Sophie Oliver is Lecturer in Modernism at the University of Liverpool. She specialises in women’s writing, fashion, and feminist methodologies. Her research on Jean Rhys informed an exhibition she curated at the British Library, and her public criticism has been broadcast in radio essays about Rhys and Mina Loy. She is writing a women’s history of modernism told through clothes.
Email: Sophie.Oliver@liverpool.ac.uk
Twitter: @sophieolive
“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.