Clothes encounters

Memoir: A family history focuses on the emotional and transformative power of clothes.

When Hilary Garnett married Michael Picardie, a Jew, in London, in black, in October l960, she was not to know that nearly half a century later, her daughter Justine would use that silk-lined corseted sheath as the starting point for a frank and intensely personal family memoir. My Mother's Wedding Dress is about the emotional power of clothes and their almost metaphysical ability to transform the self. Inextricably associated with defining moments in a woman's life, certain items such as her grandmother's black sash or her mother's red velvet trousers evoke events and feelings that far outweigh their objects' mere material form or appearance. A cherished friendship with Bella Freud, for example, begins with a jumper.

The book is a sequel to the author's best selling account of coming to terms with her sister Ruth's death from cancer at the age of 33, If The Spirit Moves You, published three years ago. A contributor to Vogue and the Daily Telegraph, Picardie's style is direct and confessional as she explores the fabric of memory, in a very real sense. Her first fairy birthday dress "of translucent net with wings and a glittery wand", for example, is her initiation into the subliminal sexual symbolism of clothes, into what can be revealed and what must be concealed. Her childhood and adolescence are recalled through memories of visits to her grandmother in South Africa, in whose lavender-scented wardrobe she would hide, and her gingham school uniform "crisp and clear and not like home where a volcano was erupting". Clothes become talismanic reminders of "what we once were and what we hope to become", possessed with the spirit of their owners.

As a fashion journalist, her personal relationship with clothes has a professional side. Throughout the book, there are entertaining encounters with designers and models, people like Donatella Versace ("a mix of fragility and implacable hardness") and Karl Lagerfeld ("his influence has grown larger as he has shrunk"). With Claude Montana, however, her preoccupation is with finding out why his wife, his muse, committed suicide. Leading model Erin O'Connor confides how she was asked to shred a dress made of razor shells by Alexander McQueen on the ramp and the bloody, macabre aftermath, exposing the lunatic edge of the catwalk.

"Chav versus Chic", an account of meeting Wayne Rooney's girlfriend, Colleen McLoughlin, as she is turned "into a slicker version of Bardot" for a Vogue makeover, reveals as much about the magazine as the tabloid media circus surrounding the couple's relationship, but ends inconclusively. A chapter on Ghost, the label founded by Tanya Sarne in l976 has a particular poignancy because Ruth started inexplicably and compulsively buying Ghost dresses after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

One, inherited by the author, later vanishes, "gone with my mermaid girl", its disappearance compounding the greater bereavement.

The profound sense of loss, the book's dark undercurrent, affects the most mundane aspects of Picardie's working life. Catching sight of a feathery white coat en route to interview Austrian modernist designer Helmut Lang and a later visit to Lemarie, a couture workshop in Paris, for a Vogue feature, stimulates a melancholic dissertation on feathers, women in white and their associations with death. Yet, wearing the black Gap jacket that belonged to Ruth serves to remind her of the material evidence of her life, and the fact that it once contained her "provides some useful containment for me". If such a garment can provide a "bulkhead" between the living and the dead, between despair and the edge of nothing, she sees parallels in the tempestuous relationship of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, in the first of a number of literary references.

'Scarlet Women', motivated by recollections of her mother's red velvet trousers - symbolic of her political allegiances - is probably the weakest section of the book; laboured, overlong references to Hans Christian Andersen and Jane Eyre lack the lightness of touch that otherwise characterises her approach.

An unfinished story is that of a black velvet jacket that belonged to Picardie's great-grandmother which leads her on a quest to trace its origins in her Jewish past, searching out distant relations to establish its history. Two of her mother's rings, one of which she discovers belonged to Charlotte Brontë, drive her to other destinations to unravel the family tree of the Balfours on her mother's side and their connection with the Brontes.

Curious interludes between chapters with pronouncements like "Do not wear a denim jacket with jeans" and other fashion dictates seem somehow superfluous and irrelevant. Inevitably, there are musings on the little black dress, her own efforts to find the perfect one and the legacy of its founder, Coco Chanel. By cleverly fashioning ideas and memories through the medium of clothes, My Mother's Wedding Dress, though meandering at times, provides a light, engaging and at times moving read.

Deirdre McQuillan is Fashion Editor of The Irish Times and a freelance feature writer

My Mother's Wedding Dress By Justine Picardie Picador, 266pp. £12.99