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.