In 1923, Virginia Woolf collaborated with her young nephew, Quentin Bell, on their charming illustrated family newspaper, which also precipitated Woolf’s little-known children’s book. But little Quentin, the son of Woolf’stalented sister, the Bloomsbury artist Vanessa Bell, grew up to be a man of letters and a formidable mind in his own right — an author, historian, and his aunt’s official biographer.

 

In 1947, when he was thirty-seven, Bell published On Human Finery (public library) — a brilliant meditation on the psychology, sociology, and history of fashion, exploring how the art of dress both bespeaks our greatest human aspiration and betrays our deepest contradictions.

 

In the opening chapter, titled “Sartorial Morality,” Bell writes:

The study of fashion does not quite lie within [the economists'] province. It is a borderline science, important to the historian in that it exhibits in a pure form the changing impulse of social behavior; to the artist in that here, if anywhere, we can trace a direct relationship between economics and aesthetics.

 

The charm of the study lies precisely in the ephemeral nature of the subject; in sociological studies fashion plays the role which has been allotted to Drosophila, the fruit fly, in the science of genetics. Here at a glance we can perceive phenomena so mobile in their response to varying effects, so rapid in their mutation that the deceptive force of inertia which overlays and obscures most other manifestations of human activity is reduced to a minimum.

 

The evidence is moreover abundant, not only without but within, for we have all experienced in our own persons the pains and pleasures of attire. … In obeying fashion we undergo discomforts and distress which are, from a strictly economic point of view, needless and futile. We do so for the sake of something which transcends our own immediate interests.