My Mother's Wedding Dress: The Life and Afterlife of Clothes - Softcover

Picardie, Justine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330413074 ISBN 13: 9780330413077

Publisher: Picador, 2006

Synopsis

Unusual book

About this title

About the Author:

JUSTINE PICARDIE is a freelance fashion journalist who has written for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. She is the author of several books, including If the Spirit Moves You, a chronicle of her journey to come to terms with her sister’s death. Justine Picardie lives in London, England, with her husband and two sons.

From Publishers Weekly:

A former British Vogue editor turned novelist (Wish I May) offers a stylish treatment of the significance of clothes to their owners and admirers. A black wedding dress belonging to Picardie's mother circa 1960 became the author's perfect little black dress 20 years later and serves as the elegant entrée to Picardie's narrative. Picardie devotes a chapter to each item: the wedding dress, cast off by her divorced mum, was added to the author's secondhand college wardrobe, a "rag-tag bundle of other people's identities"; a pair of plastic trousers, purchased in 1977, signified a transitory rebellion; a velvet jacket belonging to various relatives segues into a meditation on the frustrating elements of the unfinished story. Most poignant is the author's exploration of haunted clothing, seen in literary examples from Daphne du Maurier and Elizabeth Bowen, and exemplified in clothing favored by her terminally ill sister and abandoned in death. Picardie is amusingly digressive, moving from a discourse on the Gap's ability to bridge fashion and functionality to Zelda Fitzgerald's clothing memory as a grasp of her dwindling sanity. Picardie is also a terrific journalist, offering a shimmering chapter on the profane and sacred aspects of "scarlet women" and sharp interviews with Donnatella Versace and Karl Lagerfeld. (May 1)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0330413074
• ISBN 13: 9780330413077
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 354