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Virginia Woolf Society Turkey hosts free online seminar on Woolf and fashion

Posted in events, fashion, Online discussions, Turkey, tagged , , on Saturday 14 October 2023| Leave a Comment »

Virginia Woolf Society Turkey is holding another online seminar, and this one covers Virginia Woolf and fashion.

What: A free online talk: “‘She had a flair for beautiful, if individual dresses’: Virginia Woolf’s Style Itineraries,” as part of the Woolf Seminars series of the Virginia Woolf Society Turkey.

When: Oct. 20 at 7 p.m. (Turkey time) or noon-2:30 p.m. EST. Check times for your location.

Who: Antoine Perret, a PhD candidate in English literature at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, will be the speaker.

Cost: Free

Registration: Open to all via the Eventbrite link.

About the talk

This talk will explore the intriguing paradoxes surrounding Virginia Woolf’s sartorial style. Deemed highly unfashionable by her contemporaries, she now stands as a style icon, inspiring designers and gracing the pages of fashion magazines. Woolf’s personal relationship with clothes was in itself contradictory, always oscillating between love and hate.

Perret arguesthat Woolf’s shabby looks and ostensible disinterest in dress can be seen as a posture that not only helped crafting her bohemian public persona, but also took part in her subsequent celebration on the fashion scene. Drawing from her fiction, he will eventually explore how Woolf’s distinctive style and fascination with dress also influenced her literary use of clothes.

About the speaker

Antoine Perret is a PhD candidate in English literature at Universite Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris. Supervised by Professor Catherine Lanone and Dr. Floriane Reviron-Pi?gay, he is currently writing a doctoral thesis on fashion, style, and modernism, focusing particularly on the works of E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Rhys. Arguing for a material approach to literary modernism, his research addresses the role of clothing within the diegesis, while also exploring the concept of fashion taken as a social phenomenon, in particular its influence on the literary community and on aesthetic practices, so as to interrogate the modalities of modernism and its reception.

About last month’s talk

Last month, Virginia Woolf Society Turkey hosted a free online talk on “Unwriting and Rewriting History and Literary History: Woolf’s Fictions and Essays,” as part of the Woolf Seminars series.

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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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Woolf, Keynes, Gertler, and more: some Bloomsbury links

Posted in Bloomsbury, Woolf online, tagged , , , , , , on Tuesday 29 September 2020| Leave a Comment »

Here are links to a few resources of interest to Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury aficianadoes:

  • On BBC Radio 4’s “Great Lives”: Listen to why James Graham is inspired by John Maynard Keynes, along with expert analysis by economist Linda Yueh.
  • In the LA Times: Read a quote from Woolf about writers’ neglect of food.
  • In Issue XXXVII of Piano Nobile’s InSight: Read about Virginia Woolf’s relationship with artist Mark Gertler.
  • A foundation named after Virginia Woolf: “In Woolf’s Words,” by the Hong-Kong-based company Woke Up Like This. WULT was recently heavily criticized for naming another shade in its “Face Daubs” line after Anne Frank. The company took it off the market.

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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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