Puffed up, low cut and hiding an unspoken love: the mystery of Virginia Woolf’s dress
In 1924, Virginia Woolf was -photographed for British Vogue. Being featured by the magazine was a statement of power, that you had arrived. The photograph appeared a year before Mrs Dalloway, her watershed novel. For -decades, it has been assumed that she was photographed for Vogue wearing her mother’s dress. The dress was wildly unfashionable for the 1920s, with huge puff sleeves, an excess of satin and an overbearing lace trim at the neck. It is like something from a dressing-up box. Woolf was surely trying to tell us something. But what?
I’ve been researching what the Bloomsbury group wore for my book (and exhibition at Charleston), Bring No Clothes. At first, I was ready to write about her mother’s dress, with all the psychological implications. It was as if the dress cast Woolf as a broken child, clinging on to the woman she had lost.
But Woolf never states it’s her mother’s dress. Her mother, the Pre-Raphaelite model Julia Stephen, was a regular subject of Woolf’s great aunt, photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, but the dress does not appear in her portraits. The dress in Vogue has a scooped neck that reveals the beginning of shoulder and upper chest, but her mother’s dresses cover to the neck – the norm for those living under Queen Victoria. The dress Woolf wears is visibly too big, yet Woolf was around the same height and shape as her mother. If it wasn’t her mother’s dress, whose was it?
Some may question why it matters. It’s just a dress. Yet our understanding of Woolf has been burdened by misinformation. Her experiences with mental health were long called “madness”, her queerness cast as eccentricity, particularly her relationship with Vita Sackville-West. The sexual and psychological abuse Woolf suffered into her 20s has been questioned. Her story is often told as if her suicide in 1941 was inevitable. Woolf is among the most singular writers of the 20th century, yet she is rarely ascribed her own agency.
Clothing is a way in. Ask someone about what they’re wearing, and they’ll tell you about their lives. By looking at what someone wore, we can experience them as real people making real choices, rather than figures frozen in time. I’ve long wanted to look at when the Victorian and Edwardian periods turned to the modern age: the eras that lay the foundation for the way we dress and live today. The core protagonists of the Bloomsbury Group, such as Woolf and her sister, artist Vanessa Bell, the painter Duncan Grant and economist John Maynard Keynes, were born in Victorian times, becoming young adults at the beginning of the 20th century. What do their clothes tell us of this age of monumental change?
Woolf and Bell used clothing – or its lack – in their quest for freedom. “Please bring no clothes,” Woolf wrote to TS Eliot in September 1920, when he was due to visit her in Monk’s House, Rodmell. “Don’t trouble to dress,” Bell wrote to Grant in 1909, when they were first becoming acquainted. Nowadays, an invitation to dress for dinner can sound so innocuous, or even pleasurable. Yet Woolf and Bell escaped to Bloomsbury in 1904 after years of abuse by their half-brother George Duckworth, who controlled their lives and demanded their clothing met his approval. Each evening, they had to scrub their bodies, then cinch them with -corsets. Their gowns were cheap imitations of the stifling fashion of the time (in Woolf’s case once even made from furniture fabric). The main purpose was to look pretty and be presented to society while remaining silent.
The sisters’ move to Bloomsbury was a rejection of their past. When male friends, such as Clive Bell or Lytton Strachey, began to visit on Thursday evenings, Woolf wrote that not only was the -conversation equal, that the young men “criticised our arguments as severely as their own”, but that they “never seemed to notice how we were dressed”.
Their refusal of tradition led to their liberation. Woolf wrote: “We were not wearing white satin or seed pearls; we were not dressed at all.” Rather than offering us an easily definable style, she shows us her rejection of it. Today, we would recognise this as anti-fashion, a countercultural force that can provoke change, as with punks in the 1970s.
Woolf eventually attempted it by mocking herself: in 1919 she wrote in her diary: “I am resigned to my station among the badly dressed.” These words have been taken by some at face value, to join in the mocking of Woolf. But what if she meant that she had no time for -conformity? As with her clothes, same for her words: she had no interest in following anyone else.
This is why so many 21st-century fashion brands have repeatedly cited the Bloomsbury group in their catwalk shows – Dior, Fendi, Burberry, Comme des Gar?ons and Erdem. It is not about a stereo-typical “Bloomsbury look”, usually taken to mean womenswear with a long-line silhouette, abstract -patterned fabric and hemlines approaching the floor. It is their way of being that inspires, allowing a powerful anti-fashion energy to shine through.
I was drawn to six members of the Bloomsbury Group. Three of them obvious choices: Woolf (who used clothing as a tool in Mrs Dalloway: the torn green dress that Clarissa Dalloway mends, a symbol of the “frock consciousness” that Woolf would explore in her diaries); Bell (who made her own loose and flowing clothes), and Grant (who did all he could to take clothes off). I can imagine that most who write about John Maynard Keynes think the least about his three-piece suits. Yet the economist gained his global influence just as the tailored suit evolved into its modern form, its language of male power spreading from its birthplace on Savile Row through the British Empire.
EM Forster also interested me, the jackets of his single-breasted suits so all-encompassing they were long enough to be long-sleeve mini-dresses. Forster is sometimes considered on the periphery of Bloomsbury – perhaps because he was the rare example of a member who never had sex with anyone else in the group. Another supposedly peripheral figure is Lady Ottoline Morrell, the society hostess who welcomed Bloomsbury Group members to her home in London and Garsington Manor. Morrell wore characterful garments, of puffed sleeves and dramatic shapes, wildly out of fashion for the time. Her features were striking, for which she was ridiculed relentlessly. The philosopher Bertrand Russell, who had a long affair with Morrell, once described her as having a “long thin face something like a horse”. Aldous Huxley, having lived rent-free at Garsington, lampooned her “massive projecting nose and little greenish eyes” in his novel Crome Yellow (1921). Yet the angularity of her clothes is as if she only wanted to heighten her appearance.
Around 20 years ago, her garments were donated to the Fashion Museum in Bath. When I studied Morrell’s collection, I was sure that in the room with me were the wide-brimmed hat and lace-trimmed -velvet dress that she wears in her famous 1919 portrait by Augustus John, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Morrell fascinated me. She was highly intelligent – she claimed to read Spinoza every day – yet woefully educated. She was married to Liberal MP Philip Morrell, and was noted for the intensity of her affairs with men. But that intensity was sometimes confined to written correspondence (Morrell was said to hate sex with Russell, particularly because of his bad breath).
Two biographies of Morrell have been written, both declaring outright there is no evidence of Morrell being attracted to women. But -evidence is easily found. In this period, gay men were legislated against, with homosexual acts punishable with years in prison. Yet, because of the social structures of public schools and universities, upper-middle and upper-class gay men found ways of living, hiding behind their suits. Lesbians were not legislated against in the same way, because, within society, it was as if they didn’t even exist. But through clothes, their desires can be revealed.
I studied a colour photograph of Morrell taken in 1907, wearing layers of a soft draped gown and pearls, sat next to some arum lilies. In 1909, Woolf wrote to a former lover of hers, Violet Dickinson: “Ottoline is slowly growing rather fond of me. It is like sitting beneath an arum lily; with a thick golden bar in the middle, dripping pollen”. An unspoken love can be glimpsed, hiding in plain sight, yet blurred by the internecine gossip that can make the Bloomsbury Group so airless. (Morrell, as we have seen, suffered from this.)
By concentrating on clothes, I could pull away the weeds. Without the tittle-tattle, the lives beneath could come to the fore. It was -particularly true of Woolf and Morrell. Their connection grew in 1917, as Woolf emerged from a prolonged experience of disabling mental health. Woolf would describe their encounters as “romantic”. She was due to visit Garsington that autumn with her husband Leonard, and wrote to Morrell: “Do you mind our having no clothes?” To make her debut in Vogue, it looks to me that Woolf was sending a hidden message about romantic friendship between women. I think she is wearing a dress that belonged to Lady Ottoline Morrell.
Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion (Penguin, ￡20) is published on Sept 7.
Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and Fashion opens at Charleston, Lewes (charleston.org.uk) on Sept 13
