The Fashion Memoir

Lee Miller was on the cover of American Vogue in March 1927, as a drawing by the illustrator Georges Lepape. Eighteen years later she was photographing the liberation of Dachau for the same magazine, and cabling her editor in capital letters to beg her to believe it. In between she ran British Vogue's studio through the Blitz, shooting fashion under clothes rationing, and talked her way into a siege in Brittany she was not accredited to cover.

This episode covers the Conde Nast discovery story that the Tate's own curators say has no documents behind it, the 1928 Kotex advertisement, the solarisation years with Man Ray, her work in Egypt, the wartime fashion photography she made for her editor Audrey Withers, the Paris Liberation assignment that sent her straight to the couture houses, and the sixty thousand negatives her family found in the attic after she died.

Content note: this episode mentions child S.A., photographs her father took of her that biographers find uncomfortable, depression and heavy drinking, and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. The camp photographs are not described in detail.

Annette Kellerman was an Australian champion swimmer who swam the Thames for a newspaper, tried to swim the English Channel at least three times, performed underwater ballet in a glass tank on three continents, and sold one-piece bathing suits under her own name for the better part of twenty-five years. By the 1910s, "an Annette Kellerman" was a name for that style of swimsuit.

She is remembered instead for being arrested on a Boston beach in 1907 for wearing one. That story is repeated by encyclopaedias, museums and halls of fame, and nobody has found a contemporary record of it. The earliest versions I have found are newspaper pieces from the early 1950s, and the main one is her own recollection.

This episode covers what women actually wore into the water before her, how stockings came to be sewn into a racing suit for a royal audience, the Harvard doctor whose careful remark that she was near the ideal figure became a headline about the perfect woman, the lost million-dollar film she may or may not have appeared nude in, and the two surviving swimsuits in Australian museum collections that tell the real story.

"I'm afraid that I'm a woman without a country." Anna May Wong, 1938, on taking her American clothes to China and finding she was foreign there too.

Part Two of two, covering 1931 to 1961: the Travis Banton dragon gown now in the Metropolitan Museum and where its dragon really comes from, the two parts she was refused for being too Chinese to play Chinese, the nine months in China, the auction of her own wardrobe, and the television series she pitched herself and which no longer exists.

Part One, The Certificate of Identity, covers 1905 to 1931.

Anna May Wong was born in Los Angeles in 1905 and spent her life carrying a card that certified she had been admitted to her own country as a native, on a doctor's word.

Part 1 of 2: from a laundry on Figueroa Street to a Broadway stage in 1931, by way of Berlin. The modelling job at ten, the Chinese Exclusion Act file, the Technicolor lead at seventeen, the production company she founded at nineteen, and the reasons she gave for leaving America.

Part Two, The Dragon Dress, covers 1931 to 1961.

Patrick Kelly was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi on 24 September 1954 and died in Paris on New Year's Day 1990, aged 35. In between he sold hand-sewn dresses on the street and out of flea markets, got six pages in French Elle before he had a house of his own, and in June 1988 became the first American and the first Black designer ever voted into the Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter, the body that governs Paris ready-to-wear.

This episode covers the grandmother whose mismatched buttons became his signature, the one-way ticket the model Pat Cleveland left at his door, the golliwog logo he put on his own label and the argument it started, Bette Davis wearing his clothes on American late-night television, the five-million-dollar Warnaco deal, the Mona Lisa collection he called Lisa Loves the Louvre, and the eight hundred and sixty pieces of his work that survive at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Bob Mackie died on 14 September 2026, aged 87. At 23 he drew the sketch for the most famous dress of the twentieth century, the one Marilyn Monroe wore to sing "Happy Birthday" to President Kennedy in 1962, and the credit went to his boss. He spent the eleven years that followed making somewhere between fifty and seventy costumes a week for The Carol Burnett Show, and the decades after that dressing Cher, Diana Ross, Elton John, Tina Turner and the showgirls of Las Vegas.

This episode covers the year of art school he abandoned for a job, the curtain dress now in the Smithsonian, the 1974 "naked dress" that turned the Met Gala into what it is now, the feathered mohawk at the 1986 Oscars, the flame dress that six different stars have worn across fifty years, a fashion label that failed and came back and failed again, and the Tony he finally won at eighty.

Elizabeth Keckley was born into slavery in Virginia in 1818 and taught to sew by her mother. In November 1855 she paid twelve hundred dollars for her own freedom and her son's, most of it borrowed from the white women whose dresses she made in St. Louis. Six years later she was the most sought-after dressmaker in Washington and Mary Lincoln's closest confidante in the White House.

Then in 1868 she wrote a book about it, and the book cost her almost everything she had built.

This episode covers the purple velvet dress at the Smithsonian, the Contraband Relief Association she founded in 1862, the Old Clothes Scandal of 1867, the memoir that ended her career, the Lincoln assassination relics she refused to sell, and the grave marker that went missing for fifty years.

George "Beau" Brummell had no title, no business and no trade. He never designed or made a single garment. For about sixteen years in Regency London he was nevertheless the man every fashionable Englishman was copying, and menswear has looked more or less the way he left it ever since: wool instead of silk, cut instead of embroidery, almost no colour at all.

This episode covers where he actually came from, the five-hour dressing ritual that men of rank came to watch, what he genuinely changed about men's clothes, and the quarrel with the Prince Regent that ended him. It also looks hard at how much of the Brummell legend holds up, including a coat in a London museum that is widely described as his and that the museum itself will not attribute to him.

Last week covered how Paris couture survived four years of Nazi occupation.

This week covers what it cost: Coco Chanel's wartime relationship with a German intelligence officer and the genuinely contested case for whether she worked for German intelligence herself; Louis Vuitton's well-documented collaboration with the Vichy government; the designers who thrived under occupation and the people stripped of their businesses, deported, and killed for being Jewish; and the handful who used the cover of couture for real courage.

Part One, on the industry itself, is also on the feed.

French couture industry to Berlin and Vienna. It didn't happen, because one middle-aged couturier spent four years talking them out of it, meeting by meeting.

Part One of a two-part episode on Paris fashion under Nazi occupation: who left, who stayed, what the wartime regulations actually allowed, and who was left buying couture in a city where clothing was rationed to about one outfit a year.

Part Two - the collaboration, the theft, and the people who fought back