In the Fendi show notes, Jones included a much quoted line from Orlando, “vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm”.
Jones isn’t the only designer to find inspiration in the works of the Bloomsbury group, in Woolf and especially in Orlando, given its exploration of gender fluidity – a particular interest for many fashion designers (and consumers) now. As fashion critic Anders Christian Madsen noted in his Vogue review of Jones’ couture collection, Orlando is “fashion’s favourite lexicon for the study of genderlessness”.
For Givenchy spring/summer 2020, the label’s then creative director, Clare Waight Keller, riffed on the letters Woolf wrote to her lover Vita Sackville-West, while Christopher Bailey, for his autumn/winter 2016 collection for Burberry, and Rei Kawakubo at Comme des Garçons (who recently designed the costumes for the Vienna State Opera production of Orlando the opera) have also found inspiration in Woolf’s work.
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And Woolf was the “ghost narrator” for The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2020 blockbuster exhibition About Time: Fashion and Duration.
The author’s slightly dishevelled elegance has been pegged as a fashion influence. Any designer hoping to clothe women of ambition, power and independence has surely, even in passing, glanced through a copy of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.
That the fashion world lost its mind when author Joan Didion appeared in a 2015 advertising campaign shot by Juergen Teller for Fendi (whose then creative director was Phoebe Philo, patron saint of the thinking woman who loves clothes – how Woolf might have loved her!) shows Woolf was not alone in thinking deeply about her clothes, and that literature and fashion make fine bedfellows.
For the record, Didion, whose precision with words also applies to her fashion choices, never understood the furore around her ad.
Ian Griffiths, creative director at luxury Italian fashion house Max Mara, reread Françoise Sagan’s slim and scandalous 1954 French novel Bonjour Tristesse ahead of his spring/summer 2022 collection, shown in Milan in September.
For Griffiths, a former Manchester “club kid” whose uber-chic collections always have a link to art, culture, or literature, it is essential that his clothes have a deeper meaning.
“There has to be some kind of cerebral, intellectual underpinning to a collection … at the same time the collection has to appeal to anybody who encounters it – even someone who hasn’t heard of Françoise Sagan – or existentialism,” he says. “Backstory is incredibly important and right for the times in which we live.”
It makes sense that literature has been pinned to many a fashion designer’s mood board. As Adam Geczy, a Sydney-based artist and writer who teaches at the University of Sydney, notes, fashion has always made references – be it to literature, art or pop culture – and always weaves a narrative, whether through the fabrics used or the way the clothes are made.
“Fashion at its best is a way of articulating certain aspirations of a particular moment, but also what a particular designer or group wants Virginia Woolf to mean in this present day,” he says.
Geczy notes that in these particularly fraught times, the literature referred to is somewhat politics-neutral.
Recent literary references in fashion include nods to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Alessandro Michele at Gucci is just one designer to reference this novel, noting for his autumn/winter 2018 collection, “We are all Dr Frankensteins of our lives”. This huge collection – a joyous mishmash – also referenced Donna Haraway’s 1984 work A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.
Meanwhile a very chic and literal take on literary fashion can be found in Olympia Le-Tan. The French brand reimagines book covers as covetable embroidered clutches.
Aude Sergent, general manager of Olympia Le-Tan, says the bestsellers are always the classics, Catcher in the Rye or Pride and Prejudice – the novels many of us sentimentally reread.
“Literature brings meaningful aesthetics and a strong message to fashion. The accessory becomes a statement and an empowerment but also an expression of taste and influence … our book clutches are therefore hybrids, they are cultural and wearable objects of art that always trigger a discussion among enthusiasts,” she says.
The purpose of the clutches, says Sergent, is to create an object linked to art and culture – something the brand pushes further through collections with the book publishers Assouline and its just launched collection with art dealer and curator Simon de Pury and Pablo Picasso.
In any case, telling a story is paramount. As Vivienne Westwood once said: “My clothes have a story. They have an identity. They have a character and a purpose. That’s why they become classics. Because they keep on telling a story. They are still telling it.”
Some literary characters have become style icons. There’s Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly (isn’t the first image in your mind that little black Givenchy dress Audrey Hepburn wears in the film version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s?). And the ultimate jilted bride, Miss Havisham, in her rotting wedding dress, has inspired many a fashion collection.
For Roger Leong, senior curator at the Museum of Applied Arts and Science in Sydney, Yves Saint Laurent highlighted the way fashion can be a prism to rethink literature or parse ideas about how we dress and live.
“I think one of the most poignant connections between fashion and literature is the lifelong fascination that Yves Saint Laurent had for Marcel Proust and the writer’s monumental seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time,” says Leong.
“Saint Laurent himself identified with Proust’s hypersensitive nature. Proust’s novel evoked the opulent world of fin-de-siècle Paris vanishing before the narrator’s eyes, something Saint Laurent felt about his own relationship to his times.
“From the 1970s, Saint Laurent’s haute couture collections were created with a tension between the sumptuous nature of the post-war era and the contemporary world,” says Leong.
“One of the central characters in Proust’s novel is the Duchess of Guermantes, who made herself into a work of art using fashion, style and gesture. The duchess was a constant muse to Saint Laurent and you can feel in those swishing, full-skirted gowns that the designer did so well that he was always trying to capture the essence of Proust’s duchess in his own work.
“While there were no single collections devoted to the novel, Saint Laurent’s ‘Proust dresses’ of 1971 did provoke US Vogue to declare they would ‘bring taffeta into our lives’.”
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel once mused that “books have been my best friends … each one is a treasure. If I had daughters, I would give them novels for their instruction. There you find all the great unwritten laws that govern mankind.”
Throughout 2021 Charlotte Casiraghi, scion of Monaco’s royal family, has hosted Chanel’s own literary salon, called Literary Rendezvous, in Paris, with the episodes available on Chanel’s website.
Guests in the salon have included author Jeanette Winterson, author and critic Erica Wagner and actress and Chanel ambassador Margaret Qualley (who we learn is an avid Harry Potter fan). One topic of discussion in the salon? Virginia Woolf, of course.
