SoLoveToSewLikeTheBoys

In 1925 Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, "My love of clothes interests me profoundly. Only it is not love, and what it is I must discover."

The 1924 photograph of Virginia Woolf  taken for British Vogue.

She also wrote about 'frock consciousness', (most notably in her short story, 'The New Dress'), which according to Lucy McKeon, is "a paradoxical and perplexing state of mind that includes the dual pleasure and horror of being seen from the outside, the mental calculations one does about the self, when it is externally perceived and evaluated, public versus private - all of that."

How are people perceiving me? A question I ask myself at times!

Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941), a modernist 20th Century writer, who shaped the western literary world. She possessed a highly creative approach to written expression, as she delved into the use of stream of consciousness as a form of narration.
It is accepted that in the 1970s, her work helped to inspire feminism. I know Woolf's work had a big impact on my friend, Sandra, when she studied her at Otago University during the latter part of that decade. 

This is a very interesting video of a BBC 2019 production. This particular episode discusses novels that helped to open up the world for women. 33 minutes in we are introduced to Virginia Woolf, and in particular her astounding novel 'Orlando'.

A satirical history of  English literature in which the hero, Orlando, lives more than 300 years. Orlando starts life as a man, and then becomes a gender-nonconforming woman. Although published in 1928, it  resonates so well with the fluid gender expressions of today. V.W. a woman well ahead of her time!

Orlando is inspired by Vita Sackville-West. Virginia and Vita were friends and lovers, intense lovers. Much of Orlando's story relates to Vita's beloved ancestral home of Knole, an English country manor house. Vita was an only child and she could not inherit Knole, due to the laws of primogeniture, which dictated that only men could inherit the property. A male relative had to inherit, no matter what his potential, and if anyone had strong potential to inherit such a property like Knole, Vita Sackville-West did!

Vita's son, Nigel Nicolson described Orlando as "the longest and most charming love-letter in literature."

Knole

Vita is on the left.

If aristocratic history interests you, take this link, titled "A rotten family, but they had a room for every day of the year"

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-1277227/A-rotten-family-room-day-year-INHERITANCE-THE-STORY-OF-KNOLE--THE-SACKVILLES-BY-ROBERT-SACKVILLE-WEST.html

In 1992 Sally Potter directed a film based on the novel, starring wonderful Tilda Swinton.

Watch the trailer, to give you an insight into the film. Quenton Crisp ('The Naked Civil Servant') had a role playing Elizabeth 1st. Great casting!

Swinton revisited Orlando in 2019, when she guest-curated an exhibition at the Aperture Gallery in New York. 

The exhibition explored the themes of identity and transformation expressed in Woolf's novel. Swinton did say she had "come to see Orlando for less as being about gender than about the flexibility of the fully awake and the sensate spirit."

This is a good link to view many of the photographs exhibited in the exhibition.

https://www.wmagazine.com/gallery/tilda-swinton-orlando-art-exhibit/

Woolf wrote in Orlando, "There is much to support the view that 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."

Comme des Garcons delivered a Virginia Woolf Orlando inspiration for Spring/Summer 2020 collections, through a series of Acts.

Act 1 was the Comme des Garcons Plus Homme S/S '20 collection. It looked at Orlando's transformation and liberation through time, traversing Elizabethan dress through to club dance floor. Remember, this is a Men's clothing collection. RK has often explored gender boundaries.

Act 2 was the Comme des Garcons S/S 2020 collection. Again, a journey through time, but gender boundaries not quite so obvious.

Act 3 was Rei Kawakubo's costume collaboration with Austrian composer, Olgo Neuwirth, for Neuwirth's adaptation of Orlando at the Vienna State Opera in December 2019.

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BBC News provides an account of the production, which may interest you. Neuwirth expresses some of her thoughts and feelings regard the novel's themes in today's climate.  I am amused with the sentence 'The costumes are by another woman, designer Rei Kawakubo, of Comme des Garcons.' It's kind of an oh-so- nothing comment concerning the costumes.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50643589

Interesting video focusing on Kate Lindsey, who played Orlando. Shots of her in the fabulous CdG costumes, and I was intrigued to hear she had also been an intensive sportswoman.

This is my skirt inspired by the CdG RTW S/S '20 Act 2 collection. A beautiful printed satin, which just lent itself to this style.

There is an interesting feature on the side, a section is left unattached. It confuses some people a little!

As I previously mentioned, Rei Kawakubo has often explored gender boundaries. One particular collection which did so, was A/W 2006, titled 'Persona'. It was a fascinating reflection of masculinity and femininity. A fabulous fusion of men and women's wear.

 

Just for interest's sake, this is an excellent link to the words and definitions covering all aspects of gender and gender fluidity. It's educational. For example: Cisgender , /“siss-jendur”/ – adj. : a gender description for when someone’s sex assigned at birth and gender identity correspond in the expected way (e.g., someone who was assigned male at birth, and identifies as a man). A simple way to think about it is if a person is not transgender, they are cisgender. The word cisgender can also be shortened to “cis.”     https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2013/01/a-comprehensive-list-of-lgbtq-term-definitions/

Virginia Woolf has been a muse for many designers.

Alexa Chung, was inspired by 'The Bloomsbury Set' for her S/S 2018 collection. 

The Bloomsbury Set was a group of  writers, painters, sculptors, who were doing their thing in the first half of the 20th century. People like Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, E.M.Forster, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant and Katherine Mansfield. The name related to the fact they they lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury, London.

This is delightful video showing the collection...

..and this link takes you to a site matching the garments with V.W. quotes via a slideshow.

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/03/192640/alexa-chung-virginia-collection#slide-1

My bib-dress might fit in with Chung's Bloomsbury inspiration,

and I thought this outfit rather Bloomsbury like. It's the scarf with the striped shirt sleeve cardigan look that does it for me.

Clare Waight Keller's S/S 2020 Couture collection for Givenchy was inspired by the passionate love letters between Virginia and Vita, plus the home and garden, Sissinghurst, which Vita set up with her husband Harold Nicolson.

The name Sissinghurst is derived from a Saxon word describing a clearing in the woods. During the Elizabethan era, a splendid mansion stood on the site, but over the following centuries it deteriorated badly, with much of it eventually being demolished. In 1928, what was left was put up for sale. Vita Sackville-West viewed it in 1930 and immediately fell in love, especially with the tall tower. This tower became her sanctum, with Virginia Woolf being one of  the few people who was admitted into it.

When Vita was 18 Philip de Laszlo painted this portrait of her. In her Sissinghurst years, Vita hated it, because it reminded her of the days when she was 'smart', and she stopped being smart when she came to Sissinghurst. Vita hid the painting in the attic, and it only came out for display after her death. 

Vita and Harold established an astounding garden at Sissinghurst, which is now owned by The National Trust, and visited by 1000s of people every year. (That may be quite different now, due to COVID-19)

Here are some of the creations from the Givenchy collection, inspired by the wonderful Sissinghurst garden.

A video, relating to the Givenchy collection, which describes the charm of Virginia Woolf for fashion designers.

Virginia's inspiration continues, this time at The Costume Institute of The Met, 5th Ave NY, and the exhibition 'About Time: Fashion and Duration' running from October 29,2020 - February 7, 2021.

The exhibition will trace a century and a half of fashion - from 1870 to the present day, exploring how clothes generate an association that combines past, present and the future. Virginia Woolf will serve as the 'ghost narrator' of the exhibition. 

This video is a wonderful trailer for the exhibition.

Want to read Woolf's short story, 'The New Dress', which was mentioned in the "frock consciousness" paragraph? It examines how an individual comes to view themselves in society. Mabel Waring attends a party given by Clarissa Dalloway, wearing a new yellow dress. Mabel feels her dress is not fit for the occasion and this leaves her feeling inferior to the other guests.

https://fixionalinc.com/new-dress/

Henri Matisse 'The Yellow Dress'

If you are keen, watch the rather moving 1983 made-for-television film of Woolf's 'To The Lighthouse'. (A young Kenneth Branagh is cast as the earnest student, who after a while gets rather fed up with the family entertainment.)

A delightful 'To the Lighthouse' fashion shoot. Photographs by Toby Coulson.

Discussing Virginia Woolf  in a clothing context, takes me to these photos of  Jessica Ogden's 'Conversation' collection, because there is a connection with New Zealand writer, Janet Frame.

 

The narrative, by Patrizia Silingardi, goes like this...."Artificial morning. Sleepy awakenings. The slow dressing of young female bodies, round in their potential and daily beauty. The ruffled hair of young women bordering on the insane, who dress in their beloved worn-out treasures, chatting intimately, giving each other advice and exchanging morning secrets. As if they happened to be in the private rooms of a dilapidated psychiatric institute vaguely reminiscent of the one described in some of Janet Frame's books, they lazily move about amidst the unmade beds of a night that has just ended."

This got me thinking which of her books? 

I feel it has to be this one...

the book is full of references to clothing.

Faces in the Water by Janet Frame (The Women’s Press Ltd, 1980)

Pg.19	These excited people in their red ward dressing gowns and long grey ward stockings and bunchy striped bloomers which some took care to display to us….
Pg.20	…And there was my own face staring from the carriageful of the nick-named people in their ward clothes, striped smocks and grey woollen jerseys.
Pg.21	….a pair of grey woollen socks
Pg.44	And occasionally we glimpsed these same people in their dark blue striped smocks, their skin sun stained and wrinkled.
Pg.48	..when she would take off her red cardigan
Pg.49	A rope clothesline sagging with their striped ward clothes was stretched between two poles at the back door.
Pg.50	..beyond the shabby appearance of their braces hitching their pants anyhow, their unbuttoned flies, their flannel shirts bunched out, hanging loose.
Pg.53	Keep on your nightgown and dressing gown, your nightgown and dressing gown…
Pg.55	My mother wore new clothes which I did not trust. For years, ever since she had been married, her main article of clothing had been what she called “a nice navy-blue costume”. But lately she had sent her outsize measurements to a mail-order firm in the north and had had delivered to her a brown costume with fine brown stripes.
Pg.59	And Susan is standing still and silent in the corner; her limbs are blue and cold. She has taken off her cardigan and shoes and will not be persuaded to put them on again.  And the confused elderly ladies are wandering up and down in their crumpled dresses, with concertina ripples in their lisle stockings, because when they were dressed in the early morning perhaps their garters were missing from their “bundle”.  …Later, the same nurses will become impatient with their charges; but at first they are full of sympathy; the old ladies are obviously suffering; and their strayed appearance is emphasized by their clothes, the overlong cardigans wrapped over their shrunken bodies and the seemingly shapeless dresses that husbands or daughters have brought them on visiting day.
Pg.66	Her dresses had been marked, her shoes, her nighties and in the rush of admission they had forgotten to mark her, therefore she was telling people her name, indelibly, like the ink on the tape.
Pg.68	…even their bodies were the same, huge, encased in the white uniform through which you could see the marks, like bars, of their corset.
Pg.73	She was a middle-aged woman who had unconsciously or deliberately followed the current fashion advice that pink and grey are “right’ colours for middle aged people. She wore pink blouses and grey suits and floating chiffon scarves.
Pg.89	And now I was in Lawn Lodge, the refractory ward, in a room full of raging screaming fighting people, a hundred of them, many in soft strait jackets, others in long canvas jackets that fastened between the thighs, with the crossed arms laced at the back with stiff cord, and no way out for the hands.
Pg.102	Those assessed as likely to have visitors...were brought beyond the enclosure, like cattle chosen for exhibit, to wait for the dressing operations which began when two nurses entered dragging a sheeted bundle. The knots were untied and “best” clothes, anybody’s clothes, as-long-as they nearly fitted, lay ready to be put on anybody. The waiting patients were already being stripped of their high-waisted faded floral smocks and subjected to a swift curry combing process with a damp flannel and a ward comb. Shoes were put on, ward shoes, black lace-ups with a dusty shine on them, and there were high-spirited clompings up and down and attempts at skating and kicking. A pillowcase of garters were emptied on the floor and distributed with earnest persuasions not to ping them but to wear them for keeping up the stockings. Some patients had gray ward socks; others whose relatives had remembered that mentally sick people, at least on gala occasions like visiting day, may sometimes wear the kind of clothes worn in the outside world, had their own real nylons, pulled delicately and dangled from smooth cellophane envelopes. What did it matter that, after visiting hours, these same stockings would be ruined?
Pg.106	Sometimes I had no pants on or no shoes and stockings because when my bundle was given out in the morning they were missing and there was no time, in the rush of dressing one hundred people, to attend to the needs of those who, like myself, were capable of dressing unaided.
Pg.120	..Everybody was issued a clean smock…some patients had their hair tied with satin ribbon and a slit of lipstick etched upon their wrinkled lips.
Pg.169	..Sometimes, in my mind, I dressed the people in ordinary clothes, rubbed the dreadful stain of hospital from their skin and put teeth in their mouths, put makeup on their faces, gave them handbags to carry and gloves to wear, and then I thought in my naïve way that I had transformed them into ordinary people…
Pg.184	…noting their weird hats, crumpled coats, twisted stockings…
Pg.185	In the coat cupboard there hung a collection of ward dresses, pastel-shaded party dresses in stiff shiny materials with gathers, pleats and flares and sometimes matching underskirts in parchment nylon… Although Matron Glass was constantly telling me to “write to your people and tell them you need clothes,” I did not do so, for my parents either had no money or did not realise that mental patients wear clothes other than the pants which arrived for me in festive parcels at Christmas times and on birthdays.
Pg.186	…One day we were fitted for new skirts and sweater sets…chosen to wear what could be called the uniform of the dead. We dressed in our exotic party dresses, taffetas and rayons and silk jersey florals….
Pg.188	When the last group from the male side had arrived, looking self-conscious with slicked-down hair and pressed trousers and white handkerchiefs peeping from pockets
Pg.192	…and the six o’clock jingling of keys as the nurses unlocked the doors and threw in the clothing bundles.
Pg.194	On Monday we dressed in our party clothes which looked gaudy and incongruous on people about to take part in sports.
Pg.211	…I dressed in the crumpled clothes they gave me…
Pg.212	One morning I was given my clothes and told to get up. My clothes flapped and sucked at my bones like a tent pitched in the snow…
Pg.223	…and the patients pegging their washing on the rope clothesline strung between the poplars, and it was their own clothes, not stout striped flannel pants and thick ward socks and scarecrow nighties.
Pg.245	And then the patients who, when they are undressed at night, are found to have their fingers clenched tightly over something which they refuse to surrender, as if they said, You can have the blue striped dress, and the flannelette pants, bunchy, reaching to the knee, and the gray woollen ward stockings, and the v-necked striped garment known in official records as a chemise…..

Jessica Ogden is an interesting clothing designer. Old and distressed fabrics were a continuous theme in her collections Want to know more, click on this link, lots of good information about her work. http://www.jessicaogden.com/about

Regard writing being an inspiration for design, when I was in lockdown I was working on a Central Saint Martins Foundation course project. The project was to be based around corduroy, which was challenging. I eventually worked with a delightful story from my partner's childhood...

"When he was 9 or 10 years old, Little Eric lived in the village of Mostyrn in Wales. He went out to play in the paddock one day, wearing his new pair of bedford cords. While climbing through a fence he caught himself on barb wire or a staple and tore the left leg, inside thigh of his new bedford cords. Little Eric knew he was going to be in deep shit with his mum, 'cos he didn't have many trousers and they were not a well off family! So, he goes back to the cottage and carefully spread the trousers out on the arm of the armchair, got a needle and thread and began to sew up the triangular shaped tear. When finished Little Eric thought he made a pretty neat job. "Mum will be pleased" thought Little Eric. Feeling much better Little Eric picked his bedford cords up from the arm of the chair, and ripped the material on the armchair. He'd sewed the bedford cords to the armchair! Oh no, it's double deep shit now!!

My creation, which came out of that story, and some other aspects concerning corduroy, e.g.corduroy roads.

And lastly, I return to Virginia....isn't this an amazing photo of her taken in 1912. She is statue like, 

and the bag I made in honour of her feminism. 

“Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.”  Virginia Woolf (1882-1941).

SLTSLTBsigning off.