It was recently called the most fashionable house in England, but on Tuesdays Charleston is closed to visitors and so blissfully empty. In a garden at the peak of its bloom this hot August morning, bees investigate the flowers and apple trees, while ducks cool their feathers in the lake. The Bloomsbury Group used this farmhouse in East Sussex as its countryside HQ for about 60 years, and since the members believed art and life should be thoroughly integrated, their idiosyncratic touches are everywhere. There is a picture on an easel of a naked man with a six-pack painted by Duncan Grant; yellow circles on a wardrobe decorated by Vanessa Bell; a walled garden designed by their fellow artist Roger Fry. Meanwhile, in the kitchen, eccentric pottery shades cover the lights; upstairs in the attic, there is a door frame covered in patterns painted by Bell; and beyond, windows that offer majestic views of the South Downs.
The fashion journalist Charlie Porter has spent much of the past two years here, researching an exhibition and a book. Both are called Bring No Clothes, after Virginia Woolf’s instruction to visitors to leave their starched crinolines, whalebone corsets and medals at home, since the rejection of formal attire was part of Bloomsbury’s revolutionary lifestyle. “I’ve always wanted to look at what happened at the moment clothing went from Victorian cinched and military dress to what you would call modern,” Porter says. “If you look at that moment, what can we learn about the roots of clothing today?”
The exhibition, which Porter has curated, will inaugurate Charleston’s new cultural centre in nearby Lewes, and explores the way modern fashion designers such as Kim Jones of Dior and Fendi, and the former Burberry designer Christopher Bailey, have been inspired by the Bloomsbury Group. There will also be historical artefacts like the flamboyant dresses of society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell (plus the cigarette packet found in her extravagant jodhpurs), while portraits will show the way artists such as Grant used clothing in their own paintings – often to signal queer desire, evidenced in the portrait of his friend Paul Roche dressed as a sailor. Porter is keen that the exhibition takes no prisoners – it opens with five “hardcore” looks by Comme des Garçons inspired by Woolf’s gender-swapping novel Orlando. “I didn’t want, ‘It’s not in London so it’ll have to be watered down,’” he says.
The book and exhibition concentrate on six key Bloomsbury figures, each exemplifying different aspects of clothing, from nudity to formal suits. The economist John Maynard Keynes had a seven-year sexual relationship with Grant, and Bring No Clothes features a photograph of Keynes thrusting his crotch at him, while Grant covers his genitals with his hand. Though both are wearing suits, the message from Grant is clear, Porter says: “No, you’re not getting any, you’re being pushy and needy but no.” It’s a subversion of the suit as a signifier of propriety, Porter adds, “but then the suit is also the thing men use to get what they want”.
Bring No Clothes’ exploration of cultural figures through their attire continues the idiosyncratic ethos of Porter’s 2021 debut book What Artists Wear. “I’ve always found clothing to be a way to get closer to people,” he says. “If you ask any artist about their work they say, ‘I don’t even know how to talk to myself about it.’ But if you ask, ‘What are you wearing?’ they say, ‘I’m wearing this fleece because my studio is so cold because I can’t afford the heating bills.’ Or: ‘I need a massive studio because I do huge sculptures, so I have to wear loads of layers.’”
Porter, 49, started working on magazines in the mid-90s. He joined the Guardian’s fashion desk at the start of the 00s and was the FT’s menswear critic for several years. He was asked to do the exhibition by Charleston’s director Nathaniel Hepburn after he gave a talk at the house prompted by a startling photograph in What Artists Wear of Grant at Charleston in 1974, dressed in a tracksuit, that seemed to collide our own era with that of Bloomsbury.
Porter says he isn’t a conventional Bloomsbury scholar. “I read EM Forster as a kid, but I think that most people don’t particularly call Forster Bloomsbury,” he says. “He doesn’t have sex with anyone in Bloomsbury, and that’s why he’s not dragged into the web, because I think so much of Bloomsbury is the interpersonal mesh. I wanted to look at the individual.”
In fact, the book probably works precisely because Porter isn’t a dyed-in-the-wool Bloomsbury obsessive, since it also charts how their ideals changed his life. He talks about his own sexual repression as a queer teenager in the 80s and 90s, comparing himself to the (literally) buttoned-up Forster, and writes that he didn’t lose his virginity until he was 27. “That was something I might previously have felt humiliated by,” he says. “But I’m almost 50, I don’t care, and it feels liberating to say it. Maybe I would have felt more embarrassed about it if my parents were alive. Which has its own sadness.”
Bring No Clothes addresses Porter’s experiences of grief – his parents both died while he was writing it. Like Bell, he says, his mother was an artist who turned her talents to other areas: she “made clothes and curtains and decorated”. Six weeks after she died, from a rapidly progressing blood cancer, Porter was putting on his four-times-a-year queer rave, Chapter 10, in London, and realised he didn’t have anything to wear. So he made his first garment.
To begin with, he attempted to make a linen T-shirt from a pattern, then he decided to improvise. “I extended the back of the T-shirt out to the sides and brought it round the front and sewed it all up so it was a T-shirt/frock coat thing. It was the most amazing thing to wear to a party, a total revelation to dance in.” After that, there was no stopping him: Porter now spends much of his free time cutting and sewing. Today, he sits next to me by the lake in an outfit he made: a flowing, multicoloured patchwork T-shirt, and extremely abbreviated shorts that are, he points out, “quite like nappies”.
As well as transforming his relationship with clothing, making his own pieces connected him to the Bloomsbury Group and to his mother. “It became part of living,” he says. “I also want the reader to feel activated.” He chuckles when I ask whether Christian Dior Couture, which is sponsoring the exhibition, realise that one takeaway from the book is to stop buying clothes and make your own instead. “I’ve been very lucky to have been given complete free rein.”
In some ways, the Bloomsbury Group’s sexual fluidity, and the fact that they were mixed-gender alliances, makes their sexual politics seem more contemporary than the single-sex gay groups of the more recent past. Bring No Clothes carefully notes the hidden queer aspects of Bloomsbury – a term Porter prefers to gay or lesbian. “I’ve always found the word gay doesn’t roll off my tongue,” he says. “It lands weirdly.” He is put off by its maleness. “I think queer also allows for a move beyond misogyny, which is often a part of gay male patriarchy.”
While most of the group’s sexual behaviour would today put them under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, Porter says Bloomsbury scholarship has often had a heteronormative slant, particularly when it came to Woolf – as well as a lack of understanding about the depression that led to her suicide, which for years was described as “madness”. He says: “It’s clear she had no attraction to men whatsoever.” In Bring No Clothes, he quotes a letter Woolf wrote to her friend Violet Dickinson: “It is astonishing what hot volcanic depths your finger has stirred.” The day after she met the writer Vita Sackville-West, Porter also points out, Woolf listed her moustache as one of her most impressive attributes. He says he is the first writer about Bloomsbury not to snigger at this.
Bloomsbury scholars have brushed these expressions of same-sex desire off as eccentricities, he adds, playing down the queer subtexts in books such as Mrs Dalloway, focusing instead on Woolf ’s marriage to Leonard Woolf, which Porter calls “a solution queer humans took on to be able to exist”. For him, “clothing and appearance became a way of allowing Woolf’s queerness to be talked about in an uncontroversial, matter of fact and non-prurient way”. He goes on: “Once you start interrogating what the Bloomsbury Group wore, you uncover these queer histories – some desperately sad, some desperately frustrating, some desperately sexy. But all these stories emerge if you let the clothing speak.”
• Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion is published by Penguin on 7 September, £20. The exhibition is at Charleston in Lewes, 13 September to 7 January.
