Professor Claire Wilcox

Biography

Claire Wilcox is Professor in Fashion Curation 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), Vivienne Westwood (2004), The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947-1957 (2007), From Club to Catwalk: London Fashion in the 1980s (2013) and Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (2015). She was co-curator of 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 published widely and is on the Editorial Boards of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture and Studies in Costume and Performance. In 2020 she published Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes (Bloomsbury) which won the 2021 PEN Ackerley Prize for memoir and autobiography. She is currently Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, Wolfson College, Oxford.