Rebecca Mead wrote a rather interesting piece for The New Yorker about the Bloomsbury people and their clothes and what it all meant, but sadly it does end up at the too familiar trendy place.

At the exhibition, Morrell’s garments have been lined up like runway models at the end of a contemporary designer’s show. “Morrell spoke in her journal of how her preferred look was long and plain—she thinks her look is very simple,” Porter said. “But it seems to me that she is responding to her own features and exaggerating things because of the way she looked herself, rather than trying to hide anything.” Given Morrell’s height, hair, and hauteur, she was well aware that she looked striking and odd. Indeed, her appearance qualified as what she and her contemporaries would have called “queer”—that is, peculiar. In “Women in Love,” Hermione Roddice is described as “waving her head up and down, and waving her hand slowly in dismissal, smiling a strange affected smile, making a tall queer, frightening figure.”

Oh dear. Once the q-word enters the conversation the rest must follow.

Alongside the “Bring No Clothes” exhibition, Porter has published a book that shares the title. In both, he aims to demonstrate how people in the Bloomsbury circle used clothing, fashion, and the rejection of fashion to liberate themselves in a way that presages the modern usage of “queer” as an umbrella term for “not straight.” “I describe myself as ‘queer’ rather than ‘gay,’ even though I am a gay male,” Porter writes. “The word is specific enough to have meaning, broad enough to give all queer humans the space to be themselves.”

And, bonus, it infuriates a lot of “not straight” people because of its long history as a pejorative and sometimes a prelude to violence.

Porter is not alone in the world of the arts and fashion in finding that the Bloomsbury group speaks to contemporary notions of queerness: the actor Emma Corrin, who is nonbinary, recently starred in a West End adaptation of “Orlando,” which the lesbian writer Jeanette Winterson has categorized as “the first English language trans novel.” The British designer and artist Luke Edward Hall—whose interior schemes for homes, restaurants, and retail venues, with their clashing patterns and vibrant colors, are informed by the aesthetic of Charleston—has recently launched a line of home goods and gender-neutral clothing, called Chateau Orlando, that includes baggy floral shorts and the kind of boxy sweater-vests that are perfect for a weekend in an inadequately heated country pile. Porter writes that, if Woolf were alive today, “we might imagine her identifying as non-binary or trans.” 

I think not. She was a great deal too fastidious to find the gender police attractive or persuasive.

Elsewhere, Porter writes with subtlety about Carrington’s efforts to find language for an identity that today might be categorized as nonbinary. In a 1925 letter rejecting a former lover, Gerald Brenan, Carrington tells him, “You know I have always hated being a woman. . . . I am continually depressed by my effeminacy.” Writing elsewhere of an affair with the American journalist Henrietta Bingham, Carrington confesses to having “a day-dream” of “not being female.” 

But nothing is gained by calling it “nonbinary.” Literature is full of girls and women hating being a woman, at least in the sense of hating the automatic assumption of inferiority and not-mattering that comes along with it.

Porter also advances a theory that Morrell and Virginia Woolf may have fleetingly been lovers. He cites, among other suggestive evidence, a remark in a letter to Vanessa Bell from Roger Fry, an art critic in the Bloomsbury group, that Morrell and Woolf “have fallen into each other’s arms.” At the very least, Porter argues, it makes sense to consider Woolf and Morrell as “queer comrades.”

It makes even more sense to say they were both non-conformists in various ways and leave it at that. This business of trying to stuff them into a contemporary category just betrays the silly assumption that we’re vastly cleverer than they were because we came up with these contemporary categories.