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

By Justine Picardie

In this absolutely unique treasure trove of fashion, family memoir and literature, Justine Picardie tells a sequence of stories that reveal the fabric of the past, and how a family has fashioned itself through the clothes that they have worn: from her mother’s black wedding dress to her first party frock, a translucent winged fairy outfit that provided an early lesson in what we uncover, and what we cover up. She also tells of her encounters with fashion designers – Karl Lagerfeld and Donatella Versace, among others; conversations with supermodels, and her search for Charlotte Bronte's ring.

My Mother's Wedding Dress unravels why we care so much about clothes - the white satin and feathers and little black dresses with which we armour ourselves; the material of our lives. Above all, it is Justine Picardie's inimitable voice and thought-provoking quest for answers to her own past that make this book so special.

‘An enticing combination of autobiography, biography, memoir, discourse, interviews, fashion notes, and dreams… a sparky and original book’

Daily Mail



‘Highly stylish and unusual, a selection of swatches that works as a whole’

Sunday Telegraph

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Mar 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9780330543750

Justine Picardie

JUSTINE PICARDIE is the author of four books, including her critically acclaimed memoir, If The Spirit Moves You. The former features director of British Vogue, and contributor to the Sunday Telegraph and Red magazine, she is now Editor in Chief for Harper’s Bazaar. She lives in London with her two sons.

Reviews for My Mother's Wedding Dress

[csmirl_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The subtitle of this book drew me to it immediately: The Life and Afterlife of Clothes. Luckily I was looking through book titles in a list, not covers in a book store, because its pastel pink and blue looks like boring Chick Lit, and the fashion illustration is not one I find alluring–something is off in the pose of the woman, and you can’t see any detail on the dress. I learned my lesson not to read a book by its cover with Linda Grant’sThe Thoughtful Dresser (a simple mannequin in a paper dress on a red background, not too brainy nor breezy), which did not live up to my expectations. This book is, quite frankly, what I expected that book to be: interesting and lovely.Justine Picardie is confident of her extensive knowledge of fashion today, including designers, themes, infrastructure, attitudes and history. Somehow, though, she has managed to take the best of that impressive experience and stay human at the same time. She doesn’t drop names, she mentions fascinating individuals in the context they belong in (whether Karl Lagerfeld or a curator at a small museum). There are no between-the-lines assumptions of the reader’s wardrobe, only of a shared affinity for clothing and their meaning. I imagine her in a cafe, one moment meeting with the editor of Elle, the next, asking the barista where she found her vintage earrings.The pieces of this book that pull it into the memoir realm are deeply personal and wonderfully nostalgic. Many chapters discuss the death of her adult sister, flitting back and forth to clothes the two wore as children, traded as college students, and passed between one another in her sister’s final year. Some sections dig for clothes in classic literature, the author’s career, her family’s genealogy, or English history. We all have a spiderweb of clothes memories, each wisp made of an era, a place, a relationship. The tails of that web lead off to cultural associations, heirlooms, movies and books, and Picardie has pulled many of hers together here.The only bump of a chapter, a bit out of place, is on an interview with Donatella Versace. While it’s a good story, it feels as if it could be thrown into any glossy magazine, but instead landed here. The chapter that will stick with me the most is certainly one that quotes letters between Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I actually may have to read them, since Zelda evidently regularly wrote things like this, before Christmas: “Your closet is full of lovely silver packages. It looks so sad to see your clothes getting dusty on their hangers…if you come back…I will let you play with my pistol and you can win every golf game and I will make you a new suit from a blue hydrangea bush and shoes from pecan-shells and I’ll sew you a belt from leaves from maps of the world and you can always be the one that’s perfect.” That is the sort of thing Picardie delighted me with on these pages. She didn’t say anything revolutionary about fashion. She didn’t analyze all that much, or declare. She just told me stories of clothes in her life, on her back, in her books, in her family. And while I sometimes do enjoy declaring and analyzing a bit further than that, it is stories like these that leave lasting meaning. Just as the stories in my own clothes do.

[harveywals · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Individual bits about items of clothing in the course of the author's life. Some work better than others. Worth reading, pick and choose as you go.