Sarah Parker is Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. She is the author of The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889–1930 (2013), Michael Field: Decadent Moderns (with Ana Parejo Vadillo, 2019) and Interrogating Lesbian Modernism: Histories, Forms, Genres (with Elizabeth English and Jana Funke, forthcoming 2023).
Email: S.L.Parker@lboro.ac.uk
Twitter: @DrSarahParker
“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.