The scholar or common reader does not have to look very far to find Virginia Woolf making conflicting statements on clothes and fashion. Her diary records how, in May 1926, she finds a visit to her dressmaker the “most enjoyable of proceedings” and confesses to “a lust for lovely stuffs” (D3 86), but just a few weeks later she “sinks to the depths of gloom” and declares herself “unhappy as I have been these ten years” due to criticism of her hat (D3 91). Observing Woolf's volatile relationship with dress, Ethel Smyth noted “what is amusing is her loving to cut a dash…to put on a smart gown…and then despising herselffor it” (Stape 41).

In another diary entry clothes become the dominant worry in a chaotic and comprehensive list of her current anxieties: “the inane pointlessness of all this existence…; contempt for my lack of intellectual power; society; buying clothes;…terror in the night of things generally wrong in the universe; buying clothes; how I hate Bond Street and spending money on clothes” (D4 102-103). Only a week later, after attending a dinner party she was able to claim “last night I conquered my prof ound trepidation about my clothes… on the doorstep…I fluctuated and shivered, like a blown candle flame, but when I came in and found only…grubby…Rex Whistler, why have I dressed at all I asked” (D4 104).

Her appearance provoked conflicting opinions from those who knew her. Rebecca West recalled how Virginia and her sister Vanessa “looked as if they had been drawn through a hedge backwards before they went out” (Noble 90), whereas Elizabeth Bowen recalled how Virginia wore her clothes “with very great flowing charm” (Noble 47-8). Leonard Woolf considered his wife's sartorial habits to be unique: “she had a flair for beautiful, ifindividual dresses” he recalls in his autobiography, before acknowledging that to the crowd in the street there was something in her appearance which would provoke laughter and ridicule. In pondering the cause he thinks it had much to do with her demeanour and movement, but it was also “partly that her dress was never quite the same as other people's” (BA 28-9).

Woolf's deployment of clothing in her fiction has attracted increasing attention in recent years.