Looking at Woolf's writing through its clothes brings out some striking intertextual dialogues, one of which takes place among three texts written within a decade of each other: the play Freshwater, begun in 1923 and performed in a revised version in 1935; Orlando, Woolf's 1928 mock-biography of the fashionable writer and sapphist Vita Sackville-West, and A Room of One's Own, her genealogy of women's writing, also written in 1928 (published 1929). The target of Freshwater's satire is a late Victorian sartorial practice based in ideals of authenticity and truth of expression; aligned with a Carlylean sartorial semantics in which clothes are emblems proclaiming the allegorical nature of life. Orlando participates in a related idealist send-up, most outrageously by substituting a playful and performative vestimentary practice for the nineteenth-century discourse of authenticity. Both texts introduce the modern moment as a fashionably androgyne woman, developed into a figure of modern writing through the reflections on the literary mind contained in Orlando and A Room of One's Own.

Though much of Bloomsbury's sartorial practice was directed against the authority and constrictions of their parents' generation, it both continued and departed from the practices of the previous century, as the introductory chapter suggested. Sandra Gilbert was among the first to observe that the clothes-consciousness which defines modernist writing continues and intensifies a heightened awareness of the theatricality of clothing and the potential of vestimentary self-fashioning that came to effect in the nineteenth century, partly in consequence of the increasing availability of photography (Gilbert 1980: 393–4).