Professor John Mullan: Why Virginia Woolf would love the latest Burberry collection

Gender fluidity is celebrated, and fashionistas at the show are given a copy of her bold novel Orlando
Blurring boundaries: Tilda Swinton and Billy Zane in the 1992 film version of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
John Mullan23 September 2016

Virginia Woolf would surely have thought it a hoot. The select guests for Burberry’s much anticipated ready-to-buy catwalk show at London Fashion Week arrived to find a copy of Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando on every seat. Her experimental literary fantasy, usually the stuff of academic seminars, was apparently the key to the fashion parade that they were about to see. Indeed, by being given a copy, the assembled fashion journalists and celebrities were clearly being encouraged to go away and peruse Woolf’s modernist classic, all the better to appreciate the label’s new collection.

It’s all about “gender fluidity”, as fashion correspondents are solemnly calling it. In the words of Damon Albarn in the Blur song, “Girls who are boys / Who like boys to be girls …”. Orlando is the story of a lovely youth growing up in Elizabethan England whose androgynous beauty makes it unsurprising that he eventually turns into a woman. The Burberry show featured both men’s and women’s clothes, often seeming interchangeable, modelled by boyish young women and girly young men. At the moment, it seems that there is nothing more fashionable than crossing those irksome gender boundaries.

Orlando gives cross-dressing a touch of class — not just literary distinction but also aristocratic hauteur. And it is true that in Twenties England it was only the upper classes who could safely play at gender-bending.

When Woolf’s novel opens in the age of Elizabeth I, Orlando is a young nobleman, the heir to a great estate and a huge, sumptuously furnished ancestral house. Woolf’s protagonist seems quite ready for a Vogue photo-shoot, with his teeth of “almond whiteness”, his cheeks “covered with peach down” and “his eyes like drenched violets, so large that the water seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them”. Alluringly androgynous, he possesses “a pair of the shapeliest legs that any Nobleman has ever stood upright upon”.

He has great fun dressing up. Within a few pages he is being visited by the Queen, in whose honour he hastily dons “crimson breeches, lace collar, waistcoat of taffeta and shoes with rosettes on them as big as double dahlias”. It is almost as if he were getting ready for the catwalk. (Though the shoes with rosettes seem to have been missing from the Burberry show, the other items were there.) Woolf has gone back to an age, when — if you were to judge from literature or paintings — posh young men were allowed to be beautiful, perfumed and feminine.

Burberry SS17 at London Fashion Week

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“There could be no doubt about his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it.” The Elizabethans did transgender with poetic flair. Aren’t most of Shakespeare’s amorous sonnets addressed to a beautiful young man? The name of Woolf’s hero-cum-heroine reminds us of Shakespeare’s Orlando, the lovely young man who wins the heart of Rosalind in As You Like It. This play is surely the ultimate in gender fluidity, featuring, at one point, a boy actor playing a girl (Rosalind) who disguises herself as a young man (Ganymede), who then pretends to be a girl in order to woo her man. Clearly the Elizabethan audience was relaxed about gender differences. All young women were played on the English stage by boys. Cross-dressing was the first principle of drama.

As the dutiful guests from the Burberry show get further into their copies of Orlando, they will find something even stranger than this. As one monarch’s reign succeeds another, it is clear that Orlando is not ageing much. More than 60 years after Elizabeth’s death, still youthful, he is being sent by Charles II as an ambassador to Constantinople (a chance to don Turkish silk pyjamas). There he goes into a trance-like sleep and awakes after several days transformed. “Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no choice left but confess — he was a woman.”

As a woman she/he lives through another 250 years and ends triumphantly repossessing the ancestral home as an aeroplane roars overhead, in 1928, Woolf’s present day.

The character’s defiance of time is as useful to the Burberry designers as his/her androgyny, allowing the use not just of Elizabethan ruffs but also Georgian frock coats, and silk pyjamas and a flying jacket (worn together, naturally) from the Twenties. Women wear cavalry jackets and men sport embroidered tops. Some outfits perhaps owe more to Sally Potter’s 1992 film version of Orlando, in which Tilda Swinton is perfectly cast as the gender-changing protagonist, than to the original novel. Burberry’s creative director Christopher Bailey enthuses about Orlando as “a love letter to the past and to English history, yet fiercely modern”.

It was also a kind of love letter to Vita Sackville-West, whose family home was Knole, Orlando’s house in the novel — though, as a female, she could not inherit it. Vita had briefly been Woolf’s lover, though, unlike her friend, Woolf was not a confirmed “Sapphist” (she never used the word “lesbian”). “It’s all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind,” she told Vita, to whom she eventually dedicated the book. Orlando’s gender fluidity is also a celebration of Vita Sackville-West’s defiance of sexual convention, and Woolf’s own, briefer defiance of sexual boundaries.

Yet it is odd to see it as a fashion item. Woolf herself was not usually modishly dressed. When the fashion editor of Vogue met her in the Twenties she complained that “this beautiful and distinguished woman” was wearing “what could only be described as an upturned wastepaper basket on her head”. But she did love fancy dress. She and Vita liked to disport themselves as (male) cavaliers from the mid-17th century. It was all a practical joke. Indeed, Orlando, Woolf said, “began as a joke”. Surely she would have enjoyed seeing her jeu d’esprit inspire such elaborately conceived costumes, for they are costumes as much as clothes — fancy dress in earnest. What might have begun as a jest, the fashion business takes very seriously indeed.

John Mullan is Professor of English at University College London.