Stephen Graff

The people who are fans of the DDLM are the most hardcore of all of our visitors.

I don't want to say people dance in place and scream, but there's a level of enthusiasm.

There's been a moratorium on traveling since 2015.

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.

Every outfit that's on display has to come off, be condition reported and vacuumed.

Pretty labor intensive.

That's why they rest four out of every six years and why they don't travel anymore.

Because of the pandemic, there were no in-person runway shows.

Business needed to proceed or limp along, I guess, as much as possible.

The oral history surrounding Tata Delamotte is that the individual outfits took as much time as a full-size outfit.

Within that tradition, those three fashion houses went back and created wonderful works of art in and of themselves.

I know we didn't follow up on it.

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?

And of course it went nowhere, which is fine.

Where the boost really, I think, came was after The New Look.

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.

It got people here, but they came fairly uninformed.