Lovely and frustrating read. Wilcox is terribly clever and also touching in her careful construction of her life's garments - made up of memories of her seamstress mother, her haberdasher father, her encounters with fabric and artifice that becomes a lifelong obsession. She is good at showing how key encounters and acquisitions of clothing and accessories throughout her childhood, adolescence and young womanhood come to symbolize her development as both human and historian - most touchingly in her relationships with her parents and her children. The synecdoche of baby shoes, homemade dresses, a walking cane, a clutch bag represent not a linear timeline of Wilcox's life but a collection of the moments that took her from a London council flat and made her the woman she is today (and the Senior Curator of Fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.) The book is a love letter to the V&A, even as Wilcox is deliberately humble about the enormous influence she wields in both the academic and commercial world of fashion, particularly after Savage Beauty, her groundbreaking show on Alexander McQueen. Wilcox is willing to be opaque about the identities - even the names - of those who figure in her autobiographical sketches, though really her tact seems a bit precious when we might divine she is talking about McQueen or Vivienne Westwood or annoying when she does not identify the curator who gave her the big chance at working for the V&A. What's with the secrecy, especially if Wilcox is not attempting a celebrity-ridden piece? One of the squirrels chatter, the elk looks up at it, then sees us, and freezes. It pauses and assesses, its eyes still, brown and round. We are all motionless. We are radiating stars of goodness, I think. I revel in the shared silence. It's a new feeling.

Jeff. Our breathing is synced, today. Mine slows when his does, and his does when mine does. We are like a couple who's slept together for years. I wonder if I should just reach my hand out, right now, and touch his with mine, gently. The wanting surges in my chest. And I watch it, the good yogi. Maybe our fingers would intertwine, melt together. There is a benevolent stirring in my center that seems to have come out of nowhere. And next, a sense of wanting to lean towards Andrew. Something like radiance comes from him, but it's subtle. Like a warm-springs... the kind you could sit in all day. I was rooting for Andrew and was pleased to see the MC make a connection with him by the end of the story. As I read the MC’s introspections on mating choice and attraction, as a contemporary woman character, I could not help but be reminded of the book “The Evolution of Desire” by anthropologist David Buss. He studies human mating strategies in contemporary culture. He observes mating preferences women have in men. In studied populations, the focus is on (1) men with resources, (2) men with high social status, (3) older men (as they often have (1) and (2)), (4) physical attractiveness (strength and height - to protect against physical danger), and (5) men who are kind and generous (so they will share (1)-(4)). Jeff may have strength/height/attractiveness, but Andrew clearly displays a great deal of kindness and generosity! Go Andrew!Off-gas?" I think, wondering how one would define that in biological terms, my smile receding. I wonder if this whole Buddhism thing is too woo-woo for me. But something about what she says hits home too.

Exhibits from Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, the 2015 V&A exhibition, which Wilcox says was an ‘incredible liberation’. Photograph: Victoria and Albert Museum, London Also Read: How Are Pauline Yasuda & Grace Jenkins Related? Deep Water's Little Girl Trixie Has A Famous Mother She decided to use objects in a “Proustian way”, as a means of exploring her past as well as the past – though for me the book is most alive when she is at work: looking “for a head” in the V&A’s mannequin store (the museum does not fit clothes to them, or alter garments at all, for which reason Wilcox often finds herself up a ladder, looking for a certain waist or breast size); examining the Delphos gowns, as fluid and as silvery as water, that Mariano Fortuny kept in his showroom in Venice a century ago and which are now housed in a mahogany drawer, coiled into fat rolls to prevent their pleats falling out; performing an audit of objects in the textile store, the smell of naphthalene (for moths) heavy in the air as she works her way through a group of top hats (kept in bags marked with a skull and crossbones because mercury was used in their making and they remain toxic). I have a question about thoughts," Andrew is saying. We are in the middle of a question-and-answer session, and this is one of the few opportunities we have to speak as a group over the two-week retreat. I cringe, inwardly. He's going to humiliate himself again. It all began when I was a child. Because I was short-sighted, anything more than a few feet away was a blur. I liked solitude and quiet, and was happiest lying on my stomach in the long grass making fairy skirts out of geranium petals or hiding in the airing cupboard reading everything from Tarka the Otter (I wept inconsolably) and The Secret Garden to my grandmother’s Mills & Boon.

Support Fiction on the Web

The Ambassador Magazine: Promoting Post-War British Textiles and Fashion. Victoria Albert Museum, London, 2012.