Katie Tobin
Frock Consciousness
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Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the fashion of various literary characters. Some outfits have stayed with me long after I’ve forgotten the minutiae of that particular book or film. Take, for instance, Keira Knightley’s green dress from Atonement, so famous it has its own Wikipedia page, or Tolstoy’s description of Anna Karenina’s dress: ‘A black, low-cut, velvet gown, showing her full throat and shoulders, that looked as though carved in old ivory, and her rounded arms, with tiny, slender wrists.’ Within fiction, style functions as a language unto itself, drawing readers to make particular conclusions about characters before we’ve even had a chance to properly get to know them.
My own interest in literary fashion was piqued after moving to Brighton in 2016. I lived less than a fifteen-minute drive from the bucolic Charleston Farmhouse, once home to the Bloomsbury Group and a rotating cast of friends and lovers. Experimental thinking and living were fundamental to life at Charleston, a utopian haven that could accommodate the unconventional sexual desires of its residents. Here, they could love, create and dress as they wanted – in Duncan Grant’s case, nudity was integral to all three of these practices. And for Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, forgoing their tightly laced stays and adopting loser, non-restrictive garments marked the newfound agency they had over their own lives. At Charleston, they lived as freely as early 20th century Britain would allow.
For me, the intrigue of Woolf’s writings on style comes from her meditations on clothing as a symbolic struggle, where the wearer was made to confront the rules of the world around them. Her idea of ‘frock consciousness’ was central to this philosophy: clothing as a dynamic expression of our ever-shifting internal landscape – a canvas for our moods, affections and the transience of our identities. It’s not just us who fashion our own attire, though. Rather, Woolf suggests a reciprocal relationship where ‘it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking’. Fashion is to be consumed, but it may devour us too – and this, I feel, is a fitting sentiment for a decade of fast fashion and all the moral pitfalls that come with buying clothes today.
Charlie Porter’s recent account of the Bloomsbury Group and their style, Bring No Clothes (2023), tells us that Woolf, like so many of us, never settled on a single view of fashion. At once, it was the locale of liberation from the constraints of cis-heteronormativity – yet it was often used to keep her captive to them too. Porter also notes that Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell (née Stephen) were subject to horrific acts of sexual and psychological abuse at the hands of their brother George Duckworth – a man who also used clothing to control them. He would buy his sisters the finest jewels and dresses, positioning the Stephens as the height of style and sophistication in London’s public eye while debasing and degrading them in private.
In an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable, the dichotomy between public and private life would recur throughout Woolf ’s oeuvre: Jacob’s Room (1922), To the Lighthouse (1927) and, most deftly, Mrs Dalloway (1925). It’s here that we might consider Woolf’s writings as a curatorial space where encounters with various garments can be assimilated, dramatised and explored. In her 1928 novel, Orlando: A Biography, we are presented with the image of our titular hero stark naked, and – without explanation – having suddenly turned into a woman. It’s a moment that marks a profound shift for Orlando who, although agreeable to their newfound sex, must now move through the world as a woman, and dress as one too. On this, Woolf gives us some of her most bravura writing:
Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing rather more openly than usual – openness indeed was the soul of her nature – something that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed.
We are made to understand here that clothing is a signifier of an oppressive social order, one in which patriarchal thought dictated her outward appearance and also her sense of self.
How funny, then, that Woolf would end up the subject of Charleston’s exhibition – as curated by Porter, sharing a title with his book – exploring her and the Bloomsbury Group’s legacy as style icons. Today, we might think of some of the cohort as androgynous, gender fluid, queer and/ or polyamorous – a sensibility that speaks to the joyous abundance of modern day gender and sexual identities. On display is a mix of contemporary fashion, historic artwork, objects and ephemera that once belonged to the Group. There are also samples from the Dior Men’s Spring 2023 show, which featured sweaters printed with Grant’s Post- Impressionist paintings: abstracted still lifes and landscapes filled with lucid splashes of colour. These garments are designed by Dior’s Creative Director and fellow Sussex resident Kim Jones, who had also turned to Orlando as inspiration for his womenswear debut as part of the Fendi Spring/Summer 2022 collection. Alongside ruffled shirts and floor-length silk evening gowns, the collection features passages from the novel etched into mother-of-pearl clutches and lines from Woolf and Vita Sackville- West’s love letters read aloud by models.
It’s precisely this curatorial interplay between word and fabric, aesthetics and identity that makes Charleston and Porter’s show so compelling. (And, of course, the Bloomsbury Group themselves, although it’s hard to imagine that the self-effacingly anti-fashion Woolf would have had an idea of her aesthetic influence today.) These forms delightfully coalesce and bleed into one another – where the influence of one begins and another ends is never clear. In seeing the show for myself, walking around Lewes and passing many of my old student haunts, I’m reminded of my own time living there and how intrinsic experimenting with fashion was to forging my own identity. And, although it wasn’t all that long ago since I first moved to Brighton as a naive undergraduate, the world has changed immeasurably since.
Queerness, as an identity and a mode of aesthetic expression, feels more divisive than ever before. The eclipse of pinkwashing had only just begun in 2016 – now you’ll be hard-pressed to find a major brand that doesn’t co-opt the rainbow flag every June. Politicians, meanwhile, are endlessly fixated on gender; concurrently, hate crimes against transgender people have hit an all-time high. Where much of this discourse centres on ‘passing’ and what it means to be a woman – as though it were a monolithic experience, anyway – the way we dress ourselves still feels integral to how the world defines us. I have likewise noticed a recent tendency within myself to use plain dress as a way to shrink myself down, to hide in plain sight. That I may dress myself the way I desire and potentially risk my safety feels all too reminiscent of Woolf ’s belief that clothing was a tool of the patriarchy. Short skirts, low-cut tops, gossamer fabrics: these are the things I have learned not to wear.
I’ll concede that there’s a gratifying, almost invasive intimacy to seeing the Group’s clothes on display. They were just people, after all. And as Porter importantly notes, there was an occasion in which Woolf & co. dressed in blackface and Abyssinian costume. He also points out that behind the louche and lavish lifestyle of the Group was a team of uniformly dressed domestic servants. Woolf may have felt trapped by the clothes she was made to wear, but she too would use fashion as an oppressive ideological mechanism.
So what is the power of literary fashion, then? For me it lies in its virtuality, that imaginary quality of the ekphrastic, something so beautiful that it cannot exist in real life as we know it on the page. That virtuality also ties into the codification of clothing, and how it might suggest something about its wearer without saying as much. For sapphics: two short nails today, a sprig of violets in the 1920s. Perhaps we can think of these modern attempts at appearing outwardly queer as a defiance of regressive sociopolitical ideas about gender and identity. ‘Bring no clothes’ is the Woolf quote from which Porter derives his exhibition and book title, here meaning for her guests to come as they were, to dress as they like. This, throughout the book, is something he tells us to embrace with wanton abandon but in his cumulative argument, he also makes a more pressing proposition. ‘To change our future,’ he writes, ‘we must understand our past.’ And in the landscape of modern-day Britain, I can’t help but see this as a call to arms.
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Katie Tobin is an arts and culture writer based in London. She is a PhD student at the University of Durham, researching reproductive justice in fiction, and a former lecturer in English and Philosophy. Her work has also appeared in AnOther, Dazed, Elephant, Huck, the Financial Times, i-D, and Wallpaper* among other places.
Cover image: Dior’s Mens Summer 2023 Group Shot in Front of Charleston Reconstruction © Brett Lloyd
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