Unfolding the Past

Elizabeth Wilson is a pioneer in the development of fashion studies, and has been a university professor, feminist campaigner and activist. Her writing career began in the ‘underground’ magazines of the early 1970s, (Frendz, Red Rag, Spare Rib, Come Together) before she became an academic. She's written for the Guardian and her non-fiction books include Adorned in Dreams (1985, 2003), The Sphinx in the City (1992) (shortlisted for the Manchester Odd Fellows Prize), Bohemians (2000) and Love Game (2014) (long listed for the William Hill sportswriting prize), as well as six crime novels, including War Damage (2009) and The Girl in Berlin (2012) (long listed for the Golden Dagger Award).

• List of Illustrations1. Outside Looking In2. First Came Reading3. Researching My Life4. Bodies in the Library5. Dressing the Postwar Young Woman 6. Living the Bohemian Sixties7. What Does a Lesbian Look Like?8. Writing Feminism9. Bad Decade10. The Vulgar11. Fashion as Fetish12. Haunted Houses13. Nostalgia Mode14. Cracks in the Pavement15. In Search of Lost Streets16. A Visit to Rimini17. Returning to Queens Club18. Hedonism19. Down There on a VisitReferencesIndex

It’s impossible not to warm instantly to Elizabeth Wilson … Unfolding the Past is so packed with Wilson’s literary allusions, as well as her observations about life, sex, film and fashion over the centuries, it’s like dipping into the anecdotes of a clever salonnière, peopled with Djuna Barnes, Proust and Marlene Dietrich. Wilson weaves a memoir in which the uniting thread is how clothing trends reflect changing mores as well as creating new cultural norms … Freed from the “invisible cloak” of her childhood, Wilson’s fascinating text shows how fashion can be the opposite of frivolity. Ultimately, she says, it’s the “search for personal identity through aesthetic experience".