My Bookshelf

Tuesday 18 September 2012

Writers with Style

London Fashion Week kicked off last Friday and once again I am surrounded on my daily commute by beautiful women towering over me looking sickeningly fashionable. I have had my annual ooh and ahhh over Burberry's LFW show and shivered with jealousy at the celebs gilding the catwalk.

In the middle of all that I came to think about this blog and thought that there just must be some snappy dressers out there in the writing community and thus I took to google and here are just a few of them:




Anna Wintour's long lost sister blessed with a less sensitive retina? Amazingly not. This sharp bob, mysterious eyes and verging-on-androgynous dresser is Donna Tartt, author of bestseller The Secret History. This haunting image doesn't come as so much of a surprise once you've read the novel but it's fair to say that she is a woman who dresses with purpose.




Another writer with his own thoughts on fashion is none other than Mr. Oscar Wilde. "Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months." Hats and sweeping capes, envied by the likes of Lord Voldemort - another key literary figure in the world of fashion - became very familiar in portraits of Wilde but it wasn't just him who had views on fashionable attire; Wilde and his wife, Constance, were both members of the dress reform movement. The movement's greatest achievements were centred around female dress, including underwear and simplified clothes for exercise.


You didn't think I'd get through this post without talking about Virginia Woolf did you? Those floaty dresses and floppy wide-brimmed hats? It may not surprise you that I have my own virginia-esque hat... with no flowers like Mrs. Woolf here I have to add...but I'm not the only one who has been inspired by Woolf's 20s look. Tatler magazine ran a Woolf-inspired spread by photographer Hyung-WonRyoo and designer Lifu Hsiao has also taken ideas from the tortured writer's wardrobe. Perhaps it is less surprising when you consider that Woolf's mother was a renowned beauty and modeled for the likes of Pre-Raphaelite painted, Edward Burne-Jones.


And let's not forget that Ernest Hemingway inspired the looks of the applicants to a particular prestigious competition... as you can see here.

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