A Life Amongst Clothes

This memoir is fragments of rememberances pieced together to let us into Wilcox’s world both private and public. As a senior curator of fashion, she has lived and examined clothes intimately and uses them to let us into moments in her life which are never spelled out, merely suggested.

She started young in her parents’ haberdashery and continued. There was the kimono found in the dressing up box, the way it felt and how it fitted demonstrating the type of person she would like to be: well-travelled and informed. There is the memory of borrowing her friend’s velvet trousers to take on her confidence and charisma. Held together by safety pins because they were too big, they didn’t however do the trick. When Wilcox took some velvet and violets to her friend as a thank you and acknowlegement that she now knew how to dress, she found her friend having a party to which she had not been invited.

At work there is the micro-inspection of the clothing in storage and on exhibit so that each piece is carefully catalogued with detail about its state. There are micro pleats, fragility, tiny stitches and packing everything up to move the archives. This is when pieces are found having been locked in unused toilets for years if not decades and things left on the tops of cupboards such as plaster casts of feet. All packed and relocated.

There is the love that she feels for her husband whose shirts hung on the picture rail when they were first married and there is also the loss of her son Francis. Little detail is provided and often when it is, it isn’t explained so there is a visit to a remote scottish island where the concern is how to get medical help should they need it. You get the sense of them hiding out to recover but it is never said.

This is a wonderful memoir which has made me consider my clothes more carefully and what they mean to me.