The surprisingly punk fashion of the Bloomsbury set, including Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell
Scrupulously researched and curated by fashion journalist Charlie Porter, Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and Fashion has opened at Charleston’s new spaces at Southover House in Lewes.
- Scrupulously researched and curated by fashion journalist Charlie Porter, Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and Fashion has opened at Charleston’s new spaces at Southover House in Lewes.
- The exhibition brings together original garments, paintings, photography and spoken word to explore how the Bloomsbury set continues to inspire fashion more than a century later.
- Charleston was once the home and studio of the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and a gathering space for the artists and writers who came to be known as “the Bloomsbury set”, including Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey.
- Photos of Woolf from 1923 from the journal of Lady Ottoline Morrell display more fashion audacity.
Under the influence of Bloomsbury
- The Bloomsbury group’s distaste for formality helped to set the foundations for how we dress today.
- The exhibition positions the members of the Bloomsbury group as standing up against the military inheritance of the three-piece suit, cinched waists and constrictive undergarments.
- These groups paved the way for the revolution in clothing championed by the Bloomsbury set.
The sandal-wearers
- Her roomy brown corduroy gown, monumentalised in a portrait by Pablo Picasso, must have made an impression on Bell.
- She purchased a similar dress after she visited her in 1913.
- Not to mention other radically dressed figures from the era known to the group, like Radclyffe Hall, Annie Besant and Filippo De Pisis.