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Product Info
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Author: Claire Wilcox
ISBN: 9781526614414
Non fiction, Memoir
Patch Work
by
Claire Wilcox
Patch Work by
Claire Wilcox
Reviews
"This memoir unfolds as a series of vignettes, each one as precisely constructed as an exhibit in the Victoria and Albert Museum . . . Wilcox evokes the sensual and spiritual meaning in the fabrics we weave, wear, and leave behind."
New Yorker
Summary
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.