In letters inviting friends to her Sussex home, Virginia Woolf would often sign off with a simple directive: “Bring no clothes.” Not that she was expecting them to arrive naked – although, given the famously tangled love lives of the Bloomsbury group, her aristocratic band of early 20th-century British creatives, that wouldn’t be entirely outside the realm of possibility. She merely meant that visitors should come as they were.
Woolf’s words, writer and curator Charlie Porter argues in the exhibition Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and Fashion and its lively accompanying book, reflected a broader shift – from the stuffy corsets of Victorian England to the free-spirited bohemianism embodied by Bloomsbury. (The trust that oversees Charleston, the former home of Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell and her partner, painter Duncan Grant, is behind the show, which runs until 7 January at a new space in the East Sussex town of Lewes.)
“In fashion history, that period is often skirted over,” says Porter. “It just goes from cinched control to images of women in Chanel or playing tennis, and I wanted to really look at what was actually happening at that time. The Bloomsbury group felt like the perfect people to study that through.” On view are shell necklaces worn by Woolf and Bell, original sketches by Grant, and a silk Mariano Fortuny dress that once belonged to the patroness Lady Ottoline Morrell. Meanwhile, the captivating vintage photographs and conversational tone of Porter’s book – at turns scholarly, slyly amusing, and touchingly personal, as when he describes taking inspiration from Bell to make his own clothes after the death of his artist mother – give those unable to travel to the south of England their own chance to appreciate the group’s disruptive sense of style.
And while the exhibition explores how the Bloomsbury set’s sartorial mores underlined their radical understandings of feminism and sexuality, equally fascinating for Porter was how the likes of Erdem, SS Daley, and Kim Jones have continued to mine the group’s philosophies. “It’s not a show that looks at clothes replicating motifs from around the house, and it’s not a show that looks at Bloomsbury as pastiche,” says Nathaniel Hepburn, director and CEO of the Charleston Trust. “It’s about their way of thinking.” Case in point? Five striking ensembles by Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons from 2019, all inspired by the “emotion” of Woolf’s Orlando. In Hepburn’s words: “The show is about ideas as much as it is about garments.”
