Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity

Places Woolf’s writing in the context of sartorial practice from the Victorian period to the 1930s. Bringing together studies in fashion, body culture and modernism, these 6 chapters place Woolf’s writing in the context of contemporary European fashions, sartorial practices and projects of dress reform. Drawing on theories of dress and fashion from Thomas Carlyle to Walter Benjamin, Wyndham Lewis and J.C. Flugel, the book explores the modernist fascination with clothes as objects, signs, things, and embodied practice. Clothes facilitate explorations in modern materialism by, for instance, informing surrealist attempts to think the materiality of things outside the system of commodities and their fetishisation. Woolf’s work as a cultural analyst and writer of fiction provides illuminating illustrations of all of these aspects, ‘thinking through clothes’ in representations of the present, investigations of the archives of the past, and projections for the future.