Earlier this year, Alexa Chung took us back to the '90s with her Britpop-inspired "Fantastic" collection. This time around, her eponymous clothing line takes its inspiration from a period about 70 years earlier.
The "Virginia" collection, featuring over 100 spring-ready pieces, looks to the author Virginia Woolf and the rest of the Bloomsbury set, an intellectual group of artists, poets, philosophers and writers who hung out in London in the 1920s. The new look book was even shot on location in East Sussex's Charleston Trust, the literary group's country getaway.
“This season’s inspiration came from writers, painters and sculptors whose lives are filled with created works of beauty," explains creative director Chung. "Our muse works in her worn jeans, old t-shirts, borrowed shorts; painting, creating, travelling, loving. Pay close attention to the piping, frills, embroidery and all of the Charleston inspired prints that make up this collection.”
To celebrate this beautiful new line, we decided to match some of the various looks to the works of Virginia Woolf herself. We even included a quote, so while you view the clothes you can also be reminded of some of the wit and wisdom that inspired them in the first place.
A Room Of One's Own (1929)
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
Night and Day (1919)
“I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.”
"Phyllis and Rosamund" (1906)
“We are daughters, until we become married women."
Jacob's Room (1922)
“Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.”
"A Haunted House" (1921)
“I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts.”
Between the Acts (1941)
“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
The Voyage Out (1915)
“I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.”
Orlando (1928)
“'The sky is blue,' he said, 'the grass is green.' Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods."
Mrs Dalloway (1925)
“Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence.”
To the Lighthouse (1927)
“And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.”
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