Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion with Charlie Porter

Why do we wear what we wear? To answer this question, we must go back and unlock the wardrobes of the early twentieth century, when fashion as we know it was born...

For this exclusive event for Topping & Company Booksellers, Charlie Porter talks with Rosemary Harden, the manager of the Fashion Museum, venturing behind-the-scenes of his new book Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion. 

The Fashion Museum houses the collection of Lady Ottoline Morrell, a much misunderstood figure within the Bloomsbury group, whose clothes play a pivotal role in the hidden stories that Porter uncovers.

Join us to consider how we historicise garments, the secrets that clothes can help us uncover, and to talk about how the fashion of the Bloomsbury group can help us “bring no clothes” to what we wear today.

Porter is a writer, fashion critic and curator. He has written for The Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, GQ, Luncheon, i-D and Fantastic Man, and has been described as one of the most influential fashion journalists of his time. His previous book What Artists Wear remains one of the bestselling books on Fashion in the bookshop to this day.

In Bring No Clothes, Porter brings us face to face with six members of the Bloomsbury Group, the collective of artists and thinkers who were in the vanguard of a social and sartorial revolution. Each of them offers fresh insight into the constraints and possibilities of fashion today: from the stifling repression of E. M. Forster's top buttons to the creativity of Vanessa Bell's wayward hems; from the sheer pleasure of Ottoline Morrell's lavish dresses to the clashing self-consciousness of Virginia Woolf's orange stockings. As Porter carefully unpicks what they wore and how they wore it, we see how clothing can be a means of artistic, intellectual and sexual liberation, or, conversely, a tool for patriarchal control.

Travelling through libraries, archives, attics and studios, Porter uncovers fresh evidence about his subjects, revealing them in a thrillingly intimate, vivid new light. And, as he is inspired to begin making his own clothing, his perspective on fashion - and on life - starts to change. In the end, he shows, we should all 'bring no clothes,' embracing a new philosophy of living: one which activates the connections between the way we dress and the way we think, act and love.

'He makes us see a subject we thought we knew so well from a completely different angle; in writing that is deeply researched, but inviting, warm, and full of personality' Katy Hessel

'Charlie Porter is a magician' Olivia Laing