Avery Trufelman

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.

In 1946, the Théâtre de la Meude 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.

The Teatro de la Mer was sent to a department store in downtown San Francisco that was named, confusingly, the City of Paris.

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 Spreckles.

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.

France pretty much forgot about the Théâtre de la Mode too.

The mannequins were generally assumed to be lost or destroyed.

But as you know, they weren't.

The Teatro de la Mud was perched on a mountaintop overlooking the Columbia River Gorge.

With Linda.

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 Condé Nast.

Of course, Susan Train knew all about the Teatro del Amad.

Susan flew from Paris to the Pacific Northwest to see the mannequins.