‘Filled with dreamlike memories, this autobiography is both surprising and delightful ... A strange and mesmerising piece of work, one that tears apart the usual fabric of an autobiography’ Sunday Times
Claire Wilcox has been Senior Curator of Fashion at the V&A since 2004, where she has curated exhibitions including Radical Fashion, The Art and Craft of Gianni Versace, Vivienne Westwood, The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947–1957, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, and, as co-curator, Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up, and instigated Fashion in Motion (live catwalk events in the museum) in 1999. She is Professor in Fashion Curation at the London College of Fashion and is on the editorial board of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture. She lives in South London.
Into this tapestry of memories Wilcox weaves a melancholy thread
... The clothes are Proust’s madeleines, cocooned
in hatboxes and airing cupboards ... Gripping
*Mail on Sunday*
In this remarkable self-portrait, fashion curator Claire Wilcox has
set out mementoes of her life like objects in an exhibition, like
treasures in a cabinet of curiosities ... The result is magical ...
Her spellbinding memoir is like a cherished book of poetry
*Wall Street Journal*
Wilcox writes about clothing with an intoxicating specificity ...
she uses her encounters with objects to explore themes of love and
loss, birth and bereavement, family and tribe ... As skilful and
oblique in its structure as the precious gowns she describes, is
stitched together with loving care from narrative scraps and
images, ultimately revealing how materiality and memory operate on
one another again
*New Yorker, Books of the Year*
An uncommon delight
*Observer*
Effervescent, poetic, puzzle-like ... Wilcox picks at the
heartstrings
*Financial Times*
Filled with dreamlike memories, this autobiography is both
surprising and delightful ... A strange and mesmerising piece of
work, one that tears apart the usual fabric of an autobiography
*Sunday Times*
In her beautifully written memoir Wilcox takes readers behind the
scenes of life at the museum – while recounting the many ways that
clothes have shaped her personal development in a series of lyrical
vignettes
*Vogue, 12 Of The Best Autumn Reads To Curl Up With Now*
An extraordinary mixture of museum work interleaved with memoir …
beautifully written, her book is a love story, with clothes as much
as people as its heroes
*Spectator*
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 ... The way it puts words to objects and events is
so original. I have been moved to such tears by the lives told
here, but also by the infinite care with which she has considered
them over and over again, stitched them together, pieced out of
memories and love
*LAURA CUMMING, author of On Chapel Sands*
Patch Work is a unique memoir told in rich, tantalising fragments
that made me look at what we all wear with new interest and
respect
*TRACY CHEVALIER*
I couldn't put it down ... What a wonderfully woven tangle of
stories, from dreamlike rememberings of her past to the intimate
glimpses of a world behind the polished facade of the museum, bound
together by her devotion to clothes. Claire looks at clothes with
an obsessive's eye, analysing every stitch and imagining the
history of every crease, stretch and wrinkle ... Pure delight
*LARA MAIKLEM, author of Mudlarking*
An exquisite book that works like a well-curated and eccentric
exhibition. The chronology of time and the logic of life's
sequences become irrelevant as you are led from one brightly-lit
cabinet of memories and thoughts to another, while also learning
about cloth, clothes and curating
*JULIA BLACKBURN, author of Time Song*
I loved its close detail, its sense of the warp and weft of life,
of clothes and favoured objects. Everything seen is seen intensely.
It’s a book to linger over and return to
*LYNN KNIGHT, author of The Button Box*
Intelligent and tactile - part memoir, part beautifully curated
collection of treasures. I loved it
*JOHN CRACE, author of Decline and Fail*
A series of exquisite meditations
*Harper's Bazaar*
Patch Work will never leave me. Wilcox’s memoir of life as fashion
curator at the V&A is as delicate and finely wrought as
seventeenth-century lace
*MEG ROSOFF*
In elegant, evocative prose, Victoria & Albert Museum fashion
curator Claire tells her life story, from formative
family life to love and loss, through the prism of a life-long
obsession with clothes and the beautiful garments that inspired her
intriguing career
*Sunday Express*
Among the books that most surprised and most moved me this year was
Patch Work ... The book, which is as skillful and oblique in its
structure as the precious gowns she describes, is stitched together
with loving care from narrative scraps and images, ultimately
revealing how materiality and memory operate on one another
*New Yorker, Best Books We Read in 2021*
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