Weekend Read: The Bloomsbury Look by Wendy Hitchmough

Imagine a time when what you wore, how you arranged your home, and even how you appeared in a photograph could signal a subtle rebellion. A time when such freedoms were not commonplace, but radical departures from deeply entrenched Victorian codes of dress, behaviour, and propriety. In The Bloomsbury Look, Wendy Hitchmough turns her attention to the visual life of the Bloomsbury Group, revealing how style (dress, interiors, and image-making) became central to the group’s shared identity.

Vanessa Bell, Omega Paper Flowers in a Bottle, c. 1915. Oil on canvas, 305 × 330 mm. Private collection.

Formed in the early twentieth century, the Bloomsbury Group was a loose but influential circle of writers, artists, and thinkers including E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, and Lytton Strachey, who rejected Victorian conventions in favour of intellectual freedom, artistic experimentation, and more fluid personal lives. Their ideas reshaped literature, economics, and visual culture, leaving a lasting imprint on modern thought.

Vanessa Bell, Pregnant", 1918.

Drawing on unpublished photographs, family albums, and archival material, Hitchmough reconstructs a world in which appearance was not incidental but carefully composed, a means of testing and expressing new ways of living and thinking. At the centre are Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, whose evolving self-presentation in the early 1910s reflects a decisive break from tradition. Hitchmough traces their shift from elaborate, restrictive dress to simpler, looser forms—garments that signalled both practical freedom and aesthetic intent. Woolf cultivated a look that balanced modernity with intellectual authority, while Bell approached clothing as an extension of her artistic practice, using bold colour and form to shape a distinctly unconventional style.

Omega Workshops attire: Left: Pair of Pyjamas in Maud design. Right: Dressing gown in Amenophis VI design. Both 1918, with the fabric designed in 1913. Printed linen.

This interplay between art and life finds its most vivid expression in the Omega Workshops. As co-director, Bell led the development of the Omega dress collection in 1915, translating Bloomsbury’s private experiments into wearable form. These designs rejected corsetry and conventional notions of beauty, favouring fluid silhouettes and painterly patterns inspired by post-Impressionism. As Hitchmough shows, the Omega dress was both an artistic statement and a commercial venture, embodying the group’s ability to merge radical aesthetics with everyday life.

Bloomsbury family album pages, early 20th century. Reproduced in Wendy Hitchmough, The Bloomsbury Look (Yale University Press, 2020).

Equally compelling is Hitchmough’s exploration of photography and the family album as sites of self-fashioning. These images reveal a process of rehearsal as much as representation, offering a “protective environment” in which identities could be shaped before being presented publicly. The Bloomsbury look emerges not as a fixed style but as an evolving, collaborative practice—one that extended from private interiors to public exhibitions, where the group’s “ultra-modern” work helped define British modernism.

Gabriel Loppé, Julia Stephen at the Bear Hotel, Grindelwald, Switzerland, 1889. The Charleston Trust.

Elegantly written and richly illustrated, The Bloomsbury Look is both accessible and authoritative. Hitchmough shows how the seemingly ordinary acts of dressing, decorating, and posing became instruments of artistic and intellectual rebellion. In doing so, she captures the enduring relevance of Bloomsbury’s aesthetic: a reminder that style, at its most meaningful, is a way of thinking—and, in its time, a daring way of living differently.

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Further Information:

The Bloomsbury Look by Wendy Hitchmough is published by Yale University press, and is available now in the Selvedge Bookshop.

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Image Credits:

Lead: Vanessa Bell, Mrs St John Hutchinson, 1915. Oil paint on board 73.7 x 57.8 cm © Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy Henrietta Garnett

All further images as credited in photo captions.