Professor Claire Wilcox

Biography

Claire Wilcox is Chair in Fashion Curation at London College of Fashion and also Senior Curator of Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum since 2004. She has curated many exhibitions at the V&A and edited the accompanying catalogues. These include 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), Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (2015) and Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up (2018). She instigated Fashion in Motion (live catwalk events in the Museum, 1999 - present). She was Lead Curator for the refurbishment and redisplay of the V&A’s Fashion Gallery in 2012, has contributed to numerous publications, most recently on the history of the haute couture industry for A Global History of Fashion (CUP, 2022). She is on the Editorial Board of Fashion Theory: the Journal of Dress, Body and Culture. Her recent memoir, Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes won the 2021 PEN Ackerley Prize for memoir and autobiography. Claire’s forthcoming major exhibition, Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear opens at the V&A in March 2022.