Nova Scotia House author Charlie Porter sitting and talking in the book-filled Penguin Podcast studio

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Interviews

The Penguin Podcast: series 2 episode 5 – Queer literature

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Reading lists

Debut novels of 2025: discover the year’s breakthrough new voices

Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion

Bring No Clothes

'He makes us see a subject we thought we knew so well from a completely different angle; in writing that is deeply researched, but inviting, warm, and full of personality' Katy Hessel 
 
'Charlie Porter is a magician' Olivia Laing 
 
Why do we wear what we wear? To answer this question, we must go back and unlock the wardrobes of the early twentieth century, when fashion as we know it was born. 
 
In Bring No Clothes, acclaimed fashion writer Charlie Porter brings us face to face with six members of the Bloomsbury Group-the collective of creatives and thinkers who were in the vanguard of a social and sartorial revolution. Each of them offers fresh insight into the constraints and possibilities of fashion today: from the stifling repression of E. M. Forster's top buttons to the creativity of Vanessa Bell's wayward hems; from the sheer pleasure of Ottoline Morrell's lavish dresses to the clashing self-consciousness of Virginia Woolf's orange stockings; from Duncan Grant's liberated play with nudity to John Maynard Keynes's power play in the traditional suit. As Porter carefully unpicks what they wore and how they wore it, we see how clothing can be a means of artistic, intellectual and sexual liberation, or, conversely, a tool for patriarchal control. 
 
As he travels through libraries, archives, attics and studios, Porter uncovers new evidence about his subjects, revealing them in a thrillingly intimate, vivid new light. And, as he begins making his own clothing, his own perspective on fashion-and on life-starts to change. In the end, he shows, we should all 'bring no clothes', embracing not just a new way with fashion but a new philosophy of living-one which activates the connections between the way we dress and the way we think, act and love. 
 
Now with a new Afterword by the author

A triumph. I could read Charlie Porter's books all day long. He makes us see a subject we thought we knew so well from a completely different angle; in writing that is deeply researched, but inviting, warm, and full of personality

Excellent &hellip; Porter&rsquo;s generous, empathetic eye feels like a corrective for the more salacious historical depictions of the Bloomsbury Group&rsquo;s affairs &hellip; Bring No Clothes doesn&rsquo;t just introduce a new frame of thinking, it adds a fresh layer of humanity to the collective

Charlie Porter is a magician, a radical historian who has pulled away all the threadbare myths about Bloomsbury, using clothes as a way of revealing the vulnerable bodies and wild new ideas of Woolf and her circle. In his hands, what people wear becomes an astoundingly rich way of thinking about love and grief, art-making and intimacy - and above all about old power structures and how to upend them. Bring No Clothes is at once an enriching account of the past and a primer for the future: a guide to how we too can clothe our bodies for freedom

A call to arms from the first page - it's thrilling and radical

Charlie Porter applies a literary critic&rsquo;s close reading to the clothes of the early twentieth century, unpicking philosophical texts from their textures. Bring No Clothes offers a way of recalibrating the world by understanding the tensions that underpin and overdetermine it through the ways we dress. With curiosity and contemporaneity, he finds in the Bloomsbury Group&rsquo;s experiments in intimacy a queer possibility for the way we live today

Sam Buchan-Watts, author of Path Through Wood

Spot-on ... the way the [Bloomsbury] circle thought about clothes was part of a wider revolt ... Thanks to his access to the contents of several Bloomsbury wardrobes, together with a trove of previously unseen photographs, Porter is able to provide a detailed illustration of how &quot;Make it new&quot; played out on the material level

One of the best books about Bloomsbury!

Maggie Humm, author and Vice Chair of the Virginia Woolf Society

Unlocks the Bloomsbury Group&rsquo;s wardrobes to expose the intricate interplay between attire, liberation and control

A deep dive into the wardrobes of the Bloomsbury Group. Behind colour choices and hemlines are fascinating insights into their bodies and minds

Porter clearly enjoys [the Bloomsbury Group&rsquo;s] company &ndash; exploring how Virginia Woolf&rsquo;s loose, long-line garments, John Maynard Keynes&rsquo;s &lsquo;soft tailoring,&rsquo; Vanessa Bell&rsquo;s wildly colourful home-made dresses, photographs of a naked Duncan Grant, and the loosening of EM Forster&rsquo;s buttoned-up suits all demonstrate the radicalism of a group of people determined to live differently

Fresh, empathetic &hellip; personal as much as intellectual &hellip; Bring No Clothes might be read as the manifesto of a queer human

- - Praise for What Artists Wear

Brilliant, loving, visually incisive

An insightful account ... whether offering visual analysis or social observation, Porter writes with clarity and wit

A fascinating exploration of the clothing worn by the rebels, rule breakers and outliers of the artistic world, and what it means to live in it ... The book defies convention ... Porter's curiosity is infectious

Eclectic, invigorating ... the chapters devoted to female artists make for the most fascinating reading, their clothes liberating them by giving them permission to be different

Unique, intelligent and enlightening, super interesting and so well researched. It is rare indeed to come across a book that not only captures the imagination, but informs and amuses at the same time. Each turn of the page is a surprising delight. Perhaps what is most striking about this book is its authenticity ... Charlie Porter's seriousness and genuineness, coupled with his off-kilter sense of humour, not forgetting his huge talent, seep through the entire production. Not a fake nor pompous note anywhere. This is simply the real article, just like Charlie

Adrian Joffe, President of Comme des Garçons

A roving, intimate analysis of the clothes that inform art

Wonderful ... I read it in one delicious gulp. An important page-turner

Jennifer Higgie, author of The Mirror and the Palette

Delicious ... What Artists Wear can be enjoyed by everyone, regardless of your art or fashion knowledge ... Porter shares each anecdote with the confidence and clarity of a story teller, weaving memories into the book

Timely ... intimate ... A leisurely, contemplative journey through the art world of the 20th Century, as shown through the medium of the artists' own clothes

Brilliant and unexpected... What Artists Wear approaches fashion in a wholly different way

Personal and brimming with anecdotes ...Porter explores the intrinsic connections between artists and their choice of clothing with agility, nuance and insatiable curiosity... His diverse curatorial eye holds both geographic and historical breadth

A clarion call to examine not only the clothes of artists but also our own

Manual and manifesto - a fabulous and interesting read

Unexpected, lushly illustrated ... As a connoisseur of the lived-in, Porter delights at Lee Krasner's paint-spattered slippers and the tactile richness of Alberto Giacometti's rumpled suit

As he cycles through the lives of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sarah Lucas, Martine Syms, and Joseph Beuys, Porter's deep dive is a tender report on the legacies we leave behind and the clothes that accompany us along the way

Inquisitive and insightful, Porter's skillful dissection of the historical context, social commentary, and personal symbolism behind each artist is a pleasure to get lost in

Unique, wide-ranging... Style guru Charlie Porter takes us on a voyage of discovery

Porter captures the various 'archetypes' associated with artists. He emphasises the shift from the 'codification of patriarchy to the breaking of the canon

Clothes can be a prison. But Porter makes a powerful argument that they offer freedom too, to work against the structures "that control what we all wear

Charlie Porter is a writer, fashion critic and curator. He has written for the Financial Times, the Guardian, The New York Times, GQ, Luncheon, i-D and Fantastic Man, and has been described as one of the most influential fashion journalists of his time. Porter co-runs the London queer rave Chapter 10, and is a trustee of the Friends of Arnold Circus, where he is also a volunteer gardener. He lives in London.

Why do we wear what we wear? To answer this question, we must go back and unlock the wardrobes of the early twentieth century, when fashion as we know it was born. 
 
In Bring No Clothes, acclaimed fashion writer Charlie Porter brings us face to face with six members of the Bloomsbury Group-the collective of creatives and thinkers who were in the vanguard of a social and sartorial revolution. Each of them offers fresh insight into the constraints and possibilities of fashion today: from the stifling repression of E. M. Forster's top buttons to the creativity of Vanessa Bell's wayward hems; from the sheer pleasure of Ottoline Morrell's lavish dresses to the clashing self-consciousness of Virginia Woolf's orange stockings; from Duncan Grant's liberated play with nudity to John Maynard Keynes's power play in the traditional suit. As Porter carefully unpicks what they wore and how they wore it, we see how clothing can be a means of artistic, intellectual and sexual liberation, or, conversely, a tool for patriarchal control. 
 
As he travels through libraries, archives, attics and studios, Porter uncovers new evidence about his subjects, revealing them in a thrillingly intimate, vivid new light. And, as he begins making his own clothing, his own perspective on fashion-and on life-starts to change. In the end, he shows, we should all 'bring no clothes', embracing not just a new way with fashion but a new philosophy of living-one which activates the connections between the way we dress and the way we think, act and love.

What Artists Wear

*A Financial Times Book of the Year* 
 
'The first time I opened What Artists Wear, I gasped with pleasure. Imagine it as a kind of punk cousin to John Berger's Ways of Seeing, liberally illustrated with the most astonishing images of artists, decked out in finery or rags ... It transported me to somewhere glamorous, exciting, even revolutionary' Olivia Laing, Guardian 
 
 
Most of us live our lives in our clothes without realizing their power. But in the hands of artists, garments reveal themselves. They are pure tools of expression, storytelling, resistance and creativity: canvases on which to show who we really are. 
 
In What Artists Wear, style luminary Charlie Porter takes us on an invigorating, eye-opening journey through the iconic outfits worn by artists, in the studio, on stage, at work, at home and at play. From Yves Klein's spotless tailoring to the kaleidoscopic costumes of Yayoi Kusama and Cindy Sherman; from Andy Warhol's signature denim to Charlotte Prodger's casualwear, Porter's roving eye picks out the magical, revealing details in the clothes he encounters, weaving together a new way of understanding artists, and of dressing ourselves. 
 
Part love letter, part guide to chic, and featuring generous photographic spreads, What Artists Wear is both a manual and a manifesto, a radical, gleeful, inspiration to see the world anew-and find greater pleasure and possibility in the clothes we all wear.

A liberation and a joy, beautifully written and brilliantly thought. What Artists Wear is at once a revelatory account of how art is made and an electrifying investigation into the relationship between clothes and autonomy, freedom and power

A fascinating exploration of the clothing worn by the rebels, rule breakers and outliers of the artistic world, and what it means to live in it ... The book defies convention ... Porter's curiosity is infectious

Unique, intelligent and enlightening, super interesting and so well researched. It is rare indeed to come across a book that not only captures the imagination, but informs and amuses at the same time. Each turn of the page is a surprising delight. Perhaps what is most striking about this book is its authenticity ... Charlie Porter's seriousness and genuineness, coupled with his off-kilter sense of humour, not forgetting his huge talent, seep through the entire production. Not a fake nor pompous note anywhere. This is simply the real article, just like Charlie.

Wonderful ... I read it in one delicious gulp. An important page-turner.

Delicious ... What Artists Wear can be enjoyed by everyone, regardless of your art or fashion knowledge ... Porter shares each anecdote with the confidence and clarity of a story teller, weaving memories into the book

Timely ... intimate ... A leisurely, contemplative journey through the art world of the 20th Century, as shown through the medium of the artists' own clothes.

Brilliant and unexpected... What Artists Wear approaches fashion in a wholly different way

As he cycles through the lives of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sarah Lucas, Martine Syms, and Joseph Beuys, Porter's deep dive is a tender report on the legacies we leave behind and the clothes that accompany us along the way.

Porter captures the various 'archetypes' associated with artists. He emphasises the shift from the 'codification of patriarchy to the breaking of the canon

Clothes can be a prison. But Porter makes a powerful argument that they offer freedom too, to work against the structures "that control what we all wear"

Charlie Porter is a writer, fashion critic, art curator and lecturer in Fashion at the University of Westminster. He has contributed to titles such as Financial Times, Guardian, New York Times, GQ, Luncheon, i-D and Fantastic Man, and has been described as one of the most influential fashion journalists of his time. He was a juror for the Turner Prize in 2019, and lives in London.

Most of us live our lives in our clothes without realizing their power. But in the hands of artists, garments reveal themselves. They are pure tools of expression, storytelling, resistance and creativity: canvases on which to show who we really are. 
 
In What Artists Wear, style luminary Charlie Porter takes us on an invigorating, eye-opening journey through the iconic outfits worn by artists, in the studio, on stage, at work, at home and at play. From Yves Klein's spotless tailoring to the kaleidoscopic costumes of Yayoi Kusama and Cindy Sherman; from Andy Warhol's signature denim to Charlotte Prodger's casualwear, Porter's roving eye picks out the magical, revealing details in the clothes he encounters, weaving together a new way of understanding artists, and of dressing ourselves. 
 
Part love letter, part guide to chic, and featuring generous photographic spreads, What Artists Wear is both a manual and a manifesto, a radical, gleeful, inspiration to see the world anew-and find greater pleasure and possibility in the clothes we all wear.

Charlie Porter

Nova Scotia House is one of the best things I've read in many many years; it is an extraordinary work of the imagination, and there is so much heart and longing in it that it filled my soul. It is a completely imagined work--a kind of gay dystopian story that isn't, a search for family that ends up being a multiple love story about creation. And I want to point out something as powerful as the narrative: the sheer writing force of it. Sentences that reordered my reading DNA from the first, colloquial sentences that are highly literary, a kind of queering of Beckett, a new way of seeing and writing that is not anyone else's but Porter’s own. I am really knocked out by this book. It is a profound work

Beautifully provocative, Nova Scotia House is the most compelling exploration of life, death, love and resistance that I've read for a very long time

This is going to blow reader’s minds. Intense, physical, true

I was wounded by Nova Scotia House. It’s undeniably fresh, but also a pressing reminder of the importance of community, hopeful yet richly painful

This book occupies the spaces, the lives in between, the connections we make, the memories still happening in our heads, our bodies' responsibility to the state we put them in, growing, lusting, dying, reviving, sold on, the ruins of our lives, the communities of our past, another kind of economy, of sex and loss and weeds and words, this work of genius, Nova Scotia House

Nova Scotia House is surely the tenderest of AIDS books. It makes the always radical argument that play is more important than work. At heart, it’s a queer manifesto, proclaiming the value of queer experience and soul

It’s a book made out of conversation, internal and external, it’s a variety of oral literature, I think, dropping punctuation as if you are slowly rushing to a train, incantatory, and Charlie Porter delivers a collected sensation that you are in it. We remember where we stood and forgetting is also enough. What a softly inspiring book about lived history and time and like I said, or he said, always love

I truly think Charlie Porter is doing something new: forging a radically direct language for describing a whole new way of inhabiting the world. NOVA SCOTIA HOUSE is about loss and grief, sex and love, but it’s also a super-powerful account of change and growth, about metabolising trauma and refusing to relinquish dreams

Nova Scotia House is just extraordinary. To read it is life-changing

I didn’t want to let this book go. The way it reveals its narrator, and its secrets – the pockets of emotion and memory that we half-hide from ourselves – is astonishing. The rhythm of the sentences is a spell. The pain is palpable, but worn with a kind of light melancholy, alternately bemused and amazed by the way things have turned out. Johnny and Jerry, their relationship, the long trail of damage inflicted by AIDS, the fight against numbness, and the way this book folds time again and again are with me

As the darkest days of the UK AIDS epidemic recede into history, how can we keep on learning from what happened to all of us, back then ? Charlie Porter’s first novel is a fierce and tender answer. In fresh and vivid prose, he takes us right to the heart of a world filled with love, loss - and courage

Profoundly, bracingly human … Porter has conjured such intensity here, and such tangibly real characters, that it feels like the gospel truth

Sparse, soaring, instantly elegiac … Unlike anything I’ve ever read

Moving and refreshing...Flashbacks provide glimpses of [a] relationship; past and present are woven through with desire, grief and love. Porter's optimism and the way his narrative opens up to the future are welcome ... And amid the current glut of novels about partying, Porter, who co-ran the queer rave Chapter 10, has written the most stylish club scene this reader has encountered in a long while

Exhilarating, risk-taking, life-affirming … Porter offers the reader a utopian glimpse of pre-Aids queer culture being born again, and of anger and grief turning into possibility

Some books are unforgettable. This is one of them

Jon Paul Roberts, Buying the Flowers Myself (Substack)

A tender tale of gay love and loss … it’s got hookups of every persuasion

Nova Scotia House finds its rhythm in an era of the AIDS crisis that has been less focused upon, delicately weaving together queer lives lived before, during, and long after it ... [it] asks both its reader and its author: How can we connect again with radical queerness and countercultural ideas of living? How can we live life as fully, optimistically, and queerly as possible?

A beautiful book, angry and elegiac, hopeful and romantic, and very moving … This is muscular writing, and a reminder that when it’s done well a literary novel can take you to places you’ve never been and wouldn’t otherwise be able to go. Queer magic, as Jerry would say

Evocative and exhilarating … Nova Scotia House is a story of life-affirming—and altering—love … Whoever you are, this is a book that will sear through—and uplift—you

Porter’s novel is a pleasing celebration of how gardening, queer lives and the Aids crisis intertwined … a slim but potent love story

Intriguing … [Nova Scotia House is] about seeing and being seen. It’s about British society. It’s about life lived between the potential of youth and the eradication of that potential at life’s end. It’s about what remains after that

Charlie Porter's Nova Scotia House is an actual masterpiece of longing, cruising, going out dancing, the then & now of AIDS, the pentimento of living in rooms marked by lust & loss, queer solidarity under capitalism, utopian dreaming, the apps, the future. I don't think I will ever get over this book

Nova Scotia House recalls an era when gay liberation was an open, expansive, radical field of possibilities. It's a bitter-sweet love letter to a lost era, seen through the eyes of a younger man, recalling his love for an older mentor and friend. As if that wasn't enough, it's also a book about cities, and the kind of life they used to afford, back when we could afford it

Nova Scotia House has all the markings of a modern queer classic. It conjures the past with powerful immediacy, and asks how we may channel our histories to survive the present. With hypnotic prose, the book illuminates the possibility for hope beyond grief, for life beyond death, and for a future filled with radical queer utopias

What a wondrous gift Charlie Porter has given us. Nova Scotia House is a gorgeous, aching, profound novel about AIDS, art, grief, time, memory, sex, desire, and love. The spell of Charlie Porter’s language, the mesmerizing flow and rhythms of his sentences, transported me into an intimate dream space that I didn’t want to leave

Nova Scotia House is one of the most entrancing books I’ve read in recent memory: a moving testament to unconventional lives that itself refuses to be conventional, a melancholy love story suffused with sensuality and grace, and a chronicle of grief and stubborn survival grounded in a rigorous aesthetic and moral vision. Porter writes the kind of ‘experimental’ prose that, when you’re in the grip of its raw beauty, makes you wonder how anyone could write differently

Spellbinding and deeply moving … Charlie Porter beautifully conjures gay love in all its complexity and brilliantly captures the significance of mentorship and our collective responsibility to protect queer spaces

Stunning … A raw, heart-on-its-sleeve book that wrests a tender love story out of an agonizing scream from the void … Nova Scotia House is an urgent work of remembrance

A Novel

A FOYLES AND GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 
 
He said he would understand if it was too much for me, that I could leave him, that I was young, I should be living, I said to him, I am living. 
 
Johnny Grant faces stark life decisions. Seeking answers, he looks back to his relationship with Jerry Field. When they met, nearly thirty years ago, Johnny was 19, Jerry was 45. They fell in love and made a life on their own terms in Jerry’s flat: 1, Nova Scotia House. Johnny is still there today – but Jerry is gone, and so is the world they knew. 
 
As Johnny’s mind travels between then and now, he begins to remember stories of Jerry’s youth: of experiments in living; of radical philosophies; of the many possibilities of love, sex and friendship before the AIDS crisis devastated the queer community. Slowly, he realizes what he must do next—and attempts to restore ways of being that could be lost forever. 
 
Nova Scotia House takes us to the heart of a relationship, a community and an era. It is both a love story and a lament; bearing witness to the enduring pain of the AIDS pandemic and honouring the joys and creativity of queer life. Intimate, visionary, and profoundly original, it marks the debut of a vibrant new voice in contemporary fiction, and a writer with a liberating new story to tell.

Charlie Porter

Books by Charlie Porter

Articles featuring Charlie Porter

The Penguin Podcast: series 2 episode 5 – Queer literature

Debut novels of 2025: discover the year’s breakthrough new voices

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