Why Is Virginia Woolf This Fall’s Fashion Muse?

British designer Clare Waight Keller is most famous for dressing Meghan Markle on her wedding day. The former creative director of Chloé and Givenchy has long been partial to elegant swoops of silk and precisely cut black blazers. But this season—her first as creative director for Japanese basics label Uniqlo—Keller drew from a more novel inspiration: “I was reading a lot of Virginia Woolf.” The result is a confident, slightly kooky capsule collection of hardy tweed blazers and fluttering plaid maxi skirts referencing Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, a bohemian posse of British artists and writers who resisted the staid norms of their post-Victorian era. Their style, said Keller, “is rebellious but grounded.” 

This fall, you might say Woolf’s defiant spirit haunted other collections in the form of offbeat, earthy-but-ethereal pairings. Miu Miu trotted out waxed barn jackets and deflated floral skirts, Tod’s showed boyish charcoal wool vests and frothy white nightshirts, and Burberry, which has explicit ties to Bloomsbury, offered hourglass-shaped leather blazers and plaid schoolmarm skirts. Even rocker chic designers like Anna Sui went Woolf-ward, styling floral blouses with tangerine argyle socks—a nod to the “woolen orange stockings” that writer Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s sometimes lover, noted in a 1922 letter.