How Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group unbuttoned Britain

And there are some more obvious Bloomsbury sartorial rebels: figures like Woolf and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, and her lover Grant, who rejected restrictive clothing in favour of dishevelment, comfort and flow. Women like Dora Carrington, the painter, or Sackville-West, who consciously embraced androgyny. Or Lady Ottoline Morrell, who forged her own unabashed and inimitable style, wearing elaborate dresses that were considered deeply unfashionable.

Yet we still have a tendency to get things about them wrong. It is true, for instance, that Woolf and Bell did float around in waistless, longline, drapey garms. But the entrenched idea that these were always in muted tones – mauves and sage, brown and dulled blues (think of the murky colour palette in The Hours, or the similarly restrained BBC drama Life in Squares) seems to be, at least in part, due to assumptions derived from the fact that they were always photographed in black and white.

Reports from the time suggest many of the set were actually big into bold colour – exactly as you’d expect, if you looked at Bell and Grant’s paintings or at Charleston, where they painted every available surface in mustard, tangerine, chartreuse and turquoise, as well as softer pastels.

It was something that really struck Porter in his research. “The number of times people talked about the jarring colours they wore… these vile clashes,” he recalls. He quotes Bell writing to Grant in 1915, asking for her yellow waistcoat – and one can only imagine what she was planning on pairing it with. “I am going to make myself a new dress,” she continued, adding, “you won’t like the dress I’m afraid, as it will be mostly purple… Also I’m going to make myself a bright green blouse or coat”. As Porter points out, these are “bold colour fields, just like her abstracts”.

A rejection of old mores

Bloomsbury was self-consciously revolutionary in various artistic ways – as early as 1908, Woolf was insisting that she wanted to do nothing less than “re-form the novel” – and so it is tempting to assume that they were all planning out this fashion revolution, determining to “make it new” (as fellow modernist Ezra Pound famously said).