Free author event in which Sophie Oliver, academic and critic, talks from her book on the women of modernism told through their clothes.
Sophie Oliver is at Books on the Walls on Tuesday 10 November, from 6:00 to 7:30 pm, to talk about her new book, What the dresses know: A women's history of modernism told through clothes, published by Manchester University Press. The evening is a launch for the book, so it's a good chance to hear her talk through it in person.
Oliver is a critic, curator and academic at the University of Liverpool, where she teaches modernism and feminism. In the book, she looks at the radical experiments and extraordinary lives of the pioneering women at the heart of modernism through the clothes they made and wore. She works from specific pieces: a dress Vanessa Bell rescued from the London Blitz, Frida Kahlo's huipiles, and a waistcoat Alice B. Toklas embroidered for Gertrude Stein. It's a way of getting at those lives through something very concrete.
She's an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker and writes for the Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review and Art Review, and has curated exhibitions at the British Library, the National Poetry Library and the Harry Ransom Center. Hilton Als called the book 'an essential work of scholarship and insight and heart and care', and Claire Wilcox described it as 'extraordinary, profound and inspiring'.
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The night opens with drinks, and a bar and barista service run throughout, so you can settle in before she starts. It's free, with a free ticket on Eventbrite or with Books on the Walls, and runs from 6:00 to 7:30 pm on Tuesday 10 November at 2 City Walls, Chester CH1 2JG.
