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An expert and intimate exploration of a life in clothes: their memories and stories, enchantments and spells.A linen sheet, smooth with age. A box of buttons, mother-of-pearl and plastic, metal and glass, rattling and untethered. A hundred-year-old pin, forgotten in a hem. Fragile silks and fugitive dyes, fans and crinolines, and the faint mark on leather from a buckle now lost.Claire Wilcox has worked as a curator in Fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum for most of her working life. Down cool, dark corridors and in quiet store rooms, she and her colleagues care for, catalogue and conserve clothes centuries old, the inscrutable remnants of lives long lost to history; the commonplace or remarkable things that survive the bodies they once encircled or adorned.In Patch Work, Wilcox deftly stitches together her dedicated study of fashion with the story of her own life lived in and through clothes. From her mother's black wedding suit to the swirling patterns of her own silk kimono, her memoir unfolds in luminous prose the spellbinding power of the things we wear: their stories, their secrets, their power to transform and disguise and acts as portals to our pasts; the ways in which they measure out our lives, our gains and losses, and the ways we use them to write our stories.
As a well-worn corset interior reveals the dips and curves of the original owner’s body, so a moment reveals impressions of a life. A curator examines a fragment, an object accessioned, and follows the fracture lines to time, place, use, inhabitant, radiating inquiry into the content of context.Similarly, Wilcox examines her remembrances of life moments that are attached to clothes as if they are objects in a collection, turning them over carefully.Each brief chapter of one to two pages is poetic in the use of these sparse glimpses to suggest a larger story. A moment polishing small red shoes never to be worn again causes the reader to wonder why. Each diorama invites puzzling out how it fits into the larger whole of a life. It’s worth going back to the title of each chapter and section to make more sense of the collection.Reading Wilcox is good for expanding your vocabulary. She uses special words from clothing (chatelaine, fichu, chasuble, rills, wadding, tambouring, crinoline, back-stays, drab (noun), Wales (machair), moths (tineola bisselliella and other kinds), and birds (phalarope, corncrake, moorhen, tufted ducks).Patchwork: A Life Amongst Clothes was written by the Senior Curator of Fashion at the V & A since 2004, Claire Wilcox, and published in 2020.
