Clothes: An Essay upon the Nature and Significance of the Natural and Artificial Integuments worn by Men and Women

1931

Special Collections GN418 GF46

London: Jonathan Cape

In a review of Gill’s Art-Nonsense (1929), D.H. Lawrence wrote ‘Mr Gill is not a born writer: he is crude and crass.’ While Gill admitted that he was ‘an inept and amateurish preacher’, he continued to pen polemics on subjects he was passionate about. Clothes and nakedness was one such topic as evidenced in his Clothes (1931) and Trousers (1937). For women he felt plainness was the thing, like uniforms. He disliked accessories such as scents, paint, short skirts, bare backs and chests. To Gill, vanity in the male was a virtue. He felt men should by nature be clothed and should aim for dignity and decency. He himself adopted a worker’s smock as his attire, often without underwear (which he disliked).