A WOOLF IN CHIC CLOTHING: Kim Jones and Dior aren’t finished celebrating the Bloomsbury Group.
The French fashion house is supporting “Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and Fashion,” billed as the first major exhibition to explore the style impact of the famous cultural collective, whose ringleaders Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, E.M. Forster, Vanessa Bell, John Maynard Keynes and Lady Ottoline Morrell helped set the template for modern dressing.
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The sponsorship follows Jones’ spring 2023 men’s collection for Dior, which was done in partnership with the Charleston Trust and featured prints drawn from Grant’s artworks and furniture designs.
Slated to run from Sept. 13 to Jan. 7, 2024, in a new gallery space at Charleston, the home and studio of Bell and Grant in Lewes, England, “Bring No Clothes” is to feature looks by Dior, Fendi, Comme des Garçons, Christopher Bailey-era Burberry, Erdem and S.S. Daley along with necklaces and bags worn by Woolf and Bell.
In tandem, Particular Books, an imprint of Penguin, will publish “Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion,” penned by journalist Charlie Porter, the exhibition curator.
He said the artists, writers and thinkers associated with Bloomsbury “engaged with fashion in dynamic ways, from philosophical thinking to radical dressing.”
Via garments, archival objects, paintings, photos and manuscripts, the exhibition examines how the collective explored a liberated sexuality, feminism, queerness and pacifism, among other ideas.
In Porter’s view, the assembled artifacts “shed new light on their lives, as well as bring insight into how we dress today. By mixing together the past with the present, I hope the show will encourage visitors to reconsider their future relationship with fashion.”
The showcase will also debut never-before-seen portraits of Bell and Grant, and fashion designs by Jawara Alleyne, incorporating Bell’s fetish safety pins, and Ella Boucht, who uses tailoring to reimagine gender.
In parallel with “Bring No Clothes,” Charleston will mount a second exhibition devoted to contemporary artist Jonathan Baldock.
Jones grew up in Lewes in the south of England, not far from Charleston, the farmhouse Grant and Bell took over in 1916, turning it into the epicenter of their circle of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists.
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