Margaret Atwood: Fashion and Fiction

Novelist and poet Margaret Atwood will discuss her lifelong engagement with the world of clothes in this forthcoming talk at the V & A. Atwood has often shown a keen sensitivity to the impact of fashion on all facets of social existence. In her short story Hair Jewellery, the narrator even claims to ‘resurrect’ herself through clothes: ‘it’s impossible for me to remember what I did, what happened to me, unless I can remember what I was wearing…every time I discard a sweater or a dress I am discarding a part of my life’. And in the dystopian

Handmaid’s Tale, a totalitarian government uses uniform as a means of maintaining a highly stratified social hierarchy: each different group is forced to wear a colour-coded outift. This talk therefore promises to give a fascinating insight into an important aspect of Atwood’s oeuvre.
Margaret Atwood biography:

Born in 1939, in Ottowa, Canada, Margaret Atwood decided to be a writer at the age of sixteen. Her first novel, The Edible Woman, was published in 1969. Since then she has maintained a prodigious output, publishing more than forty works of fiction (including The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize), non-fiction, children’s stories and poetry as well as trying her hand at writing television scripts and librettos. Aside from her literary pursuits, Atwood is a dedicated environmental campaigner and, appropriately for an author who is often placed in the science fiction camp, technology enthusiast: in the last ten years she has delved into the world of machines and pioneered ‘remote robotic writing technology’. She lives in Toronto with the novelist Graeme C. Gibson.

On 13 Mar 2015, 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM
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