Poets in Vogue

A gathering of the chic

The sharpest outfits and the sleekest verse worked the room on the evening of Wednesday 13 September at a party to mark the close of the National Poetry Library’s Poets in Vogue exhibition.

The exhibition centred the relationship between women poets and dress - the clothes they wore and the images they self-fashioned. It also examined the conceptual links between fashion and poetry - the parallels between fabric patterns and poetic forms, the materiality of words, the poetry of dress.

To unpick these issues, party guests at the House of St Barnabas donned the poetry rosettes and Stevie Smith collars they’d made under the expert tutelage of the Decorating Dissidence team of craftivists, and listened to new poems from Mona Arshi, Fiona Curran, Jasmine Cooray, Remi Graves and Dzifa Benson.

Members of The Poetry Society’s Young Poets Network Jessica Jamie, Lottie McCrindell, Joanna Liu, Sophia Truong, Yasmin Inkersole, Imogen Wade and Jayou (Thomas) Oh also performed their clothes-inspired poems, and fashion academic Claire Wilcox kept the questions coming. The night ended, as all good nights do, with a set from DJ Harietta, famed for the ‘gorgeous chaos’ she spreads on the dance floor.

Thank you to Sarah Parker of Loughborough University and Sophie Oliver of the University of Liverpool, curators of the original exhibition. You looked good.

Read all the commissioned poems from Poets in Vogue at Watch, Listen, Read.

Find out about the exhibition here.