The Bloomsbury Group, re-examined through their garments

All of us use our garb to ship out usually combined messages, and artists are not any exception. From Rembrandt’s multiply-costumed self portraits to Frida Kahlo’s Tehuana attire, the connection of artists to their garments has all the time been an particularly difficult one.

And nobody has charted the connection of artists and garments extra carefully than maybe the author, style critic and curator Charlie Porter. His first ebook, What Artists Put on (2021), zeroed in on the sartorial selections of Fashionable and modern artists to clarify how clothes can turn into potent instruments of expression in their very own proper.

Now Porter has set his sights on the Bloomsbury Group, that early-Twentieth-century band of British artists and intellectuals who included the author Virginia Woolf and her artist sister Vanessa Bell, the artist Duncan Grant, the economist John Maynard Keynes and the author E.M. Forster. This extremely influential cultural collective has been shrouded in a lot fantasy, false impression and snobbery, each throughout their lifetimes and by subsequent generations, who’ve usually gone to pains to obscure their experiences of queerness and self-expression in addition to a few of their much less interesting attitudes in the direction of race, class and privilege.

Porter grapples with and unpicks all the above in Carry No Garments: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Trend, a brand new ebook and exhibition that re-examine the group by way of the prism of their clothes. Reciprocally he additionally exhibits how modern designers comparable to Kim Jones and Rei Kawakubo have been impressed by the group’s radical concepts and artwork moderately than the extra superficial Bloomsbury “look” embraced by middlebrow producers of pastel paint ranges and comfortable furnishing materials.

Among the many present’s highlights is the juxtaposition of Grant’s works with the clothes they’ve impressed, comparable to his abstracted Lilypond Display now set in movement on a Jones jacket for Dior, or the best way during which the morphing identification of the protagonist in Woolf’s Orlando finds expression in Kawakubo’s eruption of white ruffles bursting out from a shell of strict black tailoring.

In 1920, Woolf invited fellow author T.S. Eliot for a rustic weekend, instructing him to “please carry no garments”. She wasn’t suggesting that he flip up bare (though there was a lot flesh-baring among the many group) however that Eliot wouldn’t have to watch the stifling sartorial conventions that also had the British higher and center courses in a stranglehold. In each this ebook and present, Porter demonstrates how the methods during which Woolf, Bell and co thought of and wore their garments was a key a part of their mental—and sexual—revolt in opposition to the late Victorian society into which they’d been born.

Queer and subversive

However it’s difficult. Woolf hated style however was fascinated by garments. Whereas Bloomsbury patron Ottoline Morrell wore more and more exaggerated garments to style her personal look in a approach that was each admired and mocked by her companions.

Porter affords an unblinking modern gaze as he dives into the extent of the group’s queerness and subversiveness but in addition doesn’t blanch from a few of their lower than savoury escapades, comparable to dressing up as African potentates or the themes of Paul Gauguin. He additionally flags up the irony that their philosophies of free and good dwelling have been underpinned by the labour of their home servants. However these anomalies are set within the context of a problematic previous period and never allowed to blot out the achievements of those sexual and mental pioneers.

By eliminating their Edwardian corsets for free-flowing clothes, usually hand-crafted and extensively repaired, the Bloomsbury girls have been signalling their sexual and artistic experimentation. Woolf’s loosening of her stays mirrored each the flourishing of her queerness in addition to her format-busting writing. And the liberated line of Vanessa Bell’s handmade clothes and her violent color combos (“they virtually wrenched my eyes from their sockets” noticed Woolf in 1916) additionally discovered expression in vivid, summary rug and fabric designs for the Omega Press, in addition to onto her canvases.

Likewise, the boys navigated the strain of tailoring in numerous methods. Wayward self-portraits and pictures of Grant reveal his garments to be in a continuing state of unravelling, or just not there in any respect. Maynard Keynes embraced and performed with the facility of the go well with: a scrumptious portrait by his then lover Grant exhibits him formally besuited and dealing on mathematical theories whereas additionally rocking a saucy pair of patent pumps.

Not solely has Porter redefined and rebooted Bloomsbury as a precursor for modern fluidity however, in true Bloomsbury spirit, he additionally blasts apart standard notions of magnificence and probity. One in every of my favorite reveals is 2 cigarettes plucked from the pocket of Morrell’s exaggeratedly mannish (however fantastically handmade) jodphurs.

It’s applicable that this exhibition isn’t being held in Charleston, the Sussex farmhouse that has turn into a Bloomsbury shrine, however as a substitute inaugurates Charleston’s new outpost in a former Nineteen Thirties Residents Recommendation Bureau constructing within the centre of Lewes. In these pared-back environment the artwork, life and garments of Bloomsbury are given a recent life and relevance.

• Carry No Garments: Bloomsbury and Trend; Charleston in Lewes, till 7 January 2024

• Carry No Garments: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Trend, revealed by Penguin, £20 on 7 September, £20