CHARLIE PORTER

A Financial Times Book of the Year* 'The first time I opened What Artists Wear, I gasped with pleasure. Imagine it as a kind of punk cousin to John Berger's Ways of Seeing, liberally illustrated with the most astonishing images of artists, decked out in finery or rags ... It transported me to somewhere glamorous, exciting, even revolutionary' Olivia Laing, GuardianMost of us live our lives in our clothes without realizing their power.But in the hands of artists, garments reveal themselves. They are pure tools of expression, storytelling, resistance and creativity: canvases on which to show who we really are. In What Artists Wear, style luminary Charlie Porter takes us on an invigorating, eye-opening journey through the iconic outfits worn by artists, in the studio, on stage, at work, at home and at play.

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 Hessel Charlie Porter is a magician Olivia LaingWhy do we wear what we wear To answer this question we must go back and unlock the wardrobes of the early twentieth century when fashion as we know it was born In Bring No Clothes acclaimed fashion writer Charlie Porter brings us face to face with six members of the Bloomsbury Group the collective of artists and thinkers who were in the vanguard of a social and sartorial revolution Each of them offers fresh insight into the constraints and possibilities of fashion today from the stifling repression of E M Forster s top buttons to the creativity of Vanessa Bell s wayward hems from the sheer pleasure of Ottoline Morrell s lavish dresses to the clashing self consciousness of Virginia Woolf s orange stockings As Porter carefully unpicks what they wore and how they wore it we see how clothing can be a means of artistic intellectual and sexual liberation or conversely a tool for patriarchal control Travelling through libraries archives attics and studios Porter uncovers fresh evidence about his subjects revealing them in a thrillin

p Why do we wear what we wear To answer this question we must go back and unlock the wardrobes of the early twentieth century when fashion as we know it was born br br In i Bring No Clothes i acclaimed fashion writer Charlie Porter brings us face to face with six members of the Bloomsbury Group the collective of creatives and thinkers who were in the vanguard of a social and sartorial revolution Each of them offers fresh insight into the constraints and possibilities of fashion today from the stifling repression of E M Forster s top buttons to the creativity of Vanessa Bell s wayward hems from the sheer pleasure of Ottoline Morrell s lavish dresses to the clashing self consciousness of Virginia Woolf s orange stockings from Duncan Grant s liberated play with nudity to John Maynard Keynes s power play in the traditional suit As Porter carefully unpicks what they wore and how they wore it we see how clothing can be a means of artistic intellectual and sexual liberation or conversely a tool for patriarchal control br br As he travels through libraries archives attics and studios Porter uncovers new evidence about his subjects revealing them in a thrillingly intimate vivid new light And as he begins making his own clothing his own persp

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