For anyone who has ever thought fashion frivolous, Ilene Beckerman has a story. It’s “Love, Loss and What I Wore” (Algonquin, $14.95), and it chronicles her life through the medium of clothing, beginning with a 1940s Brownies uniform.
Pairing spare descriptions with her sweet stick-figure drawings, Beckerman evokes a Manhattan childhood clothed in outfits associated with her mother who sewed until she died when Beckerman was 12, with her friends in circle skirts and her grandmother constantly in cardigans.
Her sartorial autobiography was a way to make these women in her life “live a little bit,” Beckerman says.
Now a 60-year-old grandmother and ad agency executive, the author says she wrote the book “to say things to my children that one doesn’t always have the time to say,” among them, that she was like them when she was young and “I still don’t have all the answers.”
Love and loss fuse poignantly in clothes that witnessed a son’s death and a husband’s betrayal, and hilariously in an ill-fated attempt to make her womanly figure fit the mode of Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy.
Beckerman can’t explain why memory is cued by clothing, but she says, based on reader response, “Women find themselves in the book. It contains memory-triggers that make them think about their own lives.”