“Poets in Vogue” is an interdisciplinary exhibition held at the National Poetry Library in the Southbank Centre, London, from 17 February to 10 September 2023. Sophie Oliver (University of Liverpool) and Sarah Parker (Loughborough University) worked with Gesa Werner, an expert costume-maker and mounter, to explore the relationship between poetry and clothes through the work and dress of seven twentieth-century women poets. The exhibition includes imaginative recreations of some of these poets’ signature “looks,” along with archival and reconstructed garments. In the following reflections on making the exhibition, Sophie’s and Sarah’s words are distinct, to emphasize two specific concerns of the project: a collaborative process and the materiality of language.

In February 1928, the popular magazine Estampa published an unassuming centerfold photograph of a large group of people strolling through Madrid. The jovial crowd pictured is so large that they take over the sidewalk and spill into the avenue (fig. 1). At the center of the image, cheerful female dressmakers walk with synchronized steps. Nearby pedestrians take note of the group’s energetic display for the photographer and pause to look at them. This photograph does not appear to immediately offer revelations about the advent of modernity in Madrid. In fact, the revolutionary aspects of the image might go entirely unnoticed for a viewer today. However, this centerfold encompasses a number of key social and political debates brought on by the modernization of Madrid and permits surprising insight into the visual and literary culture of Spanish modernity during the 1920s and 1930s. The centerfold shows how the flourishing—albeit understudied—popular press negotiated the modernization of Madrid and the corresponding effects of this phenomenon upon metropolitan urban dynamics. I contend that mass-produced periodicals played a central part in creating new understandings of the role of modern urban citizens in Madrid throughout this period. While there are very few examples of paintings that portray early twentieth-century Madrid and even fewer that depict its modernized areas, the city in all its forms was a constant visual and textual presence in periodicals. Magazines contained photographs and conflicting reports that ranged from praise to thoughtful critique of the city’s expansions and renovations. Together, text and images mediated the modern city’s purposes and problems for readers. The popular press alerted their audience that modernity’s objectives were debatable and compelled further reflection, inviting them to personally interpret their city’s transformations. Thus, periodicals did more than entertain; they proposed and propagated critical views of modernization to their wide readership.

One who is of the camouflage is called a camoufleur. —H. Ledyard Towle