lilli waters

Dress and War
2015

“The connection between dress and war is not so far to seek, your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.”
— Virginia Woolf

Dress and War costumes become armour. The fabric that once adorned women in the domestic realm—draped, stitched, ceremonial—becomes charged with a quiet defiance. This series considers the intersections of womanhood, performance, and survival, where adornment is not decoration but a coded language of resilience.

Figures appear cloaked, contorted, or obscured, often gazing elsewhere or captured mid-motion. Some are bound in ritualistic gestures, others seem to vanish into fabric or darkness. Referencing historical painting, folklore, and cinematic tableaux, these images resist easy narratives. They speak instead to a lineage of women who endured, adapted, concealed, and mourned in silence.

This is a reckoning with inherited roles—the domestic, the obedient, the ornamental—and a reframing of how dress functions not as compliance, but as a subversive act. In a world that so often wages war on the female body, these portraits stand as both elegy and uprising.