I wouldn’t dream of following fashion . . . how could one be a different person every three months?
—Edith Sitwell, from The Last Years of a Rebel, by Elizabeth Salter, 1967
The aristocratic writer Edith Sitwell, who recited her avant-garde poems through a Sengerphone and set them to music, was an awkward bird of paradise whose visually arresting image is as much remembered as her literary work. Stylewise she was akin to the Italian surrealist, artist, and designer Elsa Schiaparelli. Like the Italian fashionista, drama was key to Sitwell’s over-the-top look, as was her arts-and-craftsy bohemianism. She had a compelling sartorial magnetism. Sitwell’s signature turban was a handsome, exotic, and utopian disguise for an unconventionally beautiful woman.
The theatricality of Edith’s dress sense mirrored her literary approach. In 1922 she performed Facade—a series of spoken poems—for the first time. From behind a thick curtain at her home in London, Sitwell intoned conceptual verses set to music. She claimed that Stravinsky inspired the rhythms of her work, and many today see her as the originator of modern rap. The ethereal and poignant cadence of Sitwell’s language is as desolate and liberated as her persona.
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Edith Sitwell, 1937.
Sitwell was born at the end of the nineteenth century in Scarborough, a far-flung northern seaside town in England near the Peak District. She grew up on a country estate called Renishaw Hall, where she was clad in an iron corset commissioned by her father to correct a spinal deformity. Educated at home, she fell in love with the French writings of Arthur Rimbaud. In her 1965 autobiography Taken Care Of, she calls herself a “changeling on the parental estate” and declared that her parents never wanted her.
However, the worlds of fashion and literature grew to love Sitwell. In 1914, when she escaped home and moved to a tiny flat in Bayswater, London, Chanel was opening her first dress shop and ushering in the streamlined and effortless flapper-girl look that would dominate the 1920s. Sitwell, however, spun 180 degrees away from this, having already begun to move outside of the mainstream; she cultivated her own highly ornate style instead. At eighteen, she had been given four pounds and bought herself a black velvet dress. She loved velvets and the fabric became an essential component of her wardrobe for life. She would even buy furnishing fabrics for their heavy weight and have them tailored into frocks.
Sitwell died in 1964, the same year that Mary Quant presented the miniskirt in London and designers Elie Saab and Anna Sui were born.
Sitwell did not enjoy reading William S. Burroughs and in 1959 when Naked Lunch was published she wrote a number of letters about it to the Times Literary Supplement saying: “I do not wish to spend the rest of my life with my nose nailed to other people’s lavatories, I prefer Chanel No. 5.”
Contemporary American designer Rick Owens wrote in Vogue Paris in 2014 that Edith “turned herself into a myth. I like when people haven’t the advantage of beauty and invent something singular from scratch.” And her appeal continues to resonate at the highest echelons of the fashion industry. Marc Jacobs’s Dark Swans autumn 2015 collection was inspired by Edith’s hairstyle; Isabella Blow, Alexander McQueen’s muse and a onetime Vogue editor, usually arrived at the Vogue offices “dressed as . . . an Edith Sitwell figure,” reflected Anna Wintour in an article in The Independent in 2007.
The trouble with most Englishwomen is that they will dress as if they had been a mouse in a previous incarnation, they do not want to attract attention.
—Edith Sitwell, as quoted in Edith Sitwell: Fire of the Mind: an Anthology, 1976
Getty Images: Beaton, Cecil
Edith Sitwell, late 1920s.
Sitwell’s unapologetic guise was fuel for a driving and necessary sense of being an outsider. “Why not be oneself? That is the secret of a successful appearance. If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?” she asked in Fire of the Mind, an anthology of her work. And although during her lifetime both her work and her dress sense were ridiculed and revered in equal measure, it is with the benefit of hindsight that her aesthetic has become a perpetual touchstone for the creative community. Jean Paul Gaultier, Dries Van Noten, and John Galliano’s love of the exotic and otherworldly have informed and shaped their signature styles in the same way that it shaped Sitwell’s wardrobe.
When Sitwell was four years old she was asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, and she said: “A genius.” She was sent to bed as punishment.
She wore brocaded silk gowns and headdresses; she wore the heaviest of aquamarine and topaz rings on her long, elegant fingers and looked like a medieval princess. “I feel undressed without my rings,” she declared in 1959 on the BBC program Face to Face, and later asserted: “I can’t wear fashionable clothes. If I walked round in coats and skirts people would doubt the existence of the Almighty.” Sitwell’s clothes were always out of tune with the convention of her times, and until her death in 1964 she never looked to routine. Her costumes were designed for a long time by the gay Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, with whom she was in love. They were his vision of Sitwell as a Poiret-esque Plantagenet noblewoman that she adopted for all her life.
