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DallowayDay 23 with @VirginiaWoolfGB: Dressing the Part

Posted in Dalloway Day, events, fashion, tagged , on Friday 2 June 2023| 1 Comment »

Clarissa Dalloway took her famous walk through London in June of 1923. One hundred years later, you can join the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain for DallowayDay 2023 with its theme of “Dressing the Part.”

Date: Saturday 17 June 2023
Place: Hatchards, 187 Piccadilly, London W1J 9LE
Theme: This year’s theme for Clarissa Dalloway’s very own day is Bloomsbury, clothing and dressing up; party wear and everyday wear.
Tickets: All are welcome, and discounts are available for VWSGB members.
Bookings via Eventbrite.

Questions to explore

  • How did Bloomsbury represent themselves visually, in portraits and photographs? Participants will look at the clothes produced by the Omega workshops, and those in Virginia Woolf’s own wardrobe.
  • She was accused of being ‘badly dressed’, but what does this really mean? What did it take (other than a glamorous frock) to be a Grand Society Hostess like Sibyl Colefax, Ottoline Morrell, Emerald Cunard and Mary Hutchinson?
  • And Clarissa Dalloway’s party was a great success, but what kind of hostess was its creator, Virginia Woolf?

The day’s schedule

11.30 a.m.–12.30 p.m. A Bloomsbury Walk
Guided by Clara Jones (Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist) of King’s College, London.

2–3 p.m. Clothes Maketh Bloomsbury
A panel discussion with Wendy Hitchmough (The Bloomsbury Look), Claire Nicholson (VWSGB Chair) and Charlie Porter (Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion), chaired by Maggie Humm (Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell).

3–4 p.m. Wine & sign break
Drinks and nibbles will be served while you mingle with other Woolf enthusiasts and get your books signed by the speakers.

4–5 p.m. Bloomsbury in Society: Parties and Hostesses
A panel discussion with Sian Evans (Queen Bees: Six Brilliant and Extraordinary Society Hostesses Between the Wars) and Nino Strachey (Young Bloomsbury: The Generation That Reimagined Love, Freedom and Self-Expression), chaired by Mark Banting (Events Manager, Hatchards).

Dalloway Day at the Royal Society of Literature

Get the details about RSL events available on or after June 14.

Tell us about your Dalloway Day event

We urge you to add your own events in the comments section below or by sending an email to woolfwriter@gmail.com. And please use the hashtag #DallowayDay in your social media posts so we can track them.

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Virginia Woolf statue arrives in Richmond

Posted in fashion, tagged , , on Sunday 9 October 2022| 2 Comments »

Virginia Woolf has arrived in Richmond. The life-sized bronze statue of Woolf arrived this week and will be installed in November in the heart of the London borough where Woolf lived for 10 years.

Arts and education charity Aurora Metro launched the project to commission, fund and erect a statue of Woolf in Richmond Upon Thames in 2017. It recognizes Woolf’s life in Richmond from 1915 to 1924, along with her founding of The Hogarth Press with husband Leonard and the publication of her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915.

Aurora Metro raised £50,000 to fund the statue, designed by award-winning sculptor Laury Dizengremel. It features Woolf sitting on a bench and will be installed at Richmond Riverside near the entrance to Heron Court.

Aurora Metro is still soliciting funds to cover the installation, associated literary events and maintenance of the statue, which is the only full-sized statue of Woolf in the UK. Anyone who would like to be invited to the launch can do so by making a donation of £100 or more.

For the latest news about the statue, follow on Twitter @VWoolfstatue or on Facebook/VWoolfStatue.

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When Virginia Woolf wrote about Charlotte Brontë’s wardrobe

Posted in fashion, Travels with Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , , on Friday 4 February 2022| 1 Comment »

Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth

When Virginia Woolf visited the Brontë home and Brontë Museum in Haworth on Nov. 24, 1904, she wrote about it.

That piece was her first accepted for publication and just the second to appear in print. The Guardian published it unsigned on Dec. 21, 1904. 

In it, Woolf wrote of Charlotte:

Her shoes and her thin muslin dress have outlived her.

Woolf describes those items as “touching” and mentions those objects, along with Emily’s “little oak stool,” as those that gave her “a thrill.”

In the Yorkshire Post, Ann Dinsdale, principal curator at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, describes Woolf as being “brought up short by the sight of Charlotte’s dress – because it made her realise that apart from being a great literary mind, she was a real woman.”

Defying Expectations exhibit

Dinsdale’s remark is part of a discussion of “Defying Expectations,” the museum’s current exhibit featuring Charlotte Brontë’s wardrobe. One goal of the exhibit is to show that Charlotte was interested in fashion, color, style and trends, as it highlights some of the more colorful and exotic accessories in Charlotte’s wardrobe.

Woolf herself justified her visit to the Brontë parsonage this way:

The curiosity is only legitimate when the house of a great writer or the country in which it is set adds something to our understanding of his books. This justification you have for a pilgrimage to the home and country of Charlotte Brontë and her sisters.

Guestbook and Giggleswick

When I toured the Brontë parsonage in 2016, I was thrilled to view — and hold in my hands — the guestbook that Woolf signed using her maiden name of Virginia Stephen, when she visited in 1904.

She was the first of only two visitors that day. The other was her companion Margaret Vaughan, wife of her cousin Will, headmaster of Giggleswick School.

Woolf stayed with the couple in the headmaster’s home when she made her 1904 trip to the Brontë Parsonage.

Page in the Brontë Parsonage and Museum guestbook signed by Virginia Woolf in 1904.

Behind-the-scenes room at the Brontë Parsonage Museum where the guestbook signed by Virginia Woolf is stored, along with other materials by and about the Brontës.

Headmaster’s home at Giggleswick School

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Virginia Woolf is trending as a fashion muse

Posted in fashion, tagged , on Thursday 23 January 2020| Leave a Comment »

The New York Times is calling Virginia Woolf a fashion muse. Why? Three reasons.

Reason 1: She inspired the Met’s Costume Institute exhibit

She is the inspiration for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s coming Costume Institute blockbuster and gala, “About Time: Fashion and Duration.” The May 7 – Sept. 7 exhibit explores how clothes generate temporal associations that conflate past, present, and future, with Woolf serving as the “ghost narrator” of the exhibition, according to the Met’s website. It will feature 160 pieces of women’s fashion from the last 150 years, and beyond.

Reason 2: She inspired an opera

Her novel Orlando is the basis of a new production at the Vienna State Opera that premiered Dec. 8, 2019, with costumes by Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons. Fittingly, its the first opera commissioned by a woman composer in the 150-year history of the company. As Kawakubo said in The New York Times, “And also I have always been interested in Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury circle and “Orlando” in particular because of its central concept of ignoring time and gender.”

Reason 3: She inspired a Givenchy couture show

Her garden at Monk’s House, her relationship with Vita Sackville-West, and Orlando were the inspiration for Clare Waight Keller’s Givenchy couture show this week in Paris.

Woolf and contemporary fashion

Woolf’s connection to the fashion world is nothing new. Over the years she has inspired designers on both sides of the pond. Here are a few worth noting:

Woolf’s relationship to fashion

Woolf herself had a complicated relationship with clothing and fashion, one that has been much discussed in academic settings and online.

Catherine Gregg explores this theme in her Bloomsbury Heritage monograph Virginia Woolf and ‘Dress Mania’: ‘the eternal & insoluble question of clothes’ (2010). In it, she discusses Woolf’s “delight in clothes and interest in conceptions of fashion and femininity” as well as her sense of being an outsider when it came to fashion, as well as her loathing for its artifice (7).

More on Woolf and fashion

Since we started looking, we have noticed numerous references that connect to the topic of Woolf and fashion. Some are documented in the following posts:

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Woolf sightings: from Orlando to fashion to art

Posted in art, art exhibits, Bloomsbury, books, fashion, Orlando, tagged , , , , , , on Sunday 25 February 2018| Leave a Comment »

Lots of Woolf on the Web these days. Here are a few important sightings gleaned via Twitter links shared by Jane deGay and Maggie Humm.

  • Sentencing Orlando: Virginia Woolf and the Morphology of the Modernist Sentence, edited by Elsa Högberg and Amy Bromley, is a collection of 16 original essays offers fresh perspectives on Orlando through a unique attention to Woolf’s sentences.
  • “Six Ways Virginia Woolf Pre-Empted Spring’s Key Looks,” by Kaye Fearon in British Vogue, Feb. 21, 2018.
  • Bonnie Greer on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, a podcast discussing the friendships, work and designs behind the artists, coordinated with the Virginia Woolf exhibition at Tate St Ives, 10 February – 29 April 2018. Then view her art walk below.

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