Poetic Dress Sense On Show

STYLISH poets are to be celebrated at an exhibition during an annual fashion event. 

At London Fashion Week (Feb 17) Poets in Vogue will be showing at the National Poetry Museum on London’s South Bank curated by two Loughborough University researchers.  

Dr Sarah Parker of University of Loughborough and Dr Sophie Oliver of Liverpool University are bringing together the work and styles of seven 20^th Century female poets including a tartan skirt of Sylvia Plath.  

The installations are created in collaboration with expert costume-maker Gesa Werner and intends to uncover the relationship between the language of poets and the clothes they wear. 

The two researchers began the process of putting the exhibition together in 2018 when they started to look at the connection between poets and their clothes from press cuttings, books and other documents at the Poetry Library’s archives held at the Royal Festival Hall.  

The event showcases a reconstruction of Anne Sexton’s red ‘reading dress’, creative interpretations of Audre Lorde’s, Edith Sitwell’s and Stevie Smith’s signature looks, a fabric-adaptation of a Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, and the clothes-performances of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. 

Dr Parker said: “As a literature scholar, I’ve long been interested in how poets appear and how they develop a distinctive public image to promote their work, including their interactions with fashion, clothing, and photographic portraiture. These issues are particularly thorny for women poets, who have so often been judged in terms of their appearance, and their work read accordingly”. 

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