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.