SyncDash

Her book on burlesque sparked a worldwide craze, she talent spots for Anna Wintour and owns an archive of vintage clothing. Could Liz Goldwyn be any cooler?

BY Francesca Babb | 28 March 2011

The film-maker and writer Liz Goldwyn is something of a paradox. While you may not have heard of her she is legendary in the fashion world. A collector since her early teens, the 34-year-old Los Angeles native has the sort of priceless vintage archive that designers beg to borrow for inspiration. Such is her knowledge of clothing that in 1997, while still studying photography at the prestigious School of Visual Arts in New York, she was hired as a curator and consultant for Sotheby's newly created fashion department, a job she held for two years. Her wedding dress was designed for her, for free, by Nicolas Ghesquière of Balenciaga, who stitched 'NG 4 LG' in pale blue thread into its hem. Goldwyn was the first person to champion the Mulleavy sisters when their Rodarte label was a fledgling, emailing Anna Wintour to alert her to the new designers.

Related articles

Infocus Related products

'I remember the first Rodarte show,' says Goldwyn, in her somnolent LA drawl, as we sit and chat in the garden of the Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood. 'Of course, at first, everyone was like, "Really, Liz? They're from California!" But I told the editors they had to trust me.'

The trust paid off. There is no style tome now that would refuse Rodarte space on its pages. This is the way of Liz Goldwyn. She is always first on the scene, a setter of trends. Take burlesque. When she was 19 she decided to write a book on burlesque - the erotic cabaret entertainment popular between the 1930s and 1960s - having found two stage costumes in a charity shop. Nobody else cared, hardly anybody knew what it was then. But Goldwyn forged friendships with the strippers from the 1950s, listening to their stories and noting them down for her book, Pretty Things , which is reissued this month.

As Goldwyn became more embroiled in the world of burlesque, one of her elder brothers, the actor and director Tony Goldwyn ( Conviction , Dexter, Ghost ), told her she ought to make a documentary of her experiences. Film-making hadn't ever been on the cards at that point; she thought herself more of a rebel than that. As the granddaughter of the film producer Samuel Goldwyn, of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer fame (whose Hollywood home the family inherited and in which she grew up), and the daughter of Samuel Goldwyn Jr, a producer of art-house films, she would have preferred to defy expectations. But she did it. Her documentary was broadcast in America in 2005. Soon after, and in no way by coincidence, burlesque exploded worldwide.

'I don't think many people understood why I was so interested in burlesque when I first started,' she says, all pale complexion with startling red lips and huge, sprawling smile. 'People didn't know what it was, like they do now. There were really only
a handful of us, a handful of performers like Dita Von Teese and the Velvet Hammer girls, but there wasn't anyone documenting it. People were like, "What?" especially in the fashion industry - "Why do you care about these old women? Who cares?" Cut to a few years later and now people get it.'

It's true. Currently, all over Tube stations in London, you will find posters for the Hurly Burly Show, directed by William Baker, which is a feast of burlesque performance. Kylie Minogue (styled by Baker) has often incorporated the theme into her shows. Von Teese has become an international celebrity off the back of her burlesque act. I can name at least three of my not-particularly-outrageous friends who have been to burlesque dancing classes. Then there is the writhing, fishnet-clad, allegedly 'burlesque' dance-troupe-cum-pop-group the Pussycat Dolls. Are the ladies of Goldwyn's documentary turning in their graves as their carefully constructed craft is savaged by the masses?

'I think it's good if young girls are even aware of the word burlesque,' she says, after ordering a green salad and iced green tea. 'Then it's up to me and Dita to show them what it really is. I'm not against the mainstream becoming aware of it; I didn't work for 10 years not to have that happen, but I think, hopefully, it opens the door for dialogue. But the Pussycat Dolls are a very specific thing - [they] come out there and [they] show off their goods. That's not what I want to say. I want to say embrace your sexuality, own it, be confident, but you don't have to show everything. Respect yourself and make others respect you.'

As the daughter of the feminist screenwriter and novelist Peggy Elliott, Goldwyn's obsession with strippers must have somewhat jarred with her mother's viewpoint. 'I don't label myself a feminist,' she says. 'I love men, but I am all about promoting a better, healthier relationship between the sexes. I think the first wave of feminism, my mother's generation, a lot of their ideas were construed as anti-male - but maybe that's the way it had to be. They had to burn their bras, so we could come around and wear our corsets. I remember a lot of fights with my mother when I was little, because I wanted to wear pink. I was reading all this literature, but I still wanted to be a girl and flirt with boys. I think you can do both.'

Clothes, for Goldwyn, are a way of expressing her own form of feminism. It was during the making of her documentary that she discovered the power an outfit can possess. Nowadays she dresses for occasions, to suit or make her mood or, in some cases, to mask it. For months after her divorce from Frank Longo, a graphic designer to whom she was married at 19, she found she could only wear dark colours. It was when she noticed herself wearing pink 1950s dresses again that she knew she had turned a corner in the recovery process.

'I think in a lot of ways the burlesque queens taught me to embrace my sexuality,' she says, today wearing a black and white 1950s dress bought at a Los Angeles vintage fair. 'In a way I, and a lot of women of my generation, felt that in order to be taken seriously we had to deny we were sexual beings. I was working with a lot of men when I started out and I would wear 1960s shift dresses, nothing curvy. And through these women I started to think, "Wait a second - it's an advantage that I've got tits and an ass! It doesn't mean that I don't have brains.'

Some of Goldwyn's closest friends work in the fashion industry but she has a problem with the concept of 'fashion'. 'I have a lot of trouble with that word,' she says grimacing. 'I don't like a lot of things that go along with it: the way that women have to look a certain way to be beautiful. I've seen grown women judge each other like they're in a high-school cafeteria. I love costume, I love the craft of it and there are a lot of amazing people in the fashion industry, certainly, but I think we could use a broader perspective and a more empowering ideal for women. Even now sometimes I'll send Dita and Chloë [Sevigny], who are considered pretty fashionable, a message on my BlackBerry: "Can I rock this dress or are those New York girls going to tear me apart?'

The general rule, however, seems to be that if Goldwyn likes it, it's probably cool. She has been honing her eye for years on vintage and modern fashion alike, and her knowledge combined with her taste means she has a collection like no other. 'Clothing is my pornography,' she says. 'I went to the LA vintage fair on Saturday and it was like a dream. If we're there I can't talk to you, there is no chit-chat, it is on . I have dreams at night sometimes that I'm vintage shopping. But in LA retro culture is just part of the thing you do. When we were kids we didn't have allowances and it was not cool to wear designer clothes. So it meant that we were into 1920s dresses when we were 13.'

Her collection now is vast - large enough to have required an entire storage unit back in 2001, when her apartment near Ground Zero had to be evacuated post 9/11. 'It's… a lot,' she says, with a rather bashful smile. 'But working at Sotheby's introduced me to the idea that collecting clothing - which I had been doing since I was 13 - was actually a "serious" pursuit and that there were museums and organisations worldwide devoted to the study of it. It made me realise what I thought was a hobby was something other people saw as a collection. It was a fortuitous time and place in my career. I'm always donating - I give a lot to exhibitions and to people who need them. And I wear my collection. Some purists will say that means it isn't museum quality, but life is too short. And even now there are times when I'm like, "I have nothing to wear, it all looks terrible on me!'

Goldwyn's work currently shifts between personal and commercial projects. In 2000 she did a two-year stint as a global consultant for Shiseido, founding a fashion sponsorship and arts installation for the beauty brand, and recently made a series of short films for the French department store Le Bon Marché. She raises funding for her own projects through grants.

'I lost a big grant for one film,' she says, 'because I made a music video for a band called Hot Lunch. Journalists picked up on it and said, "Liz Goldwyn made a soft-core porn video" - which it really wasn't - and that my grandfather must be rolling in his grave. I was really quite offended.'

For now fashion remains a passion rather than a way of making money. 'Designers go to places to hire vintage clothes,' she says. 'People get paid to lend. But that's not my thing. I'm not in this as a business; it's more like friendship. Erdem, Kate and Laura [Mulleavy]… We're friends, we hang out, we party, we cook dinner and go to book stores and museums. It's just like having friends who are chefs or musicians or actors, right?'

Similar, perhaps, but frankly we'd prefer the friends who can custom-make our Balenciaga wedding gowns…

Pretty Things: The Last Generation of American Burlesque Queens, by Liz Goldwyn, is published by Harper Collins at £12.99

ncG1vJloZp%2BZo522sLqNrZylnZenrrG0jZymZ62bZLumw9JmnZ6ZpKq%2Fpr%2BOjYSAcGNug3F%2BkGiDorJdfLytsNaypWappZqyr3nOn2Scp5%2Bhe6nAzKU%3D