I saw Charlie Porter interviewed by Steven S. Daley at Waterstones, about Bring No Clothes, his book about members of the Bloomsbury group and fashion - which had me thinking about the preservation of clothes, how none of their clothes, bar a few of Ottoline Morrell’s still exist - how to preserve narratives around clothing when the clothes themselves do not exist?

Esteemed members of Bloomsbury, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, and their love letters loom large in the lesbian canon. There is a part of Porter’s book that quotes a letter from Vita to her husband, about Virginia’s awful woollen stockings in a shade of orange - how she was always slightly wrong, “off”, dishevelled, indicating an inherent queerness about her. Woolf wrote one of the most iconic novels about being “out of time” - Orlando - ever, but then, through this new text by Charlie Porter, is brought into time with her clothing. 

As an exercise, I wove the stockings - these are less faithful reproductions of 1920s hosiery and more material for a speculative stocking.