My Life in Clothes with Claire Wilcox, Sewstine, Kristína Šipulová and Amber Butchart

Hosted on Zoom 

Clothes serves many functions, adapting to serve the practical, the cultural and the personal. Our relationship with our own clothes is deeply intimate, charged with a sense of self. The first Selvedge online talk of 2022 will look at the ways that clothes are experienced by our speakers: Claire Wilcox, Kristína Šipulová, Amber Butchart and Sewstine. Curators, designers, writers and makers; each speaker brings their experiences of their lives in clothes, inspired by their professional and personal life, as well as their context in time and place. 

Christine N Millar, MD (better known online as Sewstine)
Christine Millar is a practicing medical physician who enjoys sewing in her spare time. In particular, she loves to recreate over the top gowns and court suits from the 1700s to the early 1900s, with a focus on embroidery and other specialised trims. She is most active on Instagram and Youtube, where she shares her process of turning an idea into a digitised image, and then an actual finalised clothing item. She is also actively working on creating her own aesthetic for daily wear.

Description of talk:
In this talk, Sewstine will discuss her process of taking an idea or a historical image and digitise it, pattern it, and then wear it. She will talk about how she uses her daily fashion to express herself, and how she uses sewing as a way of self expression alongside days working at the hospital.

Claire Wilcox
Claire Wilcox has been Senior Curator of Fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum since 2004. She has staged many successful exhibitions for the museum including Radical Fashion, Vivienne Westwood, The Art and Craft of Gianni Versace, The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947-1957, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, and Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up. She instigated Fashion in Motion (live catwalk events in the Museum) in 1999. Claire is Professor in Fashion Curation at the London College of Fashion and is on the editorial board of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture.

Claire is also the author of Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes, which won the 2021 PEN Ackerley Prize.

Description of talk:
Claire will talk about her life as a V&A curator and her recent memoir Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes in which she explores the relationship between archival objects and the threads of memory.

Amber Butchart
Amber Butchart is a curator, writer and broadcaster who specialises in the cultural and political history of textiles and dress. She is a former Research Fellow at the University of the Arts London, and is a regular public lecturer across the UK’s leading arts institutions. She researches and presents documentaries for television and radio, including the six-part series A Stitch in Time for BBC Four that fused biography, art and the history of fashion to explore the lives of historical figures through the clothes they wore. Amber is an external adviser for the National Crime Agency as a Forensic Garment Analyst, working on cases that require investigation of clothing and textiles. She has published five books on the history and culture of clothes, including The Fashion of Film, Nautical Chic, and a history of British fashion illustration for the British Library. She is currently curating an exhibition for the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey, to open in 2023.

Description of talk:
From the seaside charity shops of her hometown to the streets of Dakar in Senegal, fashion historian Amber Butchart tracks her life in vintage clothes. A love of secondhand style has permeated Amber’s life from an early age. In this illustrated talk she tracks her journey - both personal and professional - with secondhand style.

Kristína Šipulová 
Kristína’s work is steeped in the revival of hand-weaving and hand-made clothes and textiles, inspired by growing up surrounded by rich Slovak textile heritage.

In her studio, Kristína Šipulová, founded in 2019, she combines the art of traditional hand-weaving and other crafts with a modern approach to slow fashion. She gained her experiences while producing custom-made, hand-woven fabrics for Chanel at Danish studio Beck&Kinch and as a Visual Researcher at Studio Edelkoort in Paris. After graduating in MA Textiles at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia (2018) she has been teaching at International Fashion Academy IFA Paris. Her work was shown during Milan Design Week, London Fashion Week, and Paris Design Week and published in magazines such as Vogue, Konfekt Magazine, Elle Decor, and The Lissome.

Description of talk:
Kristína will talk about her work to preserve and elevate Slovak craft heritage - and the lifestyle that it represents. She will draw from traditional garment making in Slovakia and will discuss how we can build relationships with garments and, ultimately, preserve craft today. She will introduce her own unique practice of weaving clothes in a zero waste method and how appreciating the value of the making of clothes, and the personal and cultural meanings they have, can prolong their life.

Cancellation policy
All orders for online talks are non-refundable.