Katherine Ashenburg has always loved fashion. She has fond memories of sitting on the high stools in the pattern sections of department stores as a child while her mother chose dresses, coats and suits to sew. Her German mother, aunts and grandmothers were skilled with cloth and yarn, and she grew up surrounded by their handiwork. “They were amateur needlewomen, far from the heights of Dior, but their aesthetic and their seriousness made me see Dior as a kindred spirit,” she says over Zoom. Open this photo in gallery: Katherine Ashenburg, who published her first fiction book in 2018 at...