Author(s): Claire Wilcox

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'I am overwhelmed by this book. It is an absolute masterpiece. A book of such beauty and profundity, of such poetry in its emotion and observation ... I found my sense of life transformed by her writing as I often find it transformed after the exhibition of a great artist' LAURA CUMMING Claire Wilcox has been a curator of fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum for most of her working life. In Patch Work, she steps into the archive of memory, deftly stitching 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 spare, luminous prose the spellbinding power of the things we wear. In a series of intimate and compelling close-ups, Wilcox tugs on the threads that make up the fabric of our lives- a cardigan worn by a child, a mother's button box, the draping of a curtain, a pair of cycling shorts, a roll of lace, a pin hidden in a seam. Through the eye of a curator, we see how the stories and the secrets of clothes measure out the passage of time, our gains and losses, and the way we use them to unravel and write our histories.

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STELLA'S REVIEW:
As a maker of objects and a lover of fabric I was drawn to this memoir from Claire Wilcox, Senior Curator of Fashion at the V&A and Professor in Fashion Curation at the London College of Fashion. Yet this surpassed my expectations. It isn’t a blow by blow account of her career in fashion curation, although there are plenty of mentions of life and work at the V&A; nor is it a window to the history of fashion and textiles, although again there are pepperings of this throughout. It is a wonderful collection of vignettes about a life lived, and Wilcox uses objects as portals into history, both personal and social, and as vessels for memories. With humour and quiet reflection she pinpoints pivotal moments from childhood through to adulthood. The first time she walked into the V&A library in the passage entitled 'Yellow Pages', she was researching the colour yellow. “The invigilator sat at his desk, watching us. Our eyes met, and I blushed, feeling like an imposter and wondering if I was handling the books correctly; I’d never seen a book support before. I was wearing a Laura Ashley blouse, inset with cotton lace — it was early summer — and the deadline for my dissertation was looming ... I felt like a parched traveller who had found an oasis, found their sensibility.” This easy style takes the reader on journeys through objects — each passage either is triggered by a reference to a clothing piece or has recollections that bring to mind a significant historical costume or a more personal item. Through the joys and tiredness of motherhood to the author’s relationship with her own mother. In 'Bound', we have the corduroy baby sling, the crocheted blanket alongside her husband’s hunt for a new suit in the sales and his wedding ring, worn only once. “We were linked to each other by a series of fastenings; complications only bind us tighter. ... And, going all the way back, something I had known in my fingertips but forgotten, a far-away memory in all this remembering of buttons, of sitting on my mother’s lap buttoning up her cardigan, and pushing each button through its buttonhole with very small fingers...I was buttoning and unbuttoning her all the way up, and then all the way down...and we were together in this ritual.” There are references throughout the book to grief, loss, and to delight; to the most intimate. And wonderfully balanced with these moments are the reader’s delight as Wilcox takes us backstage, so to speak, into the rooms of the fashion collection at the V&A. Atmospheric and vividly explored, with sweet snippets of information, these passages are endlessly fascinating. The book has enticing chapter headings — 'Verdant', 'Unbound', 'Entwined', 'Gather', 'Seam', 'Dusk', 'Mist' and 'Vertigo' — and each chapter then includes three or four vignettes. Like a cloth, each strand weaves together to make a whole. Or as per the title, a pieced patch work.