Patch work A life amongst clothes

Review by Booklist Review

A longtime curator of fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Wilcox (The Golden Age of Couture) offers tantalizing, richly sensuous glimpses into her life inside and outside the museum. The book is assembled out of tiny chapters, most just a couple of pages long and grouped under loose, abstract headings such as "Verdant" or "Immersion," rather than arranged chronologically. The reader can glean a few salient facts about Wilcox's life, including her stints at a laundry and in a sex shop selling underwear before she attended art school and started working at a museum--or, on a more personal front, the birth of two daughters and one stillborn son--but this will frustrate those looking for a conventional memoir. Instead, it's best read as a series of prose poems, some focusing in tight on the details of a particular experience, mysteriously unmoored from context, and some ricocheting from point to point in a remembered life, revealing a mind in constant, curious motion.Women in Focus: The 19th in 2020

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Wilcox, senior curator of fashion at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, debuts with a fascinating memoir of her life and passion for clothing. Raised by a seamstress mother, Wilcox was destined for a career in fashion, and her appreciation for all things cloth is evident in her attention to details in garments: Japanese silks are "pleated into rills like the delicate underside of a field mushroom," and Frida Kahlo is described as wearing, in a self-portait, "a long green skirt with frothy white flounce that hides her legs and a loose blouse with a band of red embroidery around the neck." Wilcox eschews linear chronology to create a textual mood board that flits dreamily from intimate childhood memories and poignant remembrances of her father ("Every time he sat down a puff of dust would sigh out from the feather cushions") to penetrating character studies of style and design figures including Alexander McQueen and Kahlo. (On McQueen, she posits he expressed himself emotionally through the cut and drape of his designs.) The author's enthusiasm is apparent throughout, and where she really shines is in her poignant memories about family members and friends. This intricate work enchants. (Jan.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A museum curator sifts gently through treasures from the past. Wilcox, senior curator of fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, has devoted her professional life to the care, protection, and exhibition of objects: a silk-lined wallet, delicately hand-stitched linen, fragile lace garments resplendent with spangles and gilt. In a captivating memoir illustrated with photographs of cherished objects, the author describes, in radiant, sensuous prose, her often painstaking tasks and her development as a curator, which began with an entry-level part-time position. "I knew how far I had to go," she writes of those early years, "and how hard I had to work to become an expert. But I was out of my depth, and my French--the language of textile history--shaky." To bolster her ability, she enrolled at the Camberwell Art School, which enabled her to look at the collections "with the eye of a nearly-artist." Wilcox alludes to several exhibitions that she mounted: of Alexander McQueen, Frida Kahlo, and Vivienne Westwood, from whom she learned "through the particularity of her eyes, about pun and protest and her role" in fashion. Although these glimpses backstage at the museum are fascinating, equally so are Wilcox's evocative recollections of childhood, marriage, her parents' deaths, and motherhood to three children, including a daughter who suffered a frightening illness and a son who died very young. The author portrays herself as a child, defiantly "not brushing my hair, allowing it to spring in all directions. Its wildness suggested I was carefree, although in truth I was not." As she grew up, she yearned to "have interesting things, to be well travelled, to live in a shadowy house full of books and papers and all sorts of old things. I would be complicated and well informed"--a goal that she seems to have amply fulfilled. A finely crafted memoir of luminous vignettes. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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