Wilcox has published widely, most recently The V&A Gallery of Fashion, to accompany the refurbishment as well as redisplay of the Museum’s permanent fashion display for which she was Lead Curator. She was Lead Curator (V&A) for the Europeana Digital Fashion Project (co-funded under the CIP ICT-PSP program as well as composed of 22 partners from 12 European countries representing leading European institutions and collections in the fashion domain). She is a member of the AHRC Peer Review College and on the Editorial Board of Fashion Theory. No, that's ok," Andrew looks up at the door, grimaces, as the sobbing behind the door gets louder, and gestures me to follow him away from the door and down the hall. "What's happening in there?" he whispers. "This place is a trip, huh?" Charlie/Claire: The proof-reader in me wanted to give you a heads up that in the fourth paragraph of the seventh subsection there is a “to” missing between the word “going” and the word “fail”. An expert and intimate exploration of a life in clothes: their memories and stories, enchantments and spells.

In summary, a patchwork book which I enjoyed in pieces. I might have enjoyed it more if I was expecting a personal memoir rather than an account of a working life. 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? 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 ... I found my sense of life transformed by her writing as I often find it transformed after the exhibition of a great artist' LAURA CUMMINGIt 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.

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 get some food and sit down to taste the Indian-spiced lentils over brown rice and the kale salad, and I wonder how they make even the most basic of food so delectable here. I try to be mindful of my eating - noting every detail, its smell, how it feels in my mouth being chewed or in my throat being swallowed - and my associated emotions and thoughts. That's the assignment. Always. I wish he'd stop talking. But Kate nods encouragingly. "Thank you for this question. Just rest in the awareness. If you do act, just observe how your actions affect you and the people around you. The message is not to let the fire burn you up while you sit on your cushion. We're here to learn, to practice attention. Like practicing piano. Not to be statues." Here are some interesting facts and body measurements you should know about Claire Wilcox. Claire Wilcox Bio and WikiI resign myself to people watching. Thanks to my peripheral vision, I know Jeff's sitting, eating. But I deliberately avoid looking at him - anything to stay anonymous. Because of personal reasons, Wilcox has not shared her precise location of residence. We will immediately update this information if we get the location and images of her house. Is Claire Wilcox dead or alive? She has also given guest appearances in Window on Main Street, Dr. Kildare, The Virginian, Perry Mason, Ben Casey, Gunsmoke, Shane, Laredo, Lost in Space, Family Affair, Daniel Boone, My Three Sons, The High Chaparral, Gentle Ben, The Partridge Family from the year 1961-1971. A beautiful memoir but quite frustrating at times. It is a mixture of the author’s life working at the museum, mainly in Fashion at the V & A, interspersed with short vignettes about her family and life. Some of these were very moving and I must confess I found these more interesting than the museum stories, (though I particularly liked the part about Freda Kahlo which was quite heart-breaking). It’s very strange because I studied Fashion at The London College of Fashion in the 1970s so these extracts should have resonated more with me than they did. If you are going to tell him who you are, it's now or never. Because he seems to be falling for the blonde, if I'm reading things right.