I recently read Charlie Porter’s Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion and found it both fascinating and thought-provoking. There is much to unpack in it, and I won’t even attempt to do an exhaustive review here – do read the book if you’re interested in fashion as a form of self-expression and its philosophical/existential dimensions. What I want to share today are some thoughts inspired by the title and Porter’s entry point to his exploration of the topic.
Bring no clothes: words written by Virginia Woolf (then Stephens) to her future husband, Leonard Woolf, prior to him coming for a visit to her house in the countryside. Similar words were found in other letters from Woolf and her sister, artist Vanessa Bell, to their Bloomsbury friends. Here is Porter explaining what it meant.
“By ‘clothes’, Woolf meant the traditional fashions of her Victorian upbringing. This was an oppressive world codified by garments, with outfit changes throughout the day … All Woolf needed to say was ‘bring no clothes’. Her meaning: come as you are. We are no longer living by those rules. We refuse them, we reject them, we are pushing for something new.”
Elsewhere in his book, Porter makes the argument that clothing is archetypal, even today. Items of clothing – the classic suit, for example, but even basic items like shirts and dresses, etc. – carry meaning and symbolism, associated with and imbued by social structures and norms. He writes that “they provide the subconscious messaging that gives us knowledge of another human before they speak.”
Porter says:
“This knowledge of clothing is unconscious, like our knowledge of language. As with our knowledge of language, we are always learning. Our understanding of clothes is not finite, but is always evolving, and yet we tend to brush it off. This dichotomy … is at the heart of our contemporary experience with fashion. It is the tension between our self-denial and our subconscious knowledge.”
He invites us to consider this: “Imagine waking up one day and dressing without pre-conception, in response to your own body, its physical needs as well as your desire for expression. This would answer Woolf’s call to ‘bring no clothes’.”
Porter recognizes that this is not always possible — and frequently less possible for some people in our society than others — but he thinks that it can still be a goal that those of us who have the privilege to do so can work towards. I agree. I also find the phrase “bring no clothes” very inspiring in broader sense, beyond fashion. To me, “bring no clothes” can be equated to something like “bring no unexamined ideas or preconceptions to any ritual of living or of creative expression.”
We all inherit an enormous amount intellectual/psychological baggage dictated by the social environment in which we grow up and live. Traditions, norms, ideas, expectations, etc. etc. If society is the house in which we live, it comes already furnished, so to speak. In this context, bring no clothes means … bring no furniture except whatever you actually like, find valuable, etc. Redecorate. Keep and toss things as you please. If, in a metaphorical sense, we inherit and live in our parents’ houses, that doesn’t mean that we must keep them unchanged forever. We can make them our own.
For me, ‘bring no clothes’ resonates in the same way as ‘living in discovery’, which is a mantra I have been using for several years now. I consider it one of my guiding principles for living with intention and with meaning. Both of these approaches require curiosity – curiosity that is bold and fearless, but also humble. Another way that I think about curiosity as a concept is “openness”. Openness to the world – people, experiences, ideas – unblinkered by preexisting judgments. Openness is not the same thing as automatic acceptance. To be curious is not the same as being gullible.
To return to fashion …
Over the last decade or so, I have thought a lot about clothes in the context of my exploration of identity and self-expression. Without having consciously set out to do so, I ended up deconstructing my relationship with clothes and then reconstructing it, after my own pattern. Or, at least, mostly after my own pattern. It is loose enough to allow me room to move and grow and evolve. And, funnily enough, nowadays I rarely (consciously) think about clothes anymore. I know what I like and I wear what I like (and I recognize my own privilege in having the freedom to do so) and I am never not comfortable in my own clothes – as I have learned to be in my own skin. It is a state, and a freedom, I hope everyone can get to experience. As Porter writes, “[c]lothes are at the heart of how we experience ourselves.” The first step is to acknowledge that clothes have meaning and power and to start consciously thinking about them in those terms – and see where that takes us.
