WINNER OF THE 2021 PEN ACKERLEY PRIZE
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"As skillful and oblique in its structure as the precious gowns she
describes." -Rebecca Mead, New Yorker, "Best Books of the Year"**
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An expert and intimate exploration of a life in clothes: their memories
and stories, enchantments and spells.**
A linen sheet, smooth with age. A box of buttons, mother-of-pearl and
plastic, metal and glass, rattling and untethered. A hundred-year-old
pin, forgotten in a hem. Fragile silks and fugitive dyes, fans and
crinolines, and the faint mark on leather from a buckle now lost.
Claire Wilcox has worked as a curator in Fashion at the Victoria &
Albert Museum for most of her working life. Down cool, dark corridors
and in quiet store rooms, she and her colleagues care for, catalogue and
conserve clothes centuries old, the inscrutable remnants of lives long
lost to history; the commonplace or remarkable things that survive the
bodies they once encircled or adorned.
In Patch Work, Wilcox deftly stitches 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 luminous prose the spellbinding power
of the things we wear: their stories, their secrets, their power to
transform and disguise and acts as portals to our pasts; the ways in
which they measure out our lives, our gains and losses, and the ways we
use them to write our stories.
