Professor Claire Wilcox

Claire Wilcox is Professor in Fashion Curation at the Centre for Fashion Curation and Cultural Programming, University of the Arts London and former Senior Curator of Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She has curated many exhibitions at the V&A including Radical Fashion (2001), Versace at the V&A (2002), Vivienne Westwood (2004), The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947-1957 (2007), From Club to Catwalk: London Fashion in the 1980s (2013), Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (2015), Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up (2018) and most recently, Fashioning Masculinities: the Art of Menswear (2022).

Forthcoming publications include a reflection on the exhibition as site of spectacle and a chapter in the Cambridge Global History of Fashion (CUP, 2023) in which she traces the relationship between the couturier Charles Frederick Worth and Émile Zola with a particular focus on Au Bonheur des Dames (1883). Claire is on the Editorial Boards of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture and Studies in Costume and Performance. Her first degree was in English Literature, and she has maintained a life-long interest in biography, poetry and fiction, and in particular memory work as actuated by clothing. In 2020 she published Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes (Bloomsbury) which won the 2021 PEN Ackerley Prize for memoir and autobiography. While at OCLW she will be completing a companion volume to Patch Work, provisionally titled Immaterial.