashion world is as in love with Charleston now as the Bloomsbury set were from the moment in 1916 when Virginia Woolf stumbled across the house and wrote to her sister, Vanessa Bell, that “it has a charming garden, with a pond, and fruit trees, and vegetables, all now rather run wild, but you could make it lovely”.
Bell, the painter Duncan Grant and a tangle of family, lovers and friends made the house their home and studio for six decades; after Grant’s death in 1978, it opened to the public in 1986. In Paris last June, a scale model of the house was built as a stage set for a Dior menswear catwalk show, which included prints drawn from Duncan Grant paintings. A year earlier, Kate Moss was photographed for British Vogue on one of the house’s faded sofas wearing only a pair of Fendi couture high-heeled boots, embroidered all over with pearls and sequins, and Bell’s own straw sunhat. Next month, Charleston’s new gallery space in nearby Lewes will stage Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and Fashion, curated by Charlie Porter, the first major exhibition to explore the Bloomsbury influence on style.
The Charleston look has spread from the catwalk to our homes. The naive vibrancy that is the most distinctive feature of Charleston’s interiors is, right now, piled high in high-street homeware stores. Brightly painted plates and bowls borrow from the cheerful bohemia of Duncan Grant’s pottery. Rugs have scalloped edges, water glasses are daubed with swirls, lampstands fashioned from towers of bobbins. Lemon-print aprons by La DoubleJ and ladybirds on leaf platters by Bordallo Pinheiro bring to life the informal, communal spirit of a house where the dining table, chairs and fireplaces were all lovingly painted. Ella Joel, homeware buyer at Matches, is seeing fashion-conscious customers drawn to colourful rustic wicker placemats by Cabana, heart-daubed plates by Summerill & Bishop and shell-painted ones by Ginori 1735.
The irony of Charleston being fashionable is that the Bloomsbury set – who “lived in squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles”, as Dorothy Parker put it – had little time for fashion. Bring No Clothes, the title of the upcoming exhibition and Porter’s accompanying book, takes its name from an instruction Virginia Woolf gave to house guests. (“Please bring no clothes: we live in a state of utmost simplicity,” she wrote to TS Eliot, inviting him to stay in 1920.)
But the instruction is nothing if not a fashion statement. The disdain for dress codes, the irreverent self-expression of painting directly on to fireplaces and door frames, and the famously unconventional cat’s cradle of relationships between Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Grant’s lover David Garnett, all flower from the same free-thinking root. To stand in one of Charleston’s exuberantly painted rooms is to feel how much the inhabitants loved and celebrated the world of ideas; to be invigorated by their robust interrogation of tradition. And there is something very modern about the way the Charlestonians remade their home in their own image, painting directly on to wardrobes and headboards without boundaries between art and life. The house is, in a way, a giant – and gloriously unfiltered – Bloomsbury group selfie.
More than a century later, Charleston resonates with audiences who find more to relate to here than in the more conventional British stately homes, with their four-posters and gleaming silver cabinets. “A lot of people, perhaps especially from the LGBTQ+ community, are drawn to how the Bloomsbury group created an alternative vision of a chosen family,” says Nathaniel Hepburn, director of Charleston. Dotted with portraits of children, the house is imbued with a vibrant spirit of family and love. The fashion designer Susie Cave spoke at the recent Charleston festival of the kinship she feels between the house and the chosen family of creatives who make up her Vampire’s Wife design team.
Charleston’s lack of grand ballrooms or ghosts of liveried butlers has given it fresh charm for a generation of visitors who, in the cost of living crisis, have cooled on Downton Abbey nostalgia. “It is the antithesis of a great house,” says Hepburn. “It is a very modest house which was transformed, with very simple means but an extraordinary aesthetic and hard work, over 60 years. They made things, bought furniture from flea markets.”
There is, for all the decorative touches, a bracing sense of frugality in the bones of the place. “I know that many of our visitors take ideas home with them, and not just about stencil work around a fireplace,” he says. “The house shakes your perception of how different objects can fit together.”
Charleston has blue-blooded fashion pedigree. Annie Leibovitz shot Nicole Kidman and Vanessa Redgrave in the house in the 1990s. In the 2000s, Christopher Bailey landgrabbed Bloomsbury as a keystone reference for his revamped vision not just of Burberry but of Britishness itself, one rooted in hedgerows and country lanes and cups of tea but championing the artisanal and the outsider, where once Burberry had stood fast for umbrellas and stiff upper lips. Burberry’s autumn 2014 collection zoomed in on Charlestonian detail, silk dresses heavy with soft painterly scallops and petals.
Yet Charleston was in danger of closing in 2020, when lockdown wiped out ticket sales. Launching an emergency crowdfunding appeal to raise £400,000, Hepburn warned that with “no reserves and no endowment” to fall back on, the situation was dire. That Charleston now finds itself on an upswing owes something to influential British fashion designer Kim Jones, designer of both Dior menswear and Fendi womenswear and a student and collector of Bloomsbury books and paintings.
Jones first visited Charleston aged 14, on a trip with his school from nearby Lewes, and felt a kinship with “a group of outsiders, just as the fashion world is full of outsiders”. As a teenager, he sketched in the garden; these days, his extensive private collection includes both Vita Sackville-West’s and Vanessa Bell’s personal copies of Woolf’s Orlando, paintings by Duncan Grant, a shell necklace owned by Woolf, and a teapot painted as a birthday present by Vanessa Bell for her sister Virginia. Bloomsbury is no passing whim for Jones, who is fascinated by these people born in Victorian England who reacted against their time. Dior are bringing glamour and financial support, sponsoring the Bring No Clothes exhibition. “Kim has real knowledge and respect for the work,” says Hepburn. “This is not a pastiche. He is really thoughtful about the ideas behind the visuals.”
Scholars will roll their eyes at the reductiveness of the Bloomsbury name being bandied about for squiggles on a mass-produced painted plate, but there is no denying that the focus on Charleston plays into a style pendulum swing away from Scandi minimalism. The richly decorated aesthetic is yang to the yin of the uncluttered minimalism that has become the default setting of modern good taste.
Bloomsbury style, according to Porter “is absolutely not about the deification of clothing, which is the familiar narrative of fashion, and I hope that visitors will use the exhibition to reconsider their own relationship with clothing”. The wildly decorated rooms at Charleston are delicious in their rampant details – an eye and a heart here, a bug and a rose there – but their soul is in their DIY ethos. “When you see the wardrobe that Vanessa Bell painted, it makes you think about what you could do yourself. There is a sense of possibility about Charleston that makes it a very alive place to be,” says Porter. “It is ironic, really, that Charleston inspires stuff that gets mass-produced, because what the house asks you to do, always, is to think for yourself.”
Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and Fashion is at Charleston in Lewes from 13 September
‘The house sings with colour and with life’: how the fashion world fell for Charleston, the Bloomsbury set’s country home. By Jess Cartner-Morley. The Guardian, August 12, 2023.
At Dior Men’s spring 2023 show last June, the brand’s artistic director, Kim Jones, sent out models in sweaters printed with Post-Impressionist works by the early 20th-century painter Duncan Grant, a member of the constellation of British artists and intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury Group. As a teenager, Jones had moved with his family to the East Sussex village of Lewes, not far from Charleston, the 16th-century farmhouse Grant leased with Vanessa Bell, also a painter. Now a museum, the house was a gathering place for the endlessly mythologized Bloomsberries, that loose collective of friends and creative conspirators who “lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles,” as an observer once famously noted, and which included Bell’s sister Virginia Woolf, the fellow writers E.M. Forster and Lytton Strachey, the economist John Maynard Keynes and the art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell.
For his presentation, Jones commissioned a large replica of Charleston, where he used to spend time sketching. It wasn’t his first homage to the Bloomsbury set; the dresses from his spring 2021 haute couture debut for Fendi, hand-embroidered with organza flowers and crystal beads, were based on Woolf’s 1928 novel, “Orlando,” a gender-transgressive love story that’s recently been adapted into a stage production on London’s West End.
Like other British designers before him — among them Erdem’s Erdem Moralioglu, and Christopher Bailey, when he was at Burberry — Jones keeps finding fresh inspiration in Grant and his cohort: their dishabille and their rejection of Victorian England’s conservative values. The curator Darren Clarke, who recently mounted a show at Charleston of Grant’s previously unseen homoerotic drawings from the late 1940s and ’50s, was attracted to the artist’s tender but also explicit and humorous celebration of gay love. With Bloomsbury, “it feels like everything has been written about them,” he says. “But then it always surprises you that something else comes along.”
Steven Stokey-Daley, the Liverpudlian founder of the sustainable men’s wear line S.S. Daley, channels that period by offering his own queer take on elite British dress codes. “As a visual person, and as someone who enjoys the romanticism of literature, I find Bloomsbury so exciting to unpick and explore,” says the LVMH Prize winner, whose 2020 graduate collection — which included white wool tennis coats, voluminous toile de Jouy trousers and wide-brimmed boaters — alluded to Forster’s gay coming-of-age novel, “Maurice” (published posthumously in 1971).
This fall, Jones and Stokey-Daley will join Comme des Garçons’ Rei Kawakubo and other designers in contributing pieces to an exhibition at Charleston titled “Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury & Fashion.” The name derives from a letter Woolf sent T.S. Eliot in 1920, encouraging the Modernist poet and essayist to visit her home in Rodmell, East Sussex. “Please bring no clothes,” she wrote. “We live in a state of the greatest simplicity.” Today, Bloomsbury is often associated with the group’s personal aesthetics, but that simple statement captures their true spirit. As Charlie Porter, the show’s curator, says, “It wasn’t about a look at all.”
Why Fashion Can’t Get Enough of the Bloomsbury Group. By Kin Woo. The New York Times, February 23, 2023.
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