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Saddle shoes. Camp shorts. Girdles. Bell-bottoms. Each plays a significant role as we follow B., the wardrobe's owner, through her buttoned-up Midwestern childhood to the freedom of miniskirts, sundresses, and New York City. We watch as B. copes with the untimely death of her mother, makes a go of glamorous magazine work, and, after the inevitable false starts and fashion missteps, finally comes into her own.Part memoir, part fashion and cultural history of the last five decades, Autobiography of a Wardrobe is an exploration of the clothes each generation has embraced and the smallest details in which we are able to seek comfort and meaning.
Having written a family memoir (American Daughter) and a study of women in screwball comedy (The Runaway Bride), Kendall now retells her own life-from the perspective of her omniscient wardrobe. "Soundless and mute, but extremely expressive," the wardrobe calls the author "B," for body: "I am B.'s wardrobe, her ever-evolving second-skin." Wardrobe opens by remembering a pair of red corduroy overalls B. loved as a toddler and continues with descriptions of B.'s Midwestern-girlhood clothes, followed by the outfits B. chose when she left home for Radcliffe. Finally, B. comes to know her place in the world and breaks through into self-confident dressing. Women of a certain age will recognize B.'s brand names (Lanz, Marimekko, Charivari) and styles (saddle shoes, bell bottoms, ponchos). Wardrobe's musings reveal how changing attitudes toward women's roles (needing makeup and heels to use the Harvard Library, the shunning of seductive clothing in feminist circles) kept women's closets bulging with outfits, while its asides on fashion history are often quite insightful. Still, this first-person narration by a collection of clothing can be annoying and affected. Ilene Beckerman's Love, Loss, and What I Wore, with its sparer prose and fetching illustrations, is a more successful memoir-through-clothing. (May)
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Daniel Macedo
reviewed Autobiography of a Wardrobe on May 20, 2008
Autobiography of a Wardrobe
I was expecting to like this book much better than I did. A woman's memoir told through the voice of her wardrobe from her 1950's Midwestern childhood as the oldest of five children to her discovery of Marimekko while at Harvard in the 1960's to her stints in London, New York, and beyond as a writer and dancer in the 1970's, this book started off promising--sort of the literary embodiment of looking at old photographs of aunts and mothers and grandmothers and wondering just what stories were behind their mid-century get-ups. It starts to meander, though, and it became too esoteric for me in trying to discern the voice of the wardrobe vs. the voice of the actual author. It was an interesting and whimsical experiment, to recount one's life through the voice of one's wardrobe, but I think it would have been better suited as a magazine article rather than a full book.
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