Bring No Clothes

A triumph. I could read Charlie Porter’s books all day long. He makes us see a subject we thought we knew so well from a completely different angle; in writing that is deeply researched, but inviting, warm, and full of personality – Katy HesselExcellent … Porter’s generous, empathetic eye feels like a corrective for the more salacious historical depictions of the Bloomsbury Group’s affairs … Bring No Clothes doesn’t just introduce a new frame of thinking, it adds a fresh layer of humanity to the collective * Independent *Charlie Porter is a magician, a radical historian who has pulled away all the threadbare myths about Bloomsbury, using clothes as a way of revealing the vulnerable bodies and wild new ideas of Woolf and her circle. In his hands, what people wear becomes an astoundingly rich way of thinking about love and grief, art-making and intimacy - and above all about old power structures and how to upend them. Bring No Clothes is at once an enriching account of the past and a primer for the future: a guide to how we too can clothe our bodies for freedom – Olivia LaingA call to arms from the first page - it’s thrilling and radical – Chantal JoffeCharlie Porter applies a literary critic’s close reading to the clothes of the early twentieth century, unpicking philosophical texts from their textures. Bring No Clothes offers a way of recalibrating the world by understanding the tensions that underpin and overdetermine it through the ways we dress. With curiosity and contemporaneity, he finds in the Bloomsbury Group’s experiments in intimacy a queer possibility for the way we live today – Sam Buchan-Watts, author of Path Through WoodSpot-on … the way the [Bloomsbury] circle thought about clothes was part of a wider revolt … Thanks to his access to the contents of several Bloomsbury wardrobes, together with a trove of previously unseen photographs, Porter is able to provide a detailed illustration of how “Make it new” played out on the material level * Guardian *One of the best books about Bloomsbury! – Maggie Humm, author and Vice Chair of the Virginia Woolf SocietyFascinating – Samira Ahmed * BBC Front Row *Unlocks the Bloomsbury Group’s wardrobes to expose the intricate interplay between attire, liberation and control * Vogue *A deep dive into the wardrobes of the Bloomsbury Group. Behind colour choices and hemlines are fascinating insights into their bodies and minds * Monocle *

Charlie Porter is a writer, fashion critic and curator. He has written for the Financial Times, the Guardian, The New York Times, GQ, Luncheon, i-D and Fantastic Man, and has been described as one of the most influential fashion journalists of his time. Porter co-runs the London queer rave Chapter 10, and is a trustee of the Friends of Arnold Circus, where he is also a volunteer gardener. He lives in London.

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