Poets’ dress code: what the clothes of Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde and Stevie Smith tell us about their inner lives
‘I had always been slightly seduced by looking at photographs of female poets, and felt guilty about being interested in what they wore,” says Sarah Parker, a co-curator of Poets in Vogue,a new free exhibition at the National Poetry Library. “We wanted to reveal how serious and fascinating the relationship is between their work itself, the way they dressed, and the way clothes appear in their work.”
The compact show, which looks at seven 20th-century poets and their relationship with clothing, has an intentional focus on women.
The exhibition has no interest in deifying poets through their garments, or suggesting their look be emulated. Rather, the intention was to recreate these clothes and think imaginatively about how to represent poets, their work and lives.
There is only one historical garment: a plaid skirt with a button at the small waist and belted over the pleats, worn in 1956 by Sylvia Plath on a trip to Paris. Inside the hem is her handembroidered name. A couple of pieces are recreations, such as an asymmetric kaftan worn by the American poet Audre Lorde after a mastectomy. Other exhibits are imaginative acts: installations that express the importance of clothing to poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Stevie Smith.
“There’s a feminist impetus to making it just about women,” says Oliver. “This is about making things rather than just reconstructing things. Moving away from faithful reconstructions enables us to understand more about the work itself.”
Within the space is a three-metre tall manifestation of Edith Sitwell, a British poet whose clothing heightened her sense of permanent drama. The installation is essentially a tent dress, made by the co-curator Gesa Werner and inspired by a gown worn by Sitwell to perform as Lady Macbeth, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1950. The dress reaches the ceiling and, with its train, extends to more than five metres. At its base is a table displaying a turban, and slender mannequin hands covered in rings. “We’ve got her presence in her absence here,” says Werner.
The show opens with a veil, to express the work and life of the Korean American performance artist, poet and film-maker Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. An image of her 1975 performance Aveugle Voix (blind voice) is printed on a large white scrim hung in the entrance. Cha is seen blindfolded, wearing white sportswear, and holding with gloved hands a roll of fabric stencilled with the words “Me”, “Fail”, “Words”.
Her performances often involved clothing and fabric, like a veil that separated her from her audience. Also on display is a fanzine that details the garments she was wearing on 5 November 1982, the night she was raped and murdered in New York City, at the age of 31.
Nearby is a recreation of the red dress Anne Sexton wore for readings of her poetry. Sexton took her own life in 1974, at the age of 45. “After she died,” says Oliver, “her daughters found the dress in her wardrobe and decided this was most quintessentially Anne, and she was cremated in it.”
The dress has glamour and sensuality. “Her readings were loved by her fans and criticised by her detractors,” says Oliver, who adds that, at the time, poetry readings were relatively novel. “Sexton performed here at the Royal Festival Hall in 1967 at the first Poetry International, and the story goes that she blew kisses to the audience. A lot of the press and poetry world absolutely hated this.”
The British poet Stevie Smith, most famous for the work Not Waving But Drowning (published in 1957), is represented by a series of white shirt collars, to express the purposeful repetitiveness in her clothing and her work. “There’s something about sameness that was actually enabling for her,” Parker says of Smith, who died in 1971. “We wanted to think about difference within sameness and the parallels between poetic lines and clothing rhythms.” Meanwhile, the American poet Brooks is celebrated for her observations on clothing within her work, with a paper and fabric installation of her 1945 poem The Sundays of SatinLegs Smith.
The recreation of Lorde’s kaftan is the most powerful presence in the show – its asymmetric hand-printing purposefully emphasising her right chest, after her mastectomy in 1978. “She made a very conscious decision to not wear a prosthetic,” says Oliver, “to defy the norms of the times and go against various doctors and health visitors’ advice.”
Lorde wrote often about clothing, such as the dress codes in 1950s New York lesbian bars described in her 1982 book Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, although she rarely did so in her poetry. “There’s this uncomplicated sense for her that, of course clothes are essential to how I am in the world,” says Oliver. “She’s writing all the time about clothes as part of her project to remake the world in an image that would make room for a black disabled lesbian woman.”
As for Plath’s skirt: “We’ve been ambivalent about including Plath,” says Parker, “without playing into any of the incredibly loaded myths. We wanted to keep it very minimal and let the skirt speak for itself.” What that skirt says is prim, neat, polite, stifled.”
As co-curator Sophie Oliver explains: “With women, there’s the opportunity to change the narrative a little bit, to show how clothes are crucial to the work and some of the things they are thinking through their work.”
The curators have grown close to their subjects in the five years since the show’s inception (the opening was delayed by the pandemic). It’s an emotion that is present in the works they have created. “I’m going to miss the poets,” says Werner. “I’m going to miss it all.”