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

Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione, was sent to Paris in 1855 by her cousin, the future architect of Italian unification, with one unofficial job: win over Napoleon III. She did. Then, starting in 1856, she spent the next forty years and most of her fortune directing a photographer named Pierre-Louis Pierson through several hundred elaborately staged self-portraits, choosing the costumes, the poses, and the camera angles herself, right up until her own decline in the 1890s.

This episode covers her disputed birth records, the affair with Napoleon III and how it actually (probably) ended, her disputed role in Italian unification, the photographic project that made her one of the most photographed people of the entire 19th century, and her strange, reclusive final decades.

Hardy Amies spent the Second World War running covert sabotage operations behind enemy lines in occupied Belgium for Britain’s Special Operations Executive, rising to lieutenant colonel, all while still designing rationed civilian clothing back home. A decade later, he became one of Queen Elizabeth II’s official dressmakers, held the Royal Warrant for over three decades, and later staged fashion history’s first men’s ready-to-wear catwalk show.

This episode covers his wartime double life, a widely-repeated online claim linking him to something called "Operation Ratweek" that turns out, on closer inspection, to be a mix-up with a real but entirely unrelated Yugoslav operation, his decades dressing the Queen, and how he quietly reinvented British menswear.

Ann Lowe spent nearly forty years dressing America's oldest, richest families, the Auchinclosses, the du Ponts, the Rockefellers, including designing Jacqueline Bouvier's 1953 wedding dress to John F. Kennedy, one of the most reproduced wedding gowns in American history. She built her career under segregation, survived a flood that destroyed the wedding dress ten days before the ceremony, and was never publicly credited for it at the time: Jacqueline Kennedy herself once described her only as "a colored woman dressmaker." This episode covers Lowe's start in Clayton, Alabama, her training in a segregated New York classroom, an uncredited Oscar-winning gown for Olivia de Havilland, the business collapse that followed her son's death, and the recognition that only arrived decades after her own death in 1981.

Extra research notes, including a much longer look at Janet Lee Bouvier Auchincloss, are up on Substack: thefashionmemoir1.substack.com. This episode is also on YouTube, The Fashion Memoir | Podcast, if you'd rather follow along with the images.