Portrait of the author's closet.

I wasn't sure what I was really expecting when I randomly selected My Mother's Wedding Dress: The Life and Afterlife of Clothes from the new book shelf at the library. A history of famous outfits through history? A tour through fashion trends and revivals?

Well, this is actually a memoir, although a rather inventive one. Justine Picardie, herself a former editor of British Vogue, reflects on her life and family by way of their closets. In doing so, Picardie demonstrates just how much our dress reveals of our selves and sometimes the path our lives take. The wedding dress in the title, a little black dress that Picardie's mother wore only once in spite of its easy elegance, foreshadows the breakdown of her marriage; the hideous pleather trousers Picardie herself sported in the late '70s were as much about teenage rebellion as a fashion statement.

Picardie also goes beyond her own family's history to consider the grip that clothing has on some famous figures. She interviews Donatella Versace, an enigmatic figure in spite of her splashy, bright designs, and gets wound up in the cult of the Brontes while trying to trace the history of a ring. In this sections, it seems like Picardie is trying to flesh out the remainder of her memoir, as she doesn't have quite enough from her own family to make for a complete book. While interesting, it's a little jarring to go from Picardie's own family tale to that of a suicide in a white shirt--there's a connection with the clothes, but it is only by the thinnest of threads. My Mother's Wedding Dress works best as a meditation on what clothes can mean both in life and death, but as a memoir/history it feels incomplete.