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3 Jun

Latest Exhibition Will Explore the Bloomsbury Group and Fashion

A WOOLF IN CHIC CLOTHING: Kim Jones and Dior aren’t finished celebrating the Bloomsbury Group.

The French fashion home is supporting “Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and Fashion,” billed as the primary 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 contemporary dressing.

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.

Soprano Constance Hauman performs in “Orlando” wearing Comme des Garçons.

Michael Poehn

Slated to run from Sept. 13 to Jan. 7, 2024, in a latest gallery space at Charleston, the house 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 together 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 related to Bloomsbury “engaged with fashion in dynamic ways, from philosophical considering 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, amongst other ideas.

In Porter’s view, the assembled artifacts “shed latest light on their lives, in addition to bring insight into how we dress today. By mixing together the past with the current, I hope the show will encourage visitors to reconsider their future relationship with fashion.”

Erdem RTW Spring 2022

A glance from Erdem’s spring 2022 runway.

Giovanni Giannoni for WWD

The showcase may 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 dedicated to contemporary artist Jonathan Baldock.

Jones grew up in Lewes within the south of England, not removed 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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