A linen sheet, smooth with age... A hundred-year-old pin, forgotten in a hem." Wilcox is senior curator of fashion at the V&A, where she has curated blockbuster exhibitions on the likes of Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen. This is her gorgeously crafted memoir of a life lived through textiles, told in illustrated vignettes which take us from the childhood joys of night clothes and hiding in the airing cupboard, to a drawstring purse bought on the hippy trail. She embues each item with such an extraordinarily evocative power; you can almost hear the rustling.
Beyond fashion and the enviable depiction of the V&A as her office, Wilcox is at her most magical leading the reader through the museum of her family life. She peeks into a childhood memory of her mother stitching together a gingham bikini for her on a beach, then moves on to the drama of her infant daughter’s hospitalisation or the deathbed of her beloved “woollen-jumpered” father. The book brims with poetic quotes: her parents taught her that the “slow pull of death is part of life, and that love can last beyond the end”.
Beautifully written, her book is a love story, with clothes as much as people as its heroes, from the childhood frocks, wedding dress and a blue and white check bikini made by her mother to the dark blue suit her husband wore to get married in — she was in white linen — and, above all, to the Victoria & Albert Museum.
