1Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group have inspired countless exhibitions,1 books, and articles in magazines or academic reviews. Today, however, Bloomsbury seems to be the latest fashion in a stricter sense, as material culture increasingly refers to the British group of bohemian artists and intellectuals. A simple search of Woolf’s name on the e-commerce website Etsy.com, which specialises in handcrafted and customised goods, gives some 2,200 results: posters, postcards, pins, bookmarks, coffee cups, tote bags, t-shirts, hats, socks, earrings and keyrings, dolls, teaspoons, and even “Mrs Dalloway” scented candles can be found helter-skelter, testifying to Woolf’s iconic status and to her name’s ability to sell well (Virginia Woolf search history on Etsy.com).2 Big brands too, it seems, capitalise on her name and legacy, as both Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group are often cited. In March 2017, for instance, the British cosmetic company Jo Malone, which specialises in perfumes and scented candles, launched “The Bloomsbury Set,” a set of five perfumes “[i]nspired by the free-spirited artists of the Bloomsbury set, a collection of scents capturing the intoxicating essence of an unconventional life,” to quote from their online sales pitch (“The Bloomsbury Set” 2017).3
2Obviously, such commodities do little more than play with name-dropping. Yet the way in which fashion designers have tended to return to Bloomsbury and Woolf is more striking, however paradoxical it may also seem. How meaningful can the connection between the artistic and intellectual avant-garde and the fashionable runway be? Doesn’t the commercial use of the Bloomsbury’s aesthetics empty the movement of its ethical and political aspects? Conversely, how can this recycling of Bloomsbury also revivify its transmission? These are the questions I wish to consider here. While fashion magazines frequently surf on misappropriation, the work of British fashion designer Kim Jones, whose recent collections for Fendi (2021) and Dior Men (2023) were respectively inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and Duncan Grant’s artistic production, notably through the Omega Workshops (founded with Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell in 1913), seems to resonate more deeply with Bloomsbury and Woolf, and thus deserves a closer look.
3Associating Woolf and fashion may seem a contradiction in terms. In her lifetime, she was indeed praised more for her literary style than for her sense of fashion. In a letter to her husband five days after meeting Virginia for the first time, the fashionable Vita Sackville West praised Woolf’s use of words, but criticised her taste in clothes: “Mrs. Woolf is so simple,” she wrote, “she does give the impression of something big. She is utterly unaffected: there are no outward adornments – she dresses quite atrociously” (qtd in Nicolson 1974, 208). Similarly, Leonard Woolf described his wife’s style as unique, arguing that “her dress was never quite the same as other people’s,” but also recalled that her clothes would usually provoke laughter and ridicule (L. Woolf 1964, 29). Though he considered that she had “a flair for beautiful, if individual dresses,” he admitted that such dresses produced “something strange and disquieting [...] in her appearance” (L. Woolf 1964, 29). Even Grace Higgens, Vanessa Bell’s housemaid, deplored her looks, writing in her diary that Mrs. Woolf “looked [an] absolute frea[k] […] in a costume [she] had had for years” (Higgens 1924, fol. 7, right). Woolf herself, it seems, shared these views on her own style, writing in her diary that she was “resigned to [her] station among the badly dressed” (Woolf 1977, 284).
- 4 Claire Nicholson pinpoints a shopping expedition in December 1939 during which Woolf was “tempted t (...)
4However, as some critics have also noted, Woolf shared a conflictual relationship with fashion rather than a simply negative one. Lisa Cohen, Jane Garrity and Randi Koppen, have each commented upon Woolf’s literary fascination with dress and commodity culture. They consider that Woolf’s use of clothing in her literary works functions as a sign of modernity by staging the tensions between surface and depth, appearances and reality, individual consciousness and the structures of commodity culture (e.g., Cohen 1999, Garrity 2010, Koppen 2009). Cohen and Garrity, along with Claire Nicholson, have drawn upon Woolf’s diaries, letters and autobiographical essays, to explore her personal relationship with clothes – often linking it with her childhood experiences and highlighting her conflicted relationship of love and hate with dress and textiles.4
5Examples of such a love/hate relationship are easy to find in Woolf’s diary. In 1926, for instance, she registered a party during which Clive Bell and Vita Sackville-West mocked the new hat Dorothy Todd had chosen for her. Comparing herself to a hunted hare, she lamented: “I pretended a mystery, tried to change the talk, was not allowed, & they pulled me down between them, like a hare; I never felt more humiliated” (Woolf 1980, 91). A few weeks before, she had “tremble[d] & shiver[ed] all over at the appalling magnitude” of dress buying, perceived as a “task” (78). Yet, dress buying is not always depicted as a traumatic experience by Woolf. Only a week later she changed her mind, describing the process as “the most quiet & friendly & even enjoyable of proceedings” and admitting her “great lust for lovely stuffs and shapes” (86).
6Virginia Woolf was also in contact with the fashion scene of the 1920s, for instance through her friendship with Dorothy Todd and her assistant and lover, Madge Garland, during Todd’s time as editor in chief of the British Vogue magazine (1922-1926). Anne Pender reminds us that Todd, who arrived at Vogue when the British edition was in financial difficulties, tried to change the editorial line of the magazine, opting for a more “highbrow” publication that clashed with previous (as well as foreign) editions whose focus was on fashion, life-style, and trends only (Pender 2007, 520). As she was deeply interested in literature, the arts, and Modernist culture at large, Todd also commissioned articles from various members and friends of the Bloomsbury Group, such as Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, and Raymond Mortimer, while at the same time also acting as a sort of fashion advisor for Woolf, offering her help in dress-buying. Bloomsbury’s interest in a fashion magazine may seem rather surprising. At the head of the Modernist avant-garde, the group epitomised the idea of a cultural and bohemian lifestyle that rejected so-called “lowbrow” mass-culture. Randy Koppen goes further, suggesting that in Bloomsbury, “the sartorial embodiment of the modern went beyond deliberate shabbiness as an anti-fashion statement” and turned out to be a protest against bourgeois fashion and its conservative class and gender statements (Koppen 2009, 19).
- 5 Charlie Porter claims that this was not Woolf’s mother’s dress but actually Ottoline Morrell’s (202 (...)
7When Woolf was photographed for Vogue by Maurice Beck and Helen McGregor in 1924, she wore an uncharacteristic dress with puffed sleeves and a low-cut neckline trimmed with lace, allegedly her mother’s dress rather than her own.5 In Bring No Clothes, Charlie Porter argues that Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell rebelled against the constraints of their youth (the Victorian corset, cinched waist, and choice of material that pleased their conventional Duckworth half-brothers) by opting for fluid lines and, especially in the case of Virginia, with open disdain for the dictates of fashion – as indicated by her decision to dress up for the photograph in outdated as opposed to contemporary fashion (Porter 2023, 26-32). Woolf may not have cared much about being photographed by Man Ray, Gisele Freund, or Beck and McGregor, but as Joseph McBrinn argues, she cared enough to refuse Cecil Beaton, and did let her picture appear in Vogue (McBrinn 2023, 12).
8Today, as the Bloomsbury group undergoes a revival in the eyes of the general public, the figure of Virginia Woolf may often be found in magazines throughout Britain, Europe, and the US. With its affluent, urban, and international readership, The New Yorker serves as a relevant touchstone to identify what is in vogue on the globalised cultural scene, revealing the forms of cultural capital that prevail at a given time. While Woolf was scarcely covered between the 1950s and early 2000s, the magazine saw a marked surge of interest from 2008 onward, peaking in 2020 with seven articles in a single year (see fig. 1).
Fig. : Number of articles on Virginia Woolf published each year in The New Yorker from 1954 to 2022. Data collected from The New Yorker Archive.
9Similarly, the 150th anniversary issue of the British edition of Harper’s Bazaar published in March 2017 celebrated Bloomsbury; it re-printed one of Woolf’s short stories originally published in the magazine in 1930 and included articles on both Woolf and Vanessa Bell. The cover featured a fashion photoshoot seemingly inspired by To the Lighthouse while the titles displayed on the cover squeezed Virginia Woolf between Princess Diana and Audrey Hepburn, two fashion icons who have inspired numerous fashion designers (Pospieszynska 2017, n. pag.)6 – a juxtaposition that might well have puzzled Virginia Woolf herself.
10While Woolf was sometimes criticised for her so-called shabbiness and lack of taste when it came to clothes, Faye Fearon in a 2018 issue of Vogue wondered what she would be wearing today. In “Six Ways Virginia Woolf Pre-Empted Spring’s Key Looks,” Fearon traced Woolf in all the recent fashion shows, turning her into a “chic” fashion icon waving a cardigan and pencil – perhaps a vague allusion to Woolf’s essay “Street Haunting” and its roaming in London in search of lead pencil: “Woolf had a synonymous relationship with cardigans. Warmth and comfort were key as she pondered around the city, poised with pencil in hand […] nothing speaks confidence more than the chic literate woman” (Fearon 2018, n. pag.). Woolf was then summoned to condone Victoriana: “Modern interpretations of Victoriana are back. Nicolas Ghesquière debuted plenty of ruffles and embroidery at Louis Vuitton, but with the twisted addition of sleek satin running shorts. A yes from Virginia Woolf? Most certainly” (Fearon 2018, n. pag.). Whether Woolf would have liked a bare mid-riff and sleek satin shorts, however, is anybody’s guess. In 2019, The Telegraph wondered “why Virginia Woolf was a very 2019 style icon” (Abraham 2019, n. pag.), while in 2020, a fashion review published in The New York Times professed in bold letters: “Virginia Woolf is Trending” (Friedman 2020, n. pag.).
11Harper’s Bazaar tapped into this trend, by offering a “get the look” board inspired by the Bloomsbury Group’s visual style. Its page invited readers to build “a room of [their] own […] inspired […] by these creative, colourful designs” loosely evoking the Omega Workshops’ production and Bloomsbury aesthetics (Bloomfield and Bourke 2017, 213). Of course, such an endeavour empties the artistic movement of all substance. Here, as in the Vogue article, the concept of aesthetics refers not so much to a set of artistic and visual principles woven together with ethical and political concerns, but rather to a set of surface elements, easily emulated and reproduced, devoid of historical context and socio-political meaning. Slippage between Woolf (or the Omega Workshops) and the world of fashion seems so far to yield only an impoverished version of aesthetics as a philosophical concept, digested by a capitalist and mercantile logic whose main concern remains, to no one’s surprise, economic profit.
12While such magazine articles construct a monologic, toned-down version of Woolf and Bloomsbury, some of them also reflect upon how a number of fashion designers have chosen to refer to Woolf in recent years. Mutatis mutandis, one might venture to suggest that there is a spontaneous kinship between Modernism and fashion, at least in terms of temporality. It will soon be one hundred years since Modernism ceased to be the latest thing; resolutely oriented towards the new, it sought to regenerate Western artistic production; but time unwaveringly passes, and Modernism is now a thing of the past, wearing the garbs of historicity. Western fashion, with its seasonal variations, seeks to regenerate our wardrobes, to “make them new” every six months. Yet neither fashion nor Modernism, which share this renewing impetus, create a definite break with the past. Rather, they acknowledge and quote from the past, revamp it, and draw on it for inspiration. Consequently, Bloomsbury’s Modernism, now historicised and canonical, has a salient place in today’s fashion culture, which is fond of artistic citations and seems to tap into the energy of Modernism and its search for new, significant forms that respond to our contemporary world. It is through Woolf in particular, and especially through Orlando, that Modernism resurfaces in contemporary fashion. The novel’s playful subversion of gender norms, its fluid treatment of time, its reflexion on history and modernity, and its anti-essentialist depiction of identity continue to resonate in a cultural moment preoccupied with evolving notions of gender expression, questions of self-fashioning, technological change, and the return of both far-right conservatism and heightened military tensions.
13To turn to a few examples: already in 2014, Christopher Bailey’s collection for Burberry7 was inspired both by the “Bloomsbury Girl” – as the models sported dresses (Burberry dress)8 and trench coats (Burberry trench coat 2014)9 printed with the large brush strokes and the pastel colours of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s designs (Bell and Grant’s designs)10 – and by Woolf’s sartorial style (which favoured comfort over the latest trend). But Bailey’s 2016 collection for the same brand was inspired in particular by Woolf’s Orlando (Nnadi 2016, n. pag.):11 copies of the novel were placed on the seats of all those who attended the Burberry show at Makers House, and the ruffled blouses (Vlamos 2016)12 and gender-neutral trench coats (Burberry trench coat 2016)13 were a tribute to the way in which Woolf’s novel engaged with gender-crossing. Yet the collection could also be read as a metaphor for another “crossing” in the world of exclusive high-end fashion design: the shift to “a see-now-buy-now model,” as the clothes that were modelled on the runway were available directly at the brand’s boutique in Regent Street after the show (Nnadi 2016, n. pag.). For her Givenchy spring 2020 collection (Mower 2020, n. pag.), Claire Waight Keller similarly found inspiration in the romantic correspondence between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, the lesbian romance that inspired Orlando, as well as in the latter’s famous gardens planted at Sissinghurst. While Waight Keller’s references are less literal than Bailey’s, her collection echoes Modernist concerns through its focus on duration and ephemerality. The delicate white flowers that sprout from a tailored jacket (Givenchy tailored vest 2020),14 or the floral lace appliqués of the finale (Givenchy wedding dress 2020),15 all suggest nature’s ephemeral and fragile beauty, while the designs themselves pay homage to Hubert de Givenchy’s archival creations. By drawing from the past yet rendering it contemporary, the collection underscores how fashion can crystallise the archive in a fleeting present moment, capturing the fluidity of temporal experience and the tension between permanence and impermanence. Around the same time, The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum in New York used a clip from Sally Potter’s eponymous 1992 film adaptation of Orlando to introduce the theme of its 2020 Exhibition, “About Time: Fashion and Duration.” Vogue quoted the director of The Costume Institute, Andrew Bolton, who described how the clip features Tilda Swinton entering a maze in eighteenth-century dress and coming out into nineteenth-century England wearing a Victorian dress (Phelps 2020, n. pag.). In the exhibition, Virginia Woolf was chosen as a “ghost narrator” to guide visitors through the interplay between fashion and duration. Woolf’s exploration of time as duration in Orlando and To the Lighthouse provided a conceptual framework for the exhibition, with passages from her 1928 mock-biography brought to life through recordings by Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, and Julianne Moore.16 These voices echoed through the rooms of the exhibition, drawing connections between Woolf’s meditations on time and the evolution of fashion throughout the years.
14By the 2020s, Woolf’s Orlando had clearly become a fashion trope connoting the blurring of gendered binaries, the modernisation of period costume, and (dis)continuity as the crystallisation of a moment in time. When British designer Kim Jones also drew inspiration from Orlando for his Fendi spring 2021 collection, he was clearly aware of these fashionable tropes and their signification. At the same time, the collection reveals his attempt to reach beyond what had been done, and to offer a new kind of Woolfian transmission.
15The case of designer Kim Jones stands out because the references to Woolf and Bloomsbury in his work are signs of a life-long passion rather than a passing trend. Jones first came to Charleston Farmhouse (Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s country home, now turned into a museum) as a fourteen-year-old schoolboy from nearby Lewes. Charleston seems to have had an enduring impact upon him; he returned to Charleston often, painting and sketching in the house or in the garden when studying for his GCSEs, and visiting regularly later on (Dolat 2022; J. Nicolson 2023). In a talk delivered at the Charleston Festival in May 2022, he acknowledged an instant kinship with this group of “outsiders” who “looked to the future,” “breaking the rules, living a way of life not accepted at the time, living as they wanted to live, being brave, changing the world,” “just as the fashion world is full of outsiders” (J. Nicolson 2023, n. pag.).
16Charleston itself was the heart of the Bloomsbury attempt to create new designs. The house embodies Bloomsbury’s artistic ethos, reflecting their members’ quest to unify fine and decorative arts. When Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant moved there during the war in 1916, the house became an experimental canvas for their creative vision. The move was partly practical – Grant, a conscientious objector, could pursue work on the nearby farm as an alternative to military service – but it also provided a secluded space for creativity and collaboration. Over the years, every surface from walls to furniture was transformed into an artwork: murals, painted furniture, ceramics, and textiles blended seamlessly with objects from the Omega Workshops and the group’s own paintings. This holistic approach indeed blurred the boundaries between everyday life and artistic practice, turning Charleston into a complete work of art – a Gesamtkunstwerk almost – and a sanctuary for the Bloomsbury ideal of integrating beauty into daily existence (see fig. 2).
Fig. 2: Charleston Farmhouse, Sussex.
Interior details photographed by Antoine Perret, 20 December 2023. Top left: The fireplace in the sitting room, featuring a decorative painted panel depicting two female figures flanking an oval still-life. Top right: A hand painted clothes closet adorned with Bloomsbury-style motifs attributed to Vanessa Bell. Bottom-left: An armchair upholstered in Duncan Grant’s “clouds” fabric (1931). Bottom-right: The fireplace in the garden studio, decorated with a painted overmantel (c.1932) and mantelpiece (c.1925-30) by Duncan Grant.
17Such blurring was already practiced by the Omega Workshops, founded in 1913 by Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell as an ambitious endeavour to redefine the relationship between decorative and fine arts. Influenced by William Morris’s Arts and Craft movement of the late nineteenth century, refusing the post-Romantic glorification of the artist as a singular being, the Omega Workshops sold unsigned pieces of furniture, textiles, and various household accessories, which only carried an omega stamp (Ω) for trademark (Marks 2012, 18). From 1914 onwards, Vanessa Bell began incorporating sartorial items to the catalogue of the Workshops, indulging in an aesthetic project that proclaimed “Modernism as an overall experience” to use Randy Koppen’s words (2009, 19). As is often the case with the Bloomsbury Group, the clothes sold by Omega were definitively avant-garde: inspired by Post-Impressionist painting as well as by Morris’s medieval revival, they were printed with abstract and geometric patterns and cut in the loose and comfortable shapes that were to be made fashionable some ten years later (see fig. 3). Koppen sees in “Omega’s sartorial venture” an example of the Bloomsbury Group’s need for “distinction from mass culture” while also desiring to be ahead of their times, as well as an instance of their understanding of the “modern” not as a definite break with tradition but as space that allows occasions for revisiting the past (Koppen 2009, 22-23).
Fig. 3: Nina Hamnett, c. 1917, by Roger Fry.
Oil on canvas, 127 × 76.2 cm. Collection of The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds. Public domain. The sitter wears a dress designed by Vanessa Bell for the Omega Workshops. The cushion on the chair features the “Maud” fabric, also designed by Bell.
18Having long been fascinated by the history of Charleston and the Omega Workshops as well as by Woolf’s fiction, Kim Jones has become an avid collector of Bloomsbury memorabilia. His collection ranges from items such as Woolf’s teapot (Foster-Kane 2024),17 Bloomsbury paintings (Jones’s Bloomsbury collection: paintings),18 and pieces of Omega furniture (Jones’s Bloomsbury collection: Omega furniture),19 to letters, manuscripts, and first editions of Woolf, Forster, and Eliot’s works, including the copy of Orlando (Jones’s Bloomsbury collection: original edition of Orlando)20 which Woolf gifted to Vita Sackville-West (Hess 2024, n. pag.; Bowles 2022a, n. pag.).
19Interestingly, Jones sees himself as the “custodian,” rather than the owner, of these objects and intends to bequeath them back to Charleston, positioning himself as a mere link in the process of Bloomsbury transmission (Stafford 2022, 13-17). Given his investment in Woolf and Bloomsbury, it is not surprising, then, that Jones features them in his signature collections. As Covid and isolation prompted him to look inward and return to his early fondness for Woolf and Bloomsbury, his début couture collection as artistic director for Fendi’s womenswear in 2021 (Madsen 2021) was openly inspired by Orlando (Bowles 2022b; Fendi 2021). Jones was specifically drawn to the way in which Orlando’s plot extends over nearly four centuries – a journey as geographically broad as it is introspective, in which the male protagonist, who mysteriously never dies, becomes a woman halfway through the novel. For Jones, Orlando was a fitting source of inspiration to pay tribute to the house of Fendi, which was launched in 1925 (three years before Orlando was published) and has lived, like the novel’s protagonist, through a range of fashion periods. On this occasion, the runway was turned into a complex set of glass walls and pillars, creating a stylised maze that transposed the art of the English garden, and recalled Vita’s passion for Knole and Sissinghurst (indeed Vita designed the garden of Sissinghurst as a series of interconnected rooms, offering different perspectives) (Fendi 2021a).21 The transparent “garden” allowed Jones to juxtapose his masculine and feminine models in these echoing passageways or structures, creating mirror effects that suggested metamorphosis and gender fluidity.
20To transpose Woolf’s prose into a material medium, Jones also opted for fluid textures. Gisèle Venet has argued that the Woolfian sentence is itself imbued with a certain form of liquidity (Venet 2012, xxvi). On the runway, the models drifted by with sleek, wet hair evoking Naiads coming out of the water (Fendi 2021b; Fendi 2021c).22 Delettrez Fendi created the Murano glass chandelier earrings, ear cuffs, and headpieces (Fendi 2021d)23 that added to the illusion of smooth watery reflections (Fury 2021). Bella Hadid, for instance, wore a hazy dress and diaphanous cape with circles dropping from her ears to her shoulder like drops of water or shells (Fendi 2021e).24 Kate Moss sported a structured, shiny grey-blue gown that cascaded in delicate folds, creating a fluid drape reminiscent of wavelets cresting and dissolving in shimmering foam emulated by embroidered flowers at the hem (Fendi 2021f).25 The iridescent textiles caught and refracted light, as if both dresses sought to emulate the sun’s glint on rippling water. Kate Moss’s daughter, Lilla, wore an ensemble covered in pearls that evoked morning dew (Fendi 2021g).26
21Other garments gestured more directly towards Orlando. One outfit (Fendi 2021h)27 combined “the unfamiliar greenish-coloured fur” worn by Sasha at the beginning of the novel and the “pair of whipcord breeches” worn by Orlando herself in the final pages of the novel (Woolf 2015, 24, 182). The look evokes both 1920s women’s fashion, which began to incorporate sportswear elements, and Sasha’s Russian origins, with the green fur evoking, just as in the novel, an exoticised elsewhere. Jones, being a keen collector, also pays attention to the materiality of the book. Naomi Campbell wore a long, shapeless wide gown (Fendi 2021i)28 and silver cape that shimmered to mimic, not simply the ebb and flow of water, but also the marbled paper which Woolf used to cover the books she bound herself, in her younger years.29 As an intrinsic part of mock-biography, the novel also features composite photographs, which play with mimesis and historical dress to question the construction of gender. Jones incorporates one of these illustrations on a clutch bag (Fendi 2021j),30 a discreet feature finely embossed on metal. The illustration in question – actually a photograph of Angelica Bell (Vanessa Bell’s daughter and Woolf’s niece) captioned “The Russian Princess as a Child” – features Orlando’s lover Sasha as a young girl wearing pearls, a nod to Vita Sackville-West’s famous pearl necklaces.
22Indeed, both novel and fashion show are covered in an inordinate number of pearls – pearls burning “like a phosphorescent flare in the darkness,” burning bright on the skin of the breast, “like the eggs of some vast moon-spider” (Woolf 2015, 190). Along with Sasha’s “oyster-coloured velvet” (24), pearls shine on Orlando’s clothes during his time in Constantinople, and are used as currency, after the change of sex, to buy her passage back to England, and finally radiate around her neck in the last pages of the novel. They also appear in almost every illustration printed in the original edition. In the collection, a quotation from the novel – “nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy” (28) – is finely engraved on a mother-of-pearl clutch (Fendi 2021k),31 perhaps suggesting that for Jones, there is but a knife’s blade between Modernist literature and contemporary fashion. The diaphanous cape enmeshed with hundreds of pearls (modelled by Kate moss’s daughter, see above) reveals the model’s bare thighs and knee-high boots, so that the silhouette is both graceful and androgynous, echoing the novel’s depiction of androgyny. As such, pearls and oysters are connected to the novel’s central theme of gender fluidity: their shifting biological sex and concealed, iridescent interiors mirror Orlando’s play with both gender-ambiguous dresses and identities. Just as the oyster’s shell hides what lies within, the reader never fully knows what Orlando’s clothes might be concealing.
23Gender fluidity is even more blatant in Jones’s designs that piece together elements of male and female wardrobes, connecting with the novel’s exploration of the history of dress. One gown (Fendi 2021l),32 for example, flaunts an empire waistline and a bare shoulder (recalling the world of Jane Austen) while the other shoulder is covered by a kind of cinched jacket, splitting the look in two. Jones also included male models, one wearing a sleek black suit with vaguely Elizabethan long white sleeves poking from beneath, a scarf and brooch and bright red lips (Fendi 2021m),33 another a long green gown (Fendi 2021n)34 sewing two different halves together, looking both feminine and masculine (like Chinese robes or a Japanese kimono), as if it were reminiscent of the garbs worn by Orlando as an ambassador in Constantinople. As such, Jones also taps into the Orientalist unconscious (Fendi 2021o)35 that influenced Woolf during the writing of Orlando. In the novel, gender-ambiguous clothes are always associated with images of a fantasised elsewhere, be it Sasha’s Russian clothes (Woolf 2015, 24), Orlando’s Turkish trousers (84), or her “China robe of ambiguous gender” (128). Even more prominently, Orlando’s sex change takes place in Constantinople, a foreign backdrop fuelled with Orientalist fantasies. This Oriental backdrop, along with the caravan of gipsies Orlando joins after her metamorphosis, reflects Vita Sackville-West’s personal mythology. As Karen Lawrence observes, Sackville-West delighted in presenting herself as a descendant of gipsies and frequently travelled to the East with her husband, Harold Nicolson, a colonial diplomat. During the first Balkan War, when Nicolson was stationed in Constantinople, Sackville-West performed an “Eastern Fantasy” at Knole, cross-dressing as a Caliph adored by two dancing girls, in a spectacle “replete with yashmaks and flowing veils” (Lawrence 1994, 186). Sackville-West’s poem The Land (which was the model for Orlando’s poem “The Oak Tree” in Woolf’s novel), similarly links the Orient with Sapphism, further illustrating how Orientalism served as a veiled reference for androgyny, bisexuality, and homosexuality within the cultural milieu of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
24Woolf’s decision to situate Orlando’s sex change in Constantinople, as well as the text’s veiled references to homoeroticism, aligns with these artistic stereotypes. Celia Caputi Daileader has compellingly argued that Woolf’s portrayal of the Orient, while anti-imperialist in its intentions, is not free from the racial unconscious of its time. For Caputi Daileader, Woolf’s Orientalist imagery – such as Orlando and Shelmerdine recounting their exotic voyages and sexual experiments, including “kissing a negress in the dark” (Woolf 2015, 150) – participates in what she calls “racial hermaphroditism” (Caputi Daileader 2013, 68). Similarly for Jaime Hovey, Orlando’s fluidity is exemplified in the characters’ engagement with identities that are both culturally and racially ambiguous. Hovey argues that the sexualisation of the “negress” by Orlando and Shelmerdine reflects their participation in the cultural values of empire (Hovey 1997, 399), further amplified by their marriage and Orlando’s motherhood, which she sees as an alignment with bourgeois norms (402). Yet, she also sees the text as a subversion of these very constructs. She argues that Orlando portrays its protagonists as:
simultaneously English and foreign, white and multiracial, heterosexually respectable and polymorphously perverse. Woolf satirizes Orlando’s attempts to suppress this dizzying multiplicity of identities by juxtaposing England and colony, lady and “negress,” wife and lesbian, until these terms coexist within a fluid textual and psychic space where “nothing is any longer one thing. (Hovey 1997, 402)
25Celia Caputi Daileader’s reading of the novel further underscores these complexities. Drawing parallels with Shakespeare’s Othello and The Merchant of Venice, she notes the sedimentation of opposites in Shelmerdine, who embodies a multiplicity of racial and gendered identities (Caputi Daileader 2013, 66). Like Hovey, Caputi Daileader recognises that the text destabilises essentialist views of identity, rendering sexual and racial categories fluid and non-essential. Both also emphasise that the novel’s disruption of British hegemony – its rejection of all fixed categories – remains, at its core, an anti-imperialist gesture.
26In this context, clothing, especially non-binary attire, plays a crucial role in the novel’s destabilisation of the British imperial project. At the beginning of Chapter Five, Woolf explicitly links heteronormativity and motherhood to the expansion of the British Empire:
The life of the average woman was a succession of childbirths. She married at nineteen and had fifteen or eighteen children by the time she was thirty; for twins abounded. Thus the British Empire came into existence. (Woolf 2015, 133)
- 36 Clothes, in Orlando, stage gender performativity. This aspect of the novel has been heavily comment (...)
27Woolf’s use of clothing in Orlando – specifically non-gendered clothing – challenges the constraints of heteronormativity and celebrates sexual freedom. These garments, like the ones featured in Jones’s collection, provoke gender oscillations, eroticise the concealed body, and celebrate transvestism, androgyny, bisexuality, and transsexualism.36 In doing so, they subvert the binary gender system that underpinned British society and, by extension, the British Empire, reinforcing the text’s anti-imperialist ethos. Jones’s collection engages with these complexities by reinterpreting the sartorial hybridity of Orlando for a contemporary audience. His designs blend cultural references and defy binary conventions, echoing Woolf’s anti-essentialist use of clothing to challenge fixed categories. By juxtaposing heterogenous elements like Murano glass, Western historical dress, Orientalist-inspired gowns, and modern tailoring, Jones’s work highlights the fluidity and multiplicity that Orlando celebrates. His fashion show thus becomes a site where the novel’s themes of hybridity and metamorphosis continue to resonate, and his collection proves integral to the process of cultural transmission. As Charleston’s director Nathaniel Hepburn puts it, “Kim is shining a new-angled spotlight on Bloomsbury, beguiling and delighting an entirely new audience” (J. Nicolson 2023, n. pag.).
28Yet inevitably, something is always also lost in translation, even in Jones’s use of an original set and scenography, which seek to transcend the limits of the runway and to move seamlessly between Fendi and Bloomsbury. The glass cases (Fendi 2021p)37 used for the set can be read as a palimpsest: they materialise the maze of Vita’s garden (and of the novel itself), and at the same time, when seen from above (Fendi 2021q),38 they shape the double F of the Fendi logo (designed in the sixties by Karl Lagerfeld). Adding further palimpsestic layers, Jones was also implicitly alluding to the gardens of Villa Borghese (in keeping with Fendi’s Roman heritage, but also gesturing to a catalogue of paintings executed by Vanessa Bell in these very gardens).39 In this reinvented transparent maze on the runway, designed to blend Italy, Charleston and the gardens created by Vita, against backdrops of bookshelves (Fendi 2021r)40 holding books by Modernist authors, it is fluidity – of place, time, water, and gender as represented in Orlando – that seems to hold Jones’s attention the most. Yet this seductive recycling of images is bound to miss key aspects of the novel, such as its biting critique of patriarchy and British imperialism, its satire of English aristocracy and its musty conservatism. In Jones’s collection, what remains of Orlando’s most politically incisive aspects?
29While the show celebrated gender fluidity and went against the cult of youth the fashion industry tends to promote (by featuring famous figures from previous generations such as Demi Moore, Kate Moss, and Naomi Campbell among the younger models), the ultimate effect cannot correspond substantially to Woolf’s feminist ethics. The models, after walking down the runway, stood still in various tableaux (Fendi 2021s)41 filled with books, greenery, or Omega pieces of furniture. Such glass boxes were also designed to evoke the various stages of Orlando’s life, the multiple personalities s/he inhabits.42 Yet, what Jones misses here is Woolf’s parody of Victorian biography. Simply put, Orlando’s fictional biographer conceives life-writing as a series of major external events that are considered essential in the life of the biographee. For Woolf, as she asserts in her essay “Modern Fiction” (1925), on the contrary, “life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo” (Woolf 1994, 160), and her concept of a “semi-transparent envelope” may be a far cry from Jones’s transparent set. Literally and metaphorically putting Orlando (and actual women, i.e. the models that walked the runway) in boxes, Jones may be doing what Woolf blamed Victorian biographers for doing in “The Art of Biography” (1939):
And thus the majority of Victorian biographies are like the wax figures now preserved in Westminster Abbey that were carried in funeral processions through the streets – effigies that have only a smooth superficial likeness to the body in the coffin. (Woolf 2011, 182)
30In the final stream of consciousness, exploring for the first time Orlando’s interiority from her own point of view, Woolf frees the biographee from the biographer and his domineering patriarchal voice, whereas Kim Jones’s models end their journey enclosed in glass cages.
31Of course, the depiction of same-sex desire and gender ambiguity is in itself a political characteristic of the novel – but what was provocative in 1928 may seem less so now, as gender-bending clothes are a staple feature of the Western high-end fashion scene, which has already incorporated gender and LGBTQ+ concerns, at least on a superficial level. As French philosopher Jean Baudrillard writes, the very structure of fashion, which is by essence a product of capitalist modernity, stages “the drama of change in place of change” (Baudrillard 1993, 90). While the fashion system appears to be dynamic and constantly evolving, offering new collections every six months, it operates within a mercantile and bourgeois space that prevents any real disruption to the social order – only creating an illusion of social progress and transformation. The fashion industry and the illusion of change it creates, according to Baudrillard, are precisely “defined by the exchange rate that the system can tolerate without alteration to its fundamental order” (Baudrillard 1993, 90). In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, the philosopher goes even further:
The formal logic of fashion imposes an increased mobility on all the distinctive social signs. Does this formal mobility of signs correspond to a real mobility in social structures (professional, political, cultural)? Certainly not. Fashion – and more broadly, consumption, which is inseparable from fashion – masks a profound social inertia. It itself is a factor of social inertia, insofar as the demand for real social mobility frolics and loses itself in fashion, in the sudden and often cyclical changes of objects, clothes and ideas. And to the illusion of change is added the illusion of democracy (which is similar but under another aspect). (Baudrillard 1981, 50)
32It is important to bear in mind that fashion giants such as Fendi or Dior are owned by investors whose purpose is not to deconstruct the political structures of a system from which they benefit greatly. Taking part in such a system, Kim Jones’s collection may break new ground, yet still remains far from the aesthetic and political avant-garde the Omega artists sought, or the drive for freedom demonstrated by Woolf with Orlando.
33Such ambivalence also characterises Jones’s spring/summer 2023 collection for Dior Men (Charleston Trust 2022). Once again, Jones reinvents the catwalk by designing a set (Dior 2023a)43 which, in itself, creates a narrative, as it features two stylised scaled-down houses connected by an equally stylised long garden in bloom. The male models emerge from the first house, which symbolises Christian Dior’s home in Normandy (Dior 2023b),44 and walk across the garden with its myriad of real flowers. Meanwhile, this turns into a metaphorical journey across the Channel, as the second house stands for Charleston Farmhouse (Dior 2023c),45 Bell and Grant’s home in Sussex. As befits a walk through green, flowery scenery, the collection is coded as outdoorsy, complete with fabrics that may include the latest techwear (Dior 2023d)46 and Gorpcore elements (Dior 2023e),47 hiking shoes (Dior 2023f),48 big zips, camo-jackets (Dior 2023g),49 large pockets (Dior 2023h),50 and sun hats (Dior 2023i)51 (an occasional nod to the straw gardening hats worn by Grant when painting outside [Morrel 1922]).
34Charleston might seem an odd reference for a French fashion brand. Yet Jones doubles down, making the connection even more obvious here than in the Fendi show. The motifs (Dior 2023j)52 used in the Dior collection are directly drawn from Duncan Grant’s work (see fig. 4). Indeed, Jones owns several watercolours and artefacts by Grant, a versatile artist inspired by Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibitions – a painter who also worked with pottery and tiles. In recent decades, however, Grant has been eclipsed by Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf's fame. Jones thus harnesses the process of global commodification through the printing of works of art on souvenir T-shirts in an effort to place him in the limelight. Instead of world-famous artworks, however, he reproduces Grant’s lesser-known works, borrowing his abstract designs and reprinting the same painting by Grant on various items (such as an expensive scarf (Dior 2023k)53 where it appears together with its original frame). The painting, entitled Musicians (c. 1930), showcases Grant’s characteristic use of vibrant colours and fluid brushstrokes. The three “musicians,” rendered with expressive yet simplified forms that emphasise movement over realistic details, are placed in a pastoral setting, engaging in what appears to be a performance.
Fig. 4: Exhibition “Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and Fashion,” Lewes, Sussex.
Photograph by Antoine Perret, 20 December 2023. Rain jacket designed by Kim Jones for Dior and four-fold screen with lily pond designed by Duncan Grant (c.1913, The Courtauld Gallery).
Fig. 5: Exhibition “Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and Fashion,” Lewes, Sussex.
Photograph by Antoine Perret, 20 December 2023. From left to right, background to foreground: Musicians by Duncan Grant (c. 1930, private collection), rain jacket designed by Kim Jones for Dior Men (2023), knitted jumper designed by Kim Jones for Dior Men (2023), and the safety curtain for the Sadler’s Wells Theatre designed by Duncan Grant (1930).
35Once again, Jones blurs the line between creative inspiration and mere commercial reproduction. Yet some of the motifs embraced by Jones stand out. One stylish jumper (Dior 2023l),54 for instance, features two female nudes surrounding a characteristic bright yellow oval shape and bears the caption “safety curtain” below (see fig. 5). This knitted motif copies a design for an actual safety curtain (Grant 1930),55 a collage made by Grant for Sadler’s Wells Theatre in 1930. The use of knitting is in itself a metaphor of the intricate interlacing of art and fashion, bringing to mind Vanessa’s portrait of Virginia knitting (V. Bell 1912),56 and the descriptions of Mrs Ramsay’s endless knitting in To the Lighthouse (a metaphor for the text itself, as Eric Auerbach has famously shown). Knitting is a fitting way of transposing a collage, by suggesting craft, something hand-made (as the demonstration model was). But switching from collage to hand-knitting also suggests shape-shifting, perhaps even code-switching. Roland Barthes once claimed in an interview that “convention prohibits men from knitting,” and that watching a man knit on the underground was “the most anti-conformist,” possibly “the most scandalous” thing he had ever seen (Barthes 2002, n. pag.).57 Beyond the theatrical curtain designed for intervals (with its muses and radiating golden circle), the caption “safety curtain” also brings to mind what happens “between the acts” – Woolf’s title for her 1941 novel – or behind a curtain, suggesting something subversive, closeted, or unsaid that recalls Grant’s forced concealment of his homosexuality outside of his Bloomsbury circle. By reclaiming Grant’s “safety curtain,” which was never used on stage and remained stored at Charleston, virtually unseen and unused, Jones may also have been queering the garment, as if restoring Grant himself, as well as his curtain, to the light. This can be seen as a way of literally extending a hand towards the Omega Workshops and entwining his work with their own freedom and craft – seen and unseen.
36Jones also probes into Grant’s taste for objects that might bring Post-Impressionist art into people’s homes, such as fans.
Fig. 6: Exhibition “Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and Fashion,” Lewes, Sussex.
Photograph by Antoine Perret, 20 December 2023. Omega Workshops fan attributed to Duncan Grant, c.1913-15 (left) and transparent tank top designed by Kim Jones for Dior Men, 2023 (right).
37The bright blue and red faces with dark hair appear gender-neutral, while the watercolour on silk celebrates a kiss that defies ordinary processes of identification. The Post-Impressionist design can be interpreted as a way of engaging with its troubled time, providing a hint of peace in times of strife and impending war. For Jones, the image clearly resonates today. While the transparent top may be read partly as a joke (recalling the Emperor’s invisible clothes in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale), it also suggests a more serious call for transparency, whether in sexual relationships or in politics.
38Yet once again, as in the Fendi show, it is instructive to pay attention to what is inevitably lost in translation between media, historical moments, and economic purposes, when considering Jones’s reinvocation of the Omega Workshops. While this sartorial reclaiming of unseen designs and lesser-known artworks successfully breaks down the hierarchy between fine and decorative arts, it is doubtful whether the collection fully corresponds to Roger Fry’s vision when he co-founded the Omega Workshops in 1913 with Bell and Grant. In his preface to the Omega Workshops’ catalogue, Fry lays emphasis on craftsmanship and openly takes an anti-mechanical stance:
The Omega Workshops, Limited is a group of artists who are working with the object of allowing free play to the delight in creation in the making of objects for common life. They refuse to spoil the expressive quality of their work by sand-papering it down to a shop finish, in the belief that the public has at last seen through the humbug of the machine-made imitation of works of art. (Fry 1996b, 201)
39Refusing the smooth quality of mass-produced objects, Fry advocates for the singularity of the hand-crafted item, forcefully refuting what he calls “the machine-made imitation of works of art.” And yet what Kim Jones demonstrates in his collection for Dior is precisely such machine-made imitation. Rather than offering an aesthetic translation and re-creation of Modernist motifs (as in the Fendi collection), the Dior collection literally and mechanically replicates patterns and motifs on garments, typically copying the Post-Impressionist motif designed by Grant for a fan not only on a gauzy tank top (Dior 2023m),58 but also on a leather jacket (Dior 2023n).59 Similarly, Grant’s Musicians (already mentioned above) can be found now on a shirt (Dior 2023o)60 and jumper (Dior 2023p),61 now on a scarf (see above, Dior 2023k), now on a rain jacket (Dior 2023q).62 Of course, as Haute Couture, the Fendi collection embraces a production model in which each garment is unique – demanding the lengthy, painstaking practice (or craftsmanship) of skilled seamstresses – and everything is hand-sewn. On the other hand, Jones’s collection for Dior Men is a ready-to-wear collection, which means that the garments have to be machine-made and therefore mechanically reproduced.
- 63 This, once again, echoes Walter Benjamin, who claims that “the cult of stardom” is “fostered by cap (...)
40In his celebrated analysis of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin points to the disappearance of the aura in the modern work of art, which is endlessly reproduced in multiple soulless copies, that undermine the very essence of art. To Benjamin, such a process “points beyond the realm of art” (2007, 221). Whereas the Omega Workshops emphasised the uniqueness and “auratic” quality of the every-day object elevated to the status of a work of art, Jones’s use of Grant’s paintings and designs, by contrast, reveals a parasitic dependence on its commercial reproduction that may ultimately have more to do with business and money-making than art. While Fry, in his preface, explicitly rejects manufactured commodities and decries the logic of profit (“the modern factory products were made almost entirely for gain, no other joy than that of money making entered into their creation” [1996b, 201]), the very high prices of Dior ready-to-wear make it clear that Jones disregards such principles, as well as the ethical and aesthetic values of the Omega Workshops. More generally, Fry’s words resonate ironically with Dior when one thinks of the symbolic violence endured by workers in the textile industry, a back-breaking sector known for the harmful use of chemicals (Khan and Malik 2014; Perry et al. 2024; “Dior and Armani Under Investigation”). On the contrary, Fry offered his workers and artists wages that were well above the national average, as well as favourable working conditions – the artists, for example, worked for the Workshops for only three and a half days per week, thus freeing up time for their personal artistic activities (Angwin 2019, 11). Finally, the ethos of anonymity endorsed by the Omega Workshops is also negated by a fashion system that favours the star status of its designers, to the detriment of the essential work of so many anonymous seamstresses.63 Therein lies the aporia of Jones’s work: while, as a collector and designer, he shows a genuine appreciation for the Bloomsbury Group’s work, he is also bound to an industry whose very existence depends on an anti-Omega ideology that cannot be reconciled with Bloomsbury’s political stance and ethos.
- 64 Windham Lewis, who at first collaborated with the Omega Workshops, became one of the most vocal cri (...)
- 65 In his attempt to valorise so-called “primitive” craftsmanship, Fry establishes a binary opposition (...)
41However, it would be equally wrong to idealise Bloomsbury and their anti-capitalist, “anti-fashion identity” (Hitchmough 2020, 88): their artefacts were not cheap, nor did they ultimately cater to a large audience. In a 1919 letter sent to the collector Michael Sadler, Fry himself recognised that “the utter indifference […] of the public to what [he had] attempted [had] brought Omega to disaster” (Omega Workshops). The members of the Bloomsbury Group have long been blamed for being nothing more than middle-class bourgeois who, in their bohemian guise, were in fact protecting the status quo. Critics like Wyndham Lewis, for instance, accused Fry and his collaborators of perpetuating a sanitised aesthetic elitism that served the tastes of a bourgeois minority.64 Fry, whose preface engages with a primitivist vision of craftsmanship tinged with colonial overtones,65 also came under fire for his classist elitism: Laura Marcus, for instance, mentions Fry’s assumption that “house maids, like the peoples of ‘primitive cultures,’” lacked “the powers of ‘conscious critical appreciation and comparison’ that formed the other half of aesthetic response” (Marcus 2014, 167). Examining Omega’s affluent clientele, Elisabeth Sheehan too rightly articulates the dilemma that “Bloomsbury’s investment in dress suggests […] the impossibility of separating Modernism’s aspirations for social transformation from its reinforcement of the status quo” (Sheehan 2018, 24). What makes the contemporary fashion complex fundamentally different, then, is that it does not attempt to mitigate such tensions: with no aspiration for social transformation, and no desire to disrupt the capitalist logics by which it abides, the fashion industry simply reproduces and reinforces the established order.
- 66 Though he professed a connection with the Arts and Crafts movement, Fry notes that the Workshops we (...)
42When addressing the Memoir Club in 1936, Woolf herself wondered, “Am I a Snob?” The witty typescript shows how aware she was that Bloomsbury was often criticised for elitism of various kinds. Yet the Omega Workshops and the Hogarth Press were both meant as structures that could disseminate the works of young artists and open connections with the public. Though Fry was aware of their limitations, the Workshops fostered a sense of community and collaboration.66 Through shared spaces and collective decision-making processes, they embodied a cooperative and egalitarian ethos that reflected the Bloomsbury Group’s progressive ideals. Not only did Fry openly support struggling artists by giving them decent wages (as evidenced by his Omega Workshops fundraising letter [1996a, 197]), he was also among the first in the field to employ women on equal terms with men, giving them equal status and pay (Hitchmough 2020, 116-120). By promoting gender equality within the arts, he challenged traditional gender roles and patriarchal values that were also transgressed by the designs themselves: Vanessa Bell’s dresses, for instance, were practical and comfortable, lessening the need for the restrictive undergarments still in fashion before the war.
- 67 The Hampshire House Workshops were a charitable initiative established in Hammersmith, London to pr (...)
43By rejecting academic forms and embracing the avant-garde, Fry positioned the Omega Workshops as a progressive force that sought to break away from outdated norms and create a new visual language for the modern era. As such, the movement was also very much anti-fashion, rejecting the resurgence of Victorian lines in vogue at the time. Fry, Bell, and Grant were also pacifists during the war; they worked closely with the Hampshire House Workshops,67 which, as Wendy Hitchmough notes, provided shelter to Belgian war refugees (Hitchmough 2020, 103-104), many of whom escaped being conscripted into forced labour during the German occupation by fleeing to the United Kingdom. The Omega Workshops, as Charlotte de Mille has demonstrated, raised funds for the refugees by arranging concerts at 33 Fitzroy Square, where they were located (De Mille 2020, 185-187). It is imperative, then, to take into account (without naively idealising) these ethical and political engagements at the centre of the Bloomsbury Group’s aesthetic vision and practice – and it seems that today’s fashion culture has largely failed to do so.
44Should one conclude that, in contemporary fashion, the presence of Modernist citations is necessarily superficial, amounting to little more than a form of cultural snobbery, a mere set of visual elements easily emulated and reproduced but devoid of meaning, emptied of substance, and deployed for commercial gain? Such conclusion on elitist couture brands would align with Woolf’s dismissal of the “middlebrow.” In an unsent letter to a literary critic, she (in)famously defines the “middlebrow” as the man or woman “in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige” (Woolf 2011, 472). Even as they promote creativity, Dior and Fendi are expensive luxury brands whose aim is to offer social prestige to their wearers in order to demonstrate their economic success. Woolf goes on:
When the middlebrows […] have earned enough to live on, they go on earning enough to buy – what are the things that middlebrows always buy? Queen Anne furniture (faked, but none the less expensive); first editions of dead writers – always the worst; pictures, or reproductions from pictures, by dead painters. (475)
- 68 I am here referring to what Bourdieu calls objectified cultural capital, i.e. a form of capital ide (...)
45Of course, Dior offers customers fine, creative reproductions printed on clothes that are far more expensive than popular souvenirs. But Woolf’s critique, as sharp as it is, remains invested in a hierarchical conception of culture, one that takes a moral high ground and fails to fully acknowledge its own elitism. From a Bourdieusian perspective, what Woolf identifies as “middlebrow” can be understood as the process by which art becomes objectified and commodified, harnessed as a form of cultural capital.68 Luxury fashion brands like Dior and Fendi operate within this logic: they promote creativity, yet their designs serve as markers of wealth and social status, accessible only to the few who can afford them. The high price of these material goods indeed makes them inaccessible to most of Woolf’s “common readers” and admirers of Grant’s paintings.
46Still, the tension between aesthetic innovation and elitism, far from being exclusive to contemporary fashion, was already embedded in Bloomsbury’s own cultural and economic position, be it with Woolf’s praise of the “highbrow,” with Fry’s elitist views on aesthetics, or with the Omega Workshops’ wealthy clientele. The connection between Bloomsbury and fashion – then, and now – thus remains paradoxical. As such, Jones’s work serves at once as a tribute, a creative transposition, a commodification, and a betrayal adding to cultural capital, while also pointing to similar ambivalences within the Bloomsbury Group itself. Such tensions are well captured in the 2023 exhibition curated by Charlie Porter at Charleston in Lewes, entitled “Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury & Fashion,” which exhibited Bloomsbury-inspired garments designed by S. S. Daley, Rei Kawakubo, and Jones (among others) alongside personal items belonging to members of the Bloomsbury Group. Interestingly, the exhibition’s title comes from an invitation to Rodmell which Woolf sent to T. S. Eliot in 1920: “Please bring no clothes,” she wrote. “We live in a state of the greatest simplicity” (Woolf 1976, 443). Woolf’s claim to simplicity, however questionable it may be, clearly clashes with the likes of Dior and Fendi. Does this mean that we should begrudge Kim Jones? Whatever we may think of his aesthetic and ethical appropriations, the designer has undeniably played an important part in passing on the legacy of Modernism in general, and renewing interest in both Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group in particular, single-handedly making them “come back into the zeitgeist” (Rickards 2022, n. pag.). Surely he deserves to be given credit for his contribution to Modernist transmissions – by Bloomsbury enthusiasts and literary critics alike.