Claire Wilcox’s fascination with Japanese culture and Japanese objects began in her childhood, with an old Japanese kimono in the dressing-up box of a couple who lived over the road from her. But it wasn’t until she left the Victoria & Albert Museum – where she was Senior Curator for Fashion for decades – that she managed to visit Japan.
Here, her exploration of what the next chapter of her life might be coincided with a revelatory immersion in Japanese art, textiles, craft, design and fashion, and let her to reflect on the way in which beauty gives our lives meaning. As her journey progressed, she felt her life shift from grey-scale into colour, as she was released from the interiority of the museum into a new world of beauty and possibility.
The Japanese Notebook is a fascinating and moving exploration of centuries of artistic and cultural cross-pollination between Japan and the West: and a deeply personal journey to the heart of why and how objects shape our histories.
The Japanese Notebook
By Claire Wilcox
By the award-winning author of Patch Work: an enchanting odyssey of a woman's discovery of beauty, craft and purpose in Japan's history and presentMaterial available
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Imprint: Bloomsbury Publishing | Pub date: July 2027 | Format: 216 x 135mm | Extent: 288 pages
About the Author
Claire Wilcox is Professor in Fashion Curation at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London and Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, Wolfson College, Oxford. She was Senior Curator of Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum until 2022 where she curated many exhibitions, including Vivienne Westwood (2004), T he Golden Age of Couture (2007), Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (2015), Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up (2018) and Fashioning Masculinities: the Art of Menswear (2022). She instigated Fashion in Motion (live catwalk events in the Museum, 1999 - present) and was Lead Curator for the refurbishment and redisplay of the V&A’s Fashion Gallery in 2012. She has contributed to numerous publications, most recently on contemporary Japanese style for Kimono: from Kyoto to Catwalk (V&A, 2020) and the birth of haute couture for A Global History of Fashion (Cambridge University Press, 2023). She is on the Editorial Board of Fashion Theory: the Journal of Dress, Body and Culture.
