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An exciting new history of modernism that re-examines the movement through some of its most brilliant female artists.
Pioneering women were at the heart of the movement known as modernism. In What the dresses know, Sophie Oliver offers a new account of their radical experiments and extraordinary lives, told through the clothes they made and wore.
From a dress Vanessa Bell rescued from the London Blitz to Frida Kahlo’s huipiles and a waistcoat embroidered for Gertrude Stein by Alice B. Toklas, these special objects tell a story of artists seeking transformation. But getting dressed is rarely straightforward. Modernist women used clothes to think through the contradictions of the modern world: the inequalities of industrialisation, the terrible conformities demanded by fascism and racism and the call of feminists, socialists and avant-gardists to act differently and take up new forms of art.
What the dresses know is an exhilarating account of women’s bold attempts to make history during years of tumultuous change. A distinctive new voice in cultural criticism, Sophie Oliver uses clothes to explore the challenges modernist women faced – and to understand her own impulses in writing about them.
‘This bold, sensitive and beautifully written book probes the seams where art and life collide, exploring the material realities – and imaginative possibilities – revealed by the intriguing clothes of these fascinating modernist women. Oliver's embodied approach is fresh, suggestive and revealing; this is a serious, sensual history, showing how these women's desires, politics, tastes and ideals drove them each to refashion the past and make language their own.’
Francesca Wade, author of Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife
'Sophie Oliver not only writes brilliantly about the history of garments, she writes about the bodies in them and the narratives that made and unmade them, dressed and undressed them. This is an essential work of scholarship and insight and heart and care.'
Hilton Als, author of The Women
First: Vanessa Bell’s and Virginia Woolf’s old clothes
1 Form: Sonia Delaunay’s patchwork dress
2 Feminism: Rebecca West’s blouse
3 Fall: Jean Rhys’s house-gown
4 Fire: Zora Neale Hurston’s bonnet
5 Fit: Mina Loy’s corselet
6 Fur: Méret Oppenheim’s bracelet
7 Figures: Frida Kahlo’s huipil
8 Finishing: Gertrude Stein’s and Alice Toklas’s waistcoat
Index