Scrupulously researched and curated by fashion journalist Charlie Porter, Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and Fashion has opened at Charleston’s new spaces at Southover House in Lewes. The exhibition brings together original garments, paintings, photography and spoken word to explore how the Bloomsbury set continues to inspire fashion more than a century later.
Charleston was once the home and studio of the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and a gathering space for the artists and writers who came to be known as “the Bloomsbury set”, including Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey.
First, menswear designer Kim Jones transposes the works and designs of artist Duncan Grant into prints and patterns for his Dior summer 2023 collection. Jones’s hand-knitted rendering of Grant’s design for a fire curtain at Sadler’s Wells Theatre (1930) brings out all the campness of the artist, playfully reinterpreting the language of cubism to become kitsch.
