Pod Insights Articles of Interest Fantasy of Fashion, Revisited About this episode What role does fashion have in a time of crisis? This is one of my favorite stories I've ever made. But there have been some updates since it came out.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 Hey there. It's Robyn from PRX. If you're a longtime listener of Radiotopia, you may know that we had a podcast that ran from 2016 to 2020 discussing every episode of the show The West Wing. Well, I'm excited to tell you The West Wing Weekly is back. Joshua Molina, who starred on The West Wing as Will Bailey, and Rishikesh Hirway, creator and host of Song Exploder, have reunited to discuss the hit Netflix political thriller The Diplomat. Just as they did in their original run, they're discussing each episode of the series in sequence, joined by special guests from the show and from the real world of diplomacy. Rishi and Josh will be wrapping up the first season with a special live taping at Union Chapel in London on November 14th. Subscribe now to The West Wing Weekly wherever you get your podcasts.
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1:25 Avery Trufelman? That's the realreal.com artikels to get your $25 off. Start shopping now at the realreal.com artikels. The following is one of my favorite stories I have ever had the privilege of making. It came out in 2020. I remember, I finished it in my apartment during lockdown. And since it came out, there've been a lot of new updates that have happened. So first I'll play the piece, and then there'll be a little tiny follow-up. Enjoy.
1:55 Avery Trufelman? Linda Tessner wanted out.
1:57 Speaker 02 I did not love living in the Midwest, the Midwest, and I really wanted to move.
2:02 Avery Trufelman? Linda went to Ohio State University for her master's in art history. And when she graduated in the early 80s, she was ready to high tail it out to New York or Boston.
2:11 Speaker 02 I wanted a museum job.
2:12 Avery Trufelman? But institution after institution, Linda was striking out. Then, one day, Linda was flipping through a newsletter for museum professionals, and she saw a job listing to be the director at a place in Washington State called the Mary Hill Museum of Art.
2:31 Speaker 02 And I thought, what the heck is this? And at the time, there was no internet in 1983. There was no way to kind of check it up or look at their website. I had no idea what this museum was about. But I sent them my materials anyway.
2:43 Avery Trufelman? Even though Linda was 26 years old and had never worked in museum management and didn't know this place at all, she got the job. And it was only then that Linda learned exactly where she was moving.
2:56 Speaker 02 Mary Hill Museum is in the middle of nowhere. The closest town is Goldendale, Washington, which is 13 miles away.
3:02 Avery Trufelman? The Mary Hill Museum of Art is a stately mansion perched on top of a cliff by the Columbia River Gorge. It's stunning, but it looks like it was just cut and pasted onto the Lewis and Clark Trail. It has absolutely no other buildings around it.
3:22 Speaker 02 It's a very curious place because you drive to it, and the museum just unfolds like a castle on the banks of the river, surrounded by basically nothing but hills.
3:33 Avery Trufelman? This is not what Linda was picturing when she got into the arts. She grew up reading fashion magazines, getting up on culture.
3:40 Speaker 02 Glamour was kind of my bible for a long time. I mean, as a teenager, I read every single issue of 17 Magazine.
3:47 Avery Trufelman? And then, jump cut to Linda at 26 years old, looking out over a vast expanse of the Columbia River.
3:53 Speaker 02 A friend of mine said that she gave me a year because I couldn't live among cowboys.
3:59 Avery Trufelman? The Maryhill Museum of Art is surrounded by acres and acres of ranchland. Visitors usually found the museum by accident as they were driving back from ski trips. The closest thing to a restaurant was the nearest gas station. The closest building at all was two miles away, a small cottage owned by the museum. That's where Linda lived, mostly alone. Why were you alone? You moved with your husband.
4:25 Speaker 02 I did. My husband was a research glaciologist, and he was on expeditions about nine months out of every year. So even before our marriage fell apart, I was living alone mostly. So it was mostly just me living there with a big dog.
4:37 Avery Trufelman? Linda's big dog was her protector, barking at the rattlesnakes that appeared in her yard and sometimes in her basement.
4:43 Speaker 02 I don't know, I was a braver person when I was 26 and stupid.
4:47 Avery Trufelman? As for the collection, what was actually inside the Maryhill Museum of Art, it was all over the place, as random and fascinating as its location. Because the whole museum was created as a lark by four random, fascinating friends. The main founder was businessman Sam Hill. He's friend number one. He began construction on this beautiful mansion in 1914 and named it Maryhill. And there's some debate about whether he named it for his wife or his daughter because they were both named Maryhill. Sam Hill roped in friend number two, Loie Fuller, a famous modern dancer, performance artist, and friend to the sculptor Rodin.
5:30 Avery Trufelman? She helped bring in a collection of Rodin's original casts to Maryhill. The third friend was Queen Marie of Romania. She had met Sam Hill and his world travels, and she is why the atrium of the Maryhill Museum of Art is full of beautiful Romanian furniture. And the fourth, and most important friend, at least for Linda, was Alma de Bretville Spreckels. She was the wife of Adolf Spreckels, head of the Spreckels Sugar Company.
6:01 Speaker 02 When I was a little girl, the boxes of sugar in our kitchen were always Spreckels sugar.
6:05 Avery Trufelman? Alma became one of the museum's first trustees and foremost benefactors. Her donation to the museum collection would have the biggest impact on Linda's life. And it was a bunch of creepy dolls.
6:22 Speaker 02 I shouldn't say this, but it was, I thought they were the most macabre objects I'd ever seen.
6:26 Avery Trufelman? When Linda got to Maryhill, she stumbled on a glass case full of these dolls. And they weren't like baby dolls. They were clearly supposed to be adults. But they were thin and skeletal and looked like they were out of The Nightmare Before Christmas.
6:41 Speaker 02 Some of them were taken apart, so you'd see the, a mannequin, a wire mannequin with a disembodied head. You'd see these parts, little shoes, little purses, these wire bodies, these very blank, ghost-like faces.
6:56 Avery Trufelman? The dolls were 27 inches tall, about double the length of your forearm. And they all wore strange, dirty dresses and mismatched jackets, all bedraggled from years of volunteers playing with them and switching up their outfits. There were around 50 of these dolls displayed in the glass case, all just bunched up close together like they were on crowded bleachers. A bright fluorescent light flickered above them, accentuating their creepiness. Apparently, there were about 100 more of these dolls in storage. Linda did not know what was up with these dolls, but she couldn't really dwell on it.
7:32 Speaker 02 Frankly, there were so many things that had to be done at Maryhill. I mean, absolutely everything was in some sort of disrepair or dysfunction. Everything. I mean, from the bathrooms to signage.
7:47 Avery Trufelman? So, among the Rodin sculptures, the Romanian furniture, a large collection of indigenous art, and a display of chess sets, there were the dirty dolls, piling up against the glass showcase in the hall, collecting dust. Until one day, when Linda got a call from a curator at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. She asked Linda if she could come to Maryhill because she wanted to see these dolls. And that was when Linda learned what she had on her hands. These dolls weren't supposed to be so macabre. Actually, they were kind of heroes, in a way. Because these dolls had saved French fashion.
8:32 Speaker 03 This is the end of German pride and power in Paris. It began with the fall of France, and now amid the cheers of the people, the Nazi has fallen.
8:45 Avery Trufelman? After four devastating years of Nazi occupation, Paris was liberated on August 25, 1944.
8:53 Speaker 03 Feast of liberation at the Paris Opera of long renown, and all through the city, the same sights and sounds.
8:59 Avery Trufelman? Ecstatic, Parisians rejoiced in the streets. Some of them gathered up the ration tickets that had governed their lives and tore them into confetti. And this turned out to be a very bad idea because the war was not over. They'd still need those ration tickets. In the aftermath of the occupation, more than 5 million French adults and children didn't have adequate shelter or food. Parisians, dressed in ratty, worn clothes, walked and bicycled through their dark city. The capital of light, of art, of culture, was a shell of itself.
9:36 Speaker 03 Liberated by its own people and by a French nation.
9:42 Avery Trufelman? During the course of World War II, Paris lost its position as the epicenter of contemporary fine art. That moved to New York City. The literary world also re-centered around New York. But Paris was determined not to lose its soul, or at least not to lose everything to New York. Somehow, even though they didn't have electricity, Paris had to remain a capital of beauty and ideas. It had to retain its title as the capital of fashion.
10:11 Speaker 04 Look at it this way. France has been relying on the couture industry and all of the other industries it involves: the textile industry, the industry that makes all of the zippers, the buttons, the hooks, the feather workers, the embroiderers.
10:29 Avery Trufelman? This is Melissa Leventon, an independent curator, fashion historian, and appraiser.
10:33 Speaker 04 That's been a big part of not only France's economy, but France's national identity since the 17th century. They're not just going to let that go because of four-year occupation by Germany. They were not going to let it die without a really tough fight.
10:50 Avery Trufelman? Before the war, in 1939, the French fashion industry employed more than 900,000 people. It was the second-largest industry in France. And then by the end of the occupation, Paris fashion houses were just gasping for breath.
11:06 Avery Trufelman? They had no customers and no materials at all. Everything had gone to the war effort. Shreds of leather and buttons were rare. Even spools of thread were few and far between. And this was really hard for France. I mean, the country has a department of its government devoted to regulating high fashion. It's called the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture. And even in that post-occupation scarcity, the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture wanted to send a message to the world.
11:38 Speaker 04 We are still here. We were not destroyed by the war. And we kept our skills. And we might not have much in the way of materials, but we're just going to figure it out. We survived, and we want you to know that we survived. But in order to keep going, we need our customers back.
11:57 Avery Trufelman? And the Chambre Syndicale came up with an idea. They would gather all the famous French fashion designers together to do a joint fall collection. They would use real fur, real leather, real silk, no compromises. Well, except that everything would have to be in miniature. That way, they could scrape together just enough to make tiny outfits, tiny shoes, little purses and gloves and belts, and still use real materials. So they revived an old, old French practice: fashion dolls.
12:34 Speaker 04 So let's talk about fashion dolls. The way dressmakers and women who were called milliners, marchands de mode, kind of like fashion stylists of today, they sent around dolls dressed in the latest fashion.
12:48 Avery Trufelman? Dolls were, in effect, the first catalogs. Clotheurs were sending out dolls to wealthy families in royal circles way before the first fashion magazine came out in the late 1700s. So the Chambre Syndicale decided to use dolls again. They reached out to fashion houses like Balenciaga and Nina Ricci and Hermès, and they each volunteered to create an outfit or two. The project was organized as a fundraiser for war refugees and victims, but it was also an advertising campaign, marketing the concept of French chic.
13:24 Avery Trufelman? The collection of 228 fashion dolls would be called the Theatre de la Mode, the Theatre of Fashion. And they would be sent to the major cities across Europe and eventually, America. And each showing would announce to the world that the couture houses in France were still in business, that Paris was still the capital of glamour and luxury, even though the city barely had power. And, OK, so I keep calling them dolls, but I'm wrong. They are not technically dolls.
13:56 Speaker 05 We have doll enthusiasts who are like, "We want to see the dolls. You can see the mannequins."
14:02 Avery Trufelman? This is collections manager Anna Goodwin, showing me some of the Theatre de la Mode mannequins.
14:07 Speaker 05 We definitely, at least I definitely, cringe anytime someone calls them dolls.
14:13 Avery Trufelman? These mannequins were sculpted by the artist Elian Bonabelle, and they are works of art in and of themselves. They were intentionally made with wire limbs on those blank plaster faces so that they would have no personality of their own.
14:27 Speaker 05 Absolutely. That was their goal, was to create a mannequin that just disappeared.
14:32 Avery Trufelman? They look like sketchbook drawings brought to life. The wire limbs look like 3D brush marks. The focus is obviously supposed to be on the impeccable clothes, like this dress Anna showed me in storage.
14:46 Speaker 05 It sort of has a bodice with buttons and a collar, and then it comes down to the waist where there's a belt, which you can see is actually a functional belt.
14:58 Avery Trufelman? It's like a teeny, tiny belt.
15:00 Speaker 05 It's about, the buckle is about half an inch by quarter inch.
15:05 Avery Trufelman? These are not doll clothes. There's no Velcro, no fake snap-on attachments. These are real outfits with little clasps and right, proper lining. I mean, they look like runway or red carpet looks put into a shrinking machine. It kind of feels like when you look at a freshly born baby and you're like, "Oh, my god, the little fingernails." Like, everything is there, all in proportion, but so careful and tiny.
15:34 Speaker 05 Tiny little buttons there.
15:36 Avery Trufelman? Oh my god, those tiny buttons on the sleeves. And let me tell you, these fashions from 1945 and 46 are not what you're imagining. Like, when I think 1940s fashion, I think broad shoulders, pencil skirts, muted colors, practical, low-heeled wartime attire. No, these are richly colored, full-skirted affairs with sumptuous overcoats and gowns intricately beaded with thousands of tiny sequins and hair resplendent with exotic bird feathers. There are tiny, radiant sundresses that hint at the 1950s to come and dramatic, pleated trousers that I would wear now. And the shoes.
16:19 Avery Trufelman? Do not get me started on the shoes. These are like, white leather platform oxfords, I guess, with a tiny buckle? Oh my god. And like, just the stitching is minute.
16:38 Avery Trufelman? The Theatre de la Mode premiered in March of 1945 in the west wing of the Louvre. It was a massive success.
16:47 Speaker 04 Supposedly, the installation in Paris raised something like a million French francs, which was a lot of money, given the total economic disaster that was France after World War II.
16:59 Avery Trufelman? As the Theatre de la Mode opened in March of 1945, Allied armies were pushing deeper into Germany, liberating French war prisoners. In April of 1945, France discovered the existential horror of the concentration camps. Bleakness was enveloping Europe, and the Theatre de la Mode was a tiny shred of pleasure. The show was extended for weeks and weeks and weeks. This miniature beacon of glamour attracted 100,000 visitors, who paid what little money they had to witness this luxurious vision of what Paris still was in their imaginations and maybe could be again.
17:43 Avery Trufelman? The Louvre's exhibit of the Theatre de la Mode ended around the same time that the war did, in May of 1945. And so, the Theatre de la Mode went on to the next phase of its mission. The show, rebranded in English as "A Fantasy of Fashion", was packed up and shipped to London, then Leeds, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Vienna, all to rave reviews. And then, the little mannequins went to show off to the old rival, New York City, to more rapturous crowds.
18:21 Speaker 06 Gering did his best to strip the French-style capital of its finest treasure, but there seems to be some things he missed. Certainly pretty snazzy. It looks like it was really worthwhile freeing Paris.
18:41 Avery Trufelman? In 1946, the Theatre de la Mode made its final stop, the De Young Museum in San Francisco. And everyone agreed this would be the exhibit's final resting place. France didn't want the mannequins anymore.
18:54 Speaker 04 They didn't need them back. So, the De Young had not earmarked funds to return them, like there was no spare cash in the system.
19:04 Avery Trufelman? The Theatre de la Mode was sent to a department store in downtown San Francisco that was named, confusingly, "The City of Paris".
19:12 Speaker 04 I remember talking to a woman who used to work at City of Paris, saying she remembered seeing them in the basement.
19:18 Avery Trufelman? And the mannequins just stayed in the basement of the City of Paris department store for years, until they were found by a wealthy San Franciscan named Alma de Bretville-Spreckels. In 1952, she shipped them off to her pet project, a museum in rural Washington State. They were sent without any accompanying documents or explanation as to their origin. Perhaps Alma thought these mannequins needed no introduction, that everyone would, of course, remember this worldwide sensation, even though, of course, they didn't.
19:55 Speaker 04 In a lot of ways, it seems to be the fate of this exhibition to get forgotten about from time to time.
20:09 Avery Trufelman? France pretty much forgot about the Theatre de la Mode, too. The mannequins were generally assumed to be lost or destroyed. But as you know, they weren't. The Theatre de la Mode was perched on a mountaintop overlooking the Columbia River Gorge. With Linda.
20:25 Speaker 02 Really soon after I started at Maryhill, I got this call from a woman named Anna Bennett, who was the textile and costume curator in San Francisco. And she wanted to know if she could drive out to Maryhill Museum and take a look at the Theatre de la Mode. It was like somebody walked into the museum and provided information that had been missing for a very long time.
20:45 Avery Trufelman? When this curator rediscovered the mannequins in the 80s, word traveled around academic fashion circles. A slow trickle of curators and professors and editors made pilgrimages to Maryhill, each one adding a little more to the pool of knowledge. But then finally, the news got to Susan Train, the Paris bureau chief for Conde Nast.
21:08 Speaker 02 She was a woman that wielded a lot of power. She was very interested in fashion. She'd been in the fashion industry for her entire life. At the time I met her, she must have been in her 50s, late 50s, maybe.
21:21 Avery Trufelman? Of course, Susan Train knew all about the Theatre de la Mode.
21:24 Speaker 02 And she knew its importance, and she couldn't believe that it was like there was this time capsule, there was this collection sitting in where? Like Goldendale, Washington? What?
21:33 Avery Trufelman? Susan flew from Paris to the Pacific Northwest to see the mannequins.
21:37 Speaker 02 And was she wearing heels when she touched down at the Portland airport?
21:40 Avery Trufelman? Yeah. She always wore heels and always wore pearls with her blonde hair chopped in a chic bob. Oh, and she always carried a purebred, long-haired, American Kennel Club dachshund with her. Linda remembers she had one named Nephophia, which is a flower. I had to look it up.
21:57 Speaker 02 She was very intimidating because she was a very tall, thin, elegant, very elegant woman.
22:05 Avery Trufelman? Linda tried to roll out the red carpet as best she could. She took Susan to the only place you could eat out for dinner, which was a truck stop across the river called Jack's Fine Foods.
22:14 Speaker 02 This was a woman that, I mean, I'm sure that a french fry rarely crossed her lips.
22:19 Avery Trufelman? And when Linda took Susan to the Maryhill Museum to see the Theatre de la Mode. Susan adored it. She could see past the grime and the mismatched outfits and recognize what it once had been.
22:32 Speaker 02 And she looked at the Theatre de la Mode and she fell in love. It was kind of love at first sight.
22:38 Avery Trufelman? And there was another love blossoming between Linda and Susan, not in a romantic way.
22:44 Speaker 02 Maybe it was an older sister, younger sister relationship.
22:48 Avery Trufelman? Listen, you can hear it in Linda's voice.
22:52 Speaker 02 She wore these big earrings that were cut glass, but it was like a big chunk of rock on her ear. And they were, they were so shockingly beautiful to me. I'd really never seen anything like that. I remember once at lunchtime, I was saying, oh, Susan, I really, those earrings, I just, I just love them. And she immediately popped them off her ears and handed to me and said, I want them to, I want you to have them. She was generous like that. She was extremely generous.
23:16 Avery Trufelman? I mean, how could you not be completely taken with this glamorous person? It's the same thing that drew 100,000 starving French people to stare at the Theatre de la Mode. Glamour and luxury are powerful. Susan knew she had to bring these mannequins back to Paris to revive the Theatre de la Mode back to its former glory.
23:38 Speaker 02 She went back to Paris and got busy.
23:41 Avery Trufelman? Susan did her Paris Conde Nast bureau chief thing and pulled together an elite team to refurbish the Theatre de la Mode.
23:47 Speaker 02 There were moth holes and the mannequins, the mannequins themselves, some of them had to be re-soldered and some things had to be recreated. And then the, maybe the most vexing thing was that, well, meaning volunteers over the years had changed all the clothes. So they were, in no way were they in their original ensembles.
24:06 Avery Trufelman? This was a team effort from a crew of set designers, clothiers, and historians. Experts and artists referenced the black and white photographs from the original show and talked with the fashion houses to make sure the outfits were perfectly restored. Leather was polished, silk was dry cleaned, diamond jewelry was reconstructed, real hair replaced and combed. And once again, the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture was footing the bill. The cool thing was that many of the original artists and designers who worked on the project in the 40s were still alive to oversee the revival in the 80s. This labor of love they all thought they had lost. And if the mannequins were going to Paris, Linda had to go with them.
24:50 Avery Trufelman? She had to ensure they were safe because they were still in the Maryhill collection. But also, there were many parties and celebrations to attend.
24:58 Speaker 02 Well, I remember I had bought outfits for all of these events that were taking place in Paris. And I thought I knew what I was doing, but the minute I got to Paris, Susan wanted to, like, "What did you bring?" So I took all of the clothes that I had brought from home to her apartment one Saturday, and she was like, "No. No. No."
25:20 Avery Trufelman? There was nothing wrong with Linda's look, but Susan was just on a whole other level.
25:25 Speaker 02 I ended up, because she'd so disapproved of what I had brought from Oregon, she ended up wearing a lot of her clothes to these events. I think it was important to her that I looked a certain way, and I certainly did not want to disappoint her.
25:39 Avery Trufelman? For the next two years, as the mannequins were being fixed up, Linda went back and forth, from Paris to Goldendale, from champagne toasts to rattlesnakes and back again. Little by little, she was becoming more glamorous, under the tutelage of Susan Train.
25:57 Speaker 02 Whenever I came to Paris, Susan always made sure there were flowers in my hotel room when I arrived. The most astonishing bouquets, like a profusion of pink lilies. She arranged for me to have my hair done. She arranged for me to have my makeup done. She arranged for me to have a pearl choker made.
26:13 Avery Trufelman? Made?
26:13 Speaker 02 Made. She actually marched me, like, she just put me in the car with her driver, and she would come along with her little dog. And there was a jewelry store. I was like, "I know just where I need to take you for a pearl choker."
26:25 Avery Trufelman? It was a real, classic makeover montage.
26:28 Speaker 02 I actually have a scrapbook I could pull out and show you.
26:30 Avery Trufelman? Could you?
26:31 Speaker 02 Yeah.
26:32 Avery Trufelman? Linda has kept nearly every party invitation, every dinner menu. And in her scrapbook, there are lots and lots of photos. And Linda looks like a supermodel. She's tall and thin, with blonde, bobbed hair and her three-strand pearl choker, always with a drink in hand, flushed with laughter.
26:57 Avery Trufelman? The Theatre de la Mode was reopened in Paris in May of 1990 at the Musée de Art de la Mode. It was a smash success. There were parties and photo shoots and press interviews, and it was like Linda had gone through the looking glass. She was living the very fantasy that the Theatre de la Mode represented. Case in point, back in Washington State, Linda had cut out an article from Vogue about the up and coming dress designer Hervé Leger. And in Paris, Susan brought Linda to Hervé Leger's studio to get a dress fitted for her. It's simple, black and white with a drop waist. In her blonde bob and her Hervé Leger dress, Linda looked like a 90s flapper.
27:41 Avery Trufelman? It was like a fairy tale. Especially because this Hervé Leger dress was for an actual ball. After France, the Theatre de la Mode was exhibited at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it was on display during the Met Gala that year. And the Met Gala is just the fashion party. In 1990, Linda received an invitation.
28:09 Speaker 02 I was kind of bedazzled with the opportunity of going to this incredibly glamorous dinner party at the Met. Like, who would ever think that was going to happen when I moved to Maryhill Museum in 1983?
28:23 Avery Trufelman? And I can't help but notice, as the pictures in her scrapbook progress, Linda starts to look more and more like Susan.
28:30 Speaker 02 Somebody once laughed, like, "Oh, Linda, you're Susan's little mannequin. Like, she's dressing you." She had opinions about how I looked. She did, in a Liza Doolittle way. Like, "I can teach you how to be chic."
28:45 Avery Trufelman? Susan wanted to teach, and Linda wanted to learn. They were getting closer.
28:51 Speaker 02 We did love each other. We really did. We did love each other. We were very, very good friends.
28:57 Avery Trufelman? But Linda started imitating Susan in other ways, too. Less healthy ones.
29:02 Speaker 02 I'm sure she was naturally thin. So staying in that body that I had in Paris and New York was really hard. It took a lot of time.
29:11 Avery Trufelman? Linda was eating less. And, as she put it, exercising like a crazy person. And then you'd get back to Goldendale and you'd still be like, running and dieting?
29:22 Speaker 02 Yes, definitely.
29:23 Avery Trufelman? Really?
29:23 Speaker 02 Yeah. I didn't want to disappoint Susan.
29:28 Avery Trufelman? I know exactly what Linda is talking about. I think a lot of people do. There were years in my life where I tried to starve myself. And definitely a big part of it was I wanted to fit into beautiful clothing. And when you are intentionally starving yourself, that is a task that takes over your whole brain. I didn't think about anything else.
29:53 Speaker 02 It's not sustainable. And it's not even very fun. Because you're constantly, you're thinking all the goddamn time about what you're going to eat or not eat. So your entire world, like, it kind of pains me to think of those years, like, not thinking about other things, but thinking about assiduously writing down every calorie in a little notebook.
30:13 Avery Trufelman? In this condition, you feel like you're not human. Like, you can't eat meals and just enjoy life the way other people can. But I did it in pursuit of glamour. Of something that ascends to a higher plane than normal life. Something that's impossible.
30:29 Speaker 02 You can't stay this thin for that long. You can't. I mean, I couldn't. And it was, it created a real crisis of confidence.
30:39 Avery Trufelman? Even Susan could see that Linda wasn't doing well.
30:42 Speaker 02 She was a little worried about me, at how thin I had become. And I remember at one lunch, we were having lunch together, and she insisted on getting a bowl of strawberries and whipped cream for dessert. And I remember her sitting there saying, "Linda, eat."
31:00 Avery Trufelman? After New York, the Teatro della Moda went to Tokyo. And so did Linda. But in the pictures in her scrapbook, all the glamour appears to be taking a toll on her. She actually gained a lot of weight in only a few months from all the stress and traveling. And she was spending a lot of money.
31:17 Speaker 02 Oh, I put myself into debt by chasing, like, having to have the Herve Leger. I don't regret it. It was really exciting to wear that dress for one night at the Costume Institute gala. I would do it again. But it had major repercussions in my life that lasted for a long time.
31:36 Avery Trufelman? Financial repercussions?
31:38 Speaker 02 Financial repercussions, body dysmorphia.
31:42 Avery Trufelman? Linda started to wonder exactly why she was doing all this.
31:46 Speaker 02 Like, how much did I want to be like Susan Train? I mean, Susan was, in many ways, a very lonely person.
31:52 Avery Trufelman? "I didn't want to depend on anyone for anything," Susan Train told a Vogue journalist in 2007. "I never wanted to be identified with one click." The profile adds that Susan Train knew every designer but kept a professional distance, and that she intentionally did not spend time with Americans. Linda, apparently, was an exception.
32:15 Speaker 02 Well, I learned that what appears to be very glamorous can be very lonely.
32:20 Avery Trufelman? In watching Susan, Linda realized that she didn't want to be quite so addicted to her work, or quite so lonely, or quite so thin. And then the best possible thing happened. The show ended. The Teatro della Moda went back to Maryhill, and so did Linda, back to her little house on the cliff. But this whirlwind experience made Linda ready to move on. She went to live in New York for a spell, and then eventually went back west. And she lives in Portland now. And she's spent much of her career working in museums and collections there. She can drive to the Maryhill Museum of Art in two hours. And she does, every so often, to remember this beacon of hope for post-war France
33:05 Avery Trufelman? and this evidence of a parallel life she once had. Because the other witnesses to her story are mostly gone.
33:12 Speaker 02 My husband, John, met Susan and we went to France for our honeymoon. We went to Paris and it was so great to see Susan. We had meals together and it was the last time I saw her.
33:22 Avery Trufelman? Most of the artisans and experts and historians who were involved with the mannequins in both of their incarnations have passed away. In a lot of ways, this story has become Linda's.
33:34 Speaker 02 I'm kind of sick of people talking about, like, I did this or I had this and it changed my life, a life-changing experience. This actually changed my life. It taught me lessons that I think about today.
33:49 Avery Trufelman? After our weekend together, Linda sent me a quote that she had heard a long time ago, which had stayed with her. It was attributed to Ben Brantley, the theater critic for The New York Times. "Glamour is whatever you can't have. It is best perceived at a distance, either literally or emotionally. Knowledge kills glamour." This just seemed so utterly true to Linda. She experienced the shadow side of her jet-set life with Susan. She knew about the suffering and deep trauma behind the tiny mannequins. And yet, I personally don't know if knowledge kills glamour entirely. Wounds it severely, for sure.
34:32 Avery Trufelman? But it's hard to completely destroy the illusion. The aspirational pull of fashion carves out a space in our imagination. It's why we dream of Paris, why we want to see Cardi B on the red carpet in vintage couture. Glamour involves so much delicate placement of smoke and mirrors for the people who occupy that rarefied air, so much so that the pleasure in it is really ours. We, the viewing public, the audience. Linda knows this, and I think that's why she enjoys the show.
35:07 Speaker 02 I don't want to go anyplace else on the night of the Oscars. I want to be in front of my TV with absolute silence and I just want to watch. But I don't want to be that. And I don't even want to be in that world. Not again. That once was enough.
35:27 Avery Trufelman? From the vantage point of Linda's living room, the beautiful people on TV seem so small and innocuous. They almost look like little dolls.
35:41 Avery Trufelman? Since this story came out, the Teatro della Mode would become, during the pandemic and the years that followed, somewhat revived, which I will tell you about after the break. When my husband and I moved to a new apartment earlier this year, it was much smaller than our last apartment. And we suddenly were like, how do we deal with all our stuff? This is where Wayfair came in. Wayfair is the go-to place for affordable, stylish home furnishings. And they have some inventive solutions I never would have thought of on my own, like a bathroom caddy that fits exactly over the toilet to fit all my excess spillover skincare supplies. Wayfair has thousands of products across every single style, every single budget,
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36:57 Avery Trufelman? I first heard about The RealReal, I think, a decade ago. Suddenly, it was this place where you could get Prada pumps and Burberry jackets and Gucci handbags for a song. Like, I recently got this vintage 90s Yoji Yamamoto skirt that I wear constantly. The RealReal is adding thousands and thousands of items every single day. So it really does still feel like a treasure hunt, even though it has all the convenience of shopping online. And I periodically use it to clean out my closet. They make it so easy. The RealReal sends a representative to my tiny apartment to Pick up my things and assess them for me, and then it's done. Money just appears in my account. The RealReal is the most trusted name in authenticated luxury resale.
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38:02 Speaker 06 So your podcast about Teatro de la Mode was actually my first time hearing about Maryhill. It became a symbol of what Maryhill could be with job hunting after graduating. And it has this anxiety-induced grad student glimmer of hope.
38:18 Avery Trufelman? I met Brielle when she was a grad student, and now she works at the Maryhill Museum of Art.
38:24 Speaker 06 I'm Brielle Pazala. I am the Collections Manager at Maryhill Museum of Art. I started this summer, and I lucked out.
38:32 Avery Trufelman? I mean, it's wild. Now Brielle sort of has a version of the job that our protagonist Linda once had.
38:38 Speaker 06 Honestly, the day-to-day is like monitoring and maintaining the galleries, ensuring that there's no unwanted six-legged critter visitors. And it's smaller than other museums, but its impact is bigger than it feels like it should be. This place, two hours' drive from Portland, is actually like a treasure.
38:59 Avery Trufelman? In many ways, because of the Teatro de la Mode. I mean, it's a gallery of a kind of clothing that really doesn't exist anymore.
39:07 Speaker 06 It's really nice just seeing the different usages of the materials and just the variety, and learning about the permits we used to have for the export, import, and re-import of endangered and extinct species of feathers.
39:22 Avery Trufelman? Wait, the feathers on the Teatro de la Mode?
39:24 Speaker 06 Yeah, especially in the hats, like hummingbirds, birds of paradise.
39:29 Avery Trufelman? And if you want to see all those hats and dresses and teeny-tiny shoes, you have to go out to Maryhill. Like, you have to make that pilgrimage. The people who are fans of the
39:42 Speaker 03 T D L M are the most hardcore of all of our visitors.
39:45 Avery Trufelman? That is art curator at Maryhill Museum of Art, Stephen Graff.
39:49 Speaker 03 I don't want to say people dance in place and scream, but there's a level of enthusiasm.
39:56 Speaker 06 And sometimes you can just see who came just for Teatro de la Mode because they dress up.
40:01 Avery Trufelman? And people get dressed up and trek out to this museum in the middle of the Columbia River Gorge because the Teatro de la Mode isn't going to be touring around again anytime soon.
40:11 Speaker 03 There's been a moratorium on traveling since 2015.
40:14 Avery Trufelman? Those clothes are fragile.
40:16 Speaker 03 They're like you would expect 80-year-old garments to be. There's a little bit of fading on some fabrics and there's some tired wire mannequins.
40:27 Avery Trufelman? So the mannequins rotate out of their display every couple of months to give the clothes and their curators a little break.
40:33 Speaker 03 Every outfit that's on display has to come off, be condition reported and vacuumed. Pretty labor intensive. That's why they rest for out of every six years and why they don't travel anymore.
40:45 Avery Trufelman? But their reputation has traveled far beyond them, especially during the pandemic.
40:51 Speaker 03 Because of the pandemic, there were no in-person runway shows. Business needed to proceed or limp along, I guess, as much as possible.
41:02 Avery Trufelman? A number of fashion designers and brands proceeded to present their 2021 collections in miniature. The Belgian designer Walter van Buren Donk made glammed-up-looking fashion dolls that were almost like Barbies. Dior made little tiny dress forms, the kind without a head, and made fully intact couture gowns for them. Moschino used little marionettes and they made this promotional video with their creative director Jeremy Scott.
41:28 Speaker 03 I just love a puppet show. This isn't a puppet show. This is a fashion show. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to offend you. Shh. The show is getting ready to start. Take your seat.
41:46 Avery Trufelman? And all of these miniature collections were completely intricate and intact and complete as any full-size clothing collection.
41:54 Speaker 03 The oral history surrounding Teatro de la Mode is that the individual outfits took as much time as a full-size outfit.
42:02 Avery Trufelman? Within that tradition, those three fashion houses went back and created wonderful works of art in and of themselves. Did any of them reach out to Mary Hill? No. Apparently Jeremy Scott of Machino wanted to come by the museum, but that fell through. I know, we didn't follow up on it. But it's not like they're giving you any of the clothes. No, and I'm embarrassed to say I actually, before we had made the acquaintance of these folks, sent them a letter saying, hey, I have a great idea. Do you want to give us those clothes? Yeah, I think it's a great idea. And of course it went nowhere, which is fine. While the use of these miniatures in fashion houses might have brought in a few visitors, that wasn't where the real impact came. Where the boost really, I think, came was after The New Look.
42:46 Avery Trufelman? The New Look, the show on Apple TV Plus about the House of Dior. Creation cannot stop the bullet, but creation is our way forward. It's either episode three or it's episode four, but they're recreating the discussions behind what is the couture industry going to do to support relief? And they come up with this idea. Which is taking a few creative liberties, because when the Teatro della Mode was created, Dior didn't have his own house yet. He was working for the designer Lucien Wollong. So maybe he worked on one of these mannequins, but we're not 100% sure. It's not in his name. It got people here, but they came fairly uninformed. We had people wanting to see
43:29 Avery Trufelman? the Christian Dior mannequins, wanting to see the Coco Chanel mannequins, of which there are none. It makes sense why this was a pandemic thing, but do you think that this is going to revive the practice of miniatures? Do you see a future for it? Only anecdotally, and only one instance. I know a native artist who is a fashion designer. The designer Orlando Dugai, spelled D-U-G-A-I. Check him out. And he was here, you know, three years ago because
43:57 Speaker 07 He is interested in creating fashions in miniature. Cause every, you know, he's making bespoke clothing. And it gets worn once on the runway and then it's a lot of effort.
44:11 Avery Trufelman? Does Linda still stop by sometimes?
44:13 Speaker 07 I haven't emailed her since last week.
44:17 Avery Trufelman? Okay.
44:19 Speaker 07 She, we hear from her from time to time.
44:21 Avery Trufelman? Yeah.
44:23 Speaker 07 So, true confession, the podcast you did with Linda about Tater Del Amo and Susan Trainor. That's the only podcast I've ever listened to in my life.
44:32 Avery Trufelman? Oh, my God.
44:34 Speaker 07 And that will provide then the context for what I'm going to say next. I'm old enough that my father's entire generation was World War II vets. My dad, my uncle, their cousins, they were all in the service during the war. And so this is a historical continuum that doesn't seem that far away to me, even though it's 80 years.
44:56 Avery Trufelman? What do you think the connection? Cause it's funny to look at Tater Del Amo as a vestige of war, which it obviously is. But there's not a lot that's particularly warlike about it. What do you think it says about conflict?
45:10 Speaker 07 I think what it says is something really profound about humanity. And the depths of both creativity and hope that are available to people. And I'm not saying that there isn't, of course, a lot of trauma written into the text. But it doesn't have to be solely trauma.
46:29 Avery Trufelman? This episode was made back when Articles of Interest was a part of the podcast 99% Invisible, so it was edited by Chris Berube with insights and other edits from the rest of the staff, including Joe Rosenberg, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivian Le, Swan Real, Lasham Madan, Kurt Kohlstedt, Delaney Hall, and Katie Mingle, and especially, especially, my podfather, Roman Mars. The music is by Ray Royal, it was fact-checked by Tom Colligan, it was mixed by Sharif Youssef and Catherine Raimondo, and this kick-ass custom song is by Sasami. For images of the Teatro della Mode and images of the other fashion houses that all relied on miniatures during the pandemic, head to articlesofinterest.substack.com.
47:22 Avery Trufelman? Radiotopia.
47:25 Avery Trufelman? From PRX.
Previous Made in USA Next Clerical Collar Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated