The poet Anne Sexton in 1974
A researcher from the Department of English has co-curated an exciting new exhibition for the National Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre, London.
Opening during London Fashion Week, Poets in Vogue (17 February – 25 June 2023) brings together the fashion worlds and poetic work of seven women poets through a series of displays, including an iconic tartan skirt owned and worn by Sylvia Plath.
The exhibition is co-curated by Dr Sophie Oliver from the University of Liverpool and Dr Sarah Parker from Loughborough University, as well as being funded by the two institutions. The installations are created in collaboration with expert costume-maker Gesa Werner.
The exhibition will rethink assumptions about the superficiality of fashion, offering new perspectives on the close connections between language and dress, and emphasising poetry as an embodied practice that includes live performance.
The displays will also include a reconstruction of Anne Sexton’s red ‘reading dress’, creative interpretations of Audre Lorde’s, Edith Sitwell’s and Stevie Smith’s signature looks, a fabric-adaptation of a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, and the clothes-performances of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Aveugle Voix, 1975
The process began in 2018, when Sarah and Sophie began researching twentieth-century women poets in the archives of the National Poetry Library, exploring newspaper clipping files, posters and LPs as well as books, in order to identify poets who have a particularly interesting relationship to fashion. They then worked with Gesa to conceive the striking installations that bring these poets to life.
Dr Sophie Oliver, Lecturer in English said: “We want to challenge any simple equation of women poets and clothes, stressing the different – sometimes ambivalent, often celebratory – ways these figures approached getting dressed in their lives, work and politics.”
The exhibition is free to enter and you can find out more here.
The Southbank Centre’s National Poetry Library is the largest public collection of modern poetry in the world and is housed at the Southbank Centre in London. Founded by the Arts Council in 1953 and opened by poets T.S. Eliot and Herbert Read, the library contains over 200,000 items spanning from 1912 to the present day, extensive resources for poets, academics, schools and families. Find out more here.