Key Points
But Woolf's handily quotable maxim that clothes "change our view of the world and the world's view of us" could have been taken from a new book and exhibition about the Bloomsbury Group the radical circle of artists, writers, and thinkers that Woolf was a part of..
Fashion journalist Charlie Porter's book, Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion, has been published to coincide with the show he's curated at Charleston in Lewes, a new exhibition space in Sussex near the famous farmhouse where several of the Bloomsbury Group lived...
Porter quotes a letter Woolf sent to TS Eliot in 1920, ahead of his visit to her Sussex cottage: "We are hoping to see you on Saturday Please bring no clothes: we live in a state of the greatest simplicity." This instruction ensured guests knew that they wouldn't have to conform to the upper-class expectation of dressing for dinner that they were rejecting hierarchies shored up by the very concept of appropriate attire...
With upwards of 20 potential Bloomsbury-ites, spanning multiple decades and even generations, it's hardly surprising that many of them dressed very differently to one another.. Dior Men's summer 2023 collection was inspired by the artist Duncan Grant and the house and garden at Charleston (Credit: Brett Lloyd)..
Bloomsbury was self-consciously revolutionary in various artistic ways as early as 1908, Woolf was insisting that she wanted to do nothing less than "re-form the novel" and so it is tempting to assume that they were all planning out this fashion revolution, determining to "make it new" (as fellow modernist Ezra Pound famously said)...
