"This past winter I survived the misery-months by reading all five volumes of Virginia Woolf's diaries. Many things happen in those diaries but the event that's seared into my mind involves a new hat. It's 1926 and the diary entry begins this way: "This is the last day of June finds me in black despair because Clive laughed at my new hat, Vita pitied me, & I sank to the depths of gloom." Oh, Virginia, girl-I feel you! The shame of wearing the too-big thing"
"Interestingly, she doesn't tell us exactly what kind of a hat. We only learn that she was feeling neither one way or another about it, until she bumped into her sister, Vanessa-wearing a "quiet black hat"-and together everybody headed to the house of an old friend, the art critic Clive Bell. It was there that disaster struck: "Clive suddenly said, or bawled rather, what an astonishing hat you're wearing! Then"
Virginia Woolf in 1926 experienced deep humiliation when friends mocked a new hat: Clive Bell laughed and demanded its origin, others pulled her down between them, and she felt like a hare. She pretended a mystery, tried to change the subject, talked and laughed too much, and left deeply chagrined and unhappy for years. The incident followed an evening out with Vita Sackville-West and a chance meeting with her sister Vanessa, who wore a quiet black hat. Many people recognize a post-fashion-disaster shame spiral. Writers often feel acute anxiety about 'looking the part' because that role is narrow; actors, comedians, and singers have more permitted absurdity.
Read at Vogue
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]