The Fashion Memoir

Roseanna | The Memoir House Productions

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Fashion & Beauty
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Every designer who changed the world left a story most people never heard. The Fashion Memoir gives full biographical portraits to the style icons who shaped culture and rarely got credit. Each episode follows one designer or icon through their life and the mark they left on how the world dresses. Made for anyone who loves fashion and history. New episodes every Monday and Thursday.

12h ago

The History of Women's Pockets

For about two hundred and fifty years, women had the bigger pockets. An eighteenth-century tie-on pocket was the size of a modern tablet, tied round the waist under the skirts, and it held your keys, your money, your sewing kit and your love letters. Then the silhouette changed in the 1790s, and the pocket did not fit underneath it. This episode traces the pocket from a pouch stitched to a Copper Age belt, through the century when men's clothes swallowed their pockets, to the Victorian fashion press arguing about where a woman's pocket should go, the suffragists who demanded pockets alongside the vote, and the 2018 study that measured eighty pairs of jeans and found women's front pockets forty-eight per cent shorter than men's.
3d ago

Lee Miller: From Vogue Cover to War Correspondent

Lee Miller was on the cover of American Vogue in March 1927, as a drawing by the illustrator Georges Lepape. Eighteen years later she was photographing the liberation of Dachau for the same magazine, and cabling her editor in capital letters to beg her to believe it. In between she ran British Vogue's studio through the Blitz, shooting fashion under clothes rationing, and talked her way into a siege in Brittany she was not accredited to cover. This episode covers the Conde Nast discovery story that the Tate's own curators say has no documents behind it, the 1928 Kotex advertisement, the solarisation years with Man Ray, her work in Egypt, the wartime fashion photography she made for her editor Audrey Withers, the Paris Liberation assignment that sent her straight to the couture houses, and the sixty thousand negatives her family found in the attic after she died. Content note: this episode mentions child S.A., photographs her father took of her that biographers find uncomfortable, depression and heavy drinking, and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. The camp photographs are not described in detail.
Oct 29

Annette Kellerman: The Swimmer Who Popularised the One-Piece

Annette Kellerman was an Australian champion swimmer who swam the Thames for a newspaper, tried to swim the English Channel at least three times, performed underwater ballet in a glass tank on three continents, and sold one-piece bathing suits under her own name for the better part of twenty-five years. By the 1910s, "an Annette Kellerman" was a name for that style of swimsuit. She is remembered instead for being arrested on a Boston beach in 1907 for wearing one. That story is repeated by encyclopaedias, museums and halls of fame, and nobody has found a contemporary record of it. The earliest versions I have found are newspaper pieces from the early 1950s, and the main one is her own recollection. This episode covers what women actually wore into the water before her, how stockings came to be sewn into a racing suit for a royal audience, the Harvard doctor whose careful remark that she was near the ideal figure became a headline about the perfect woman, the lost million-dollar film she may or may not have appeared nude in, and the two surviving swimsuits in Australian museum collections that tell the real story.
Oct 26

Anna May Wong, Part Two: The Dragon Dress

"I'm afraid that I'm a woman without a country." Anna May Wong, 1938, on taking her American clothes to China and finding she was foreign there too. Part Two of two, covering 1931 to 1961: the Travis Banton dragon gown now in the Metropolitan Museum and where its dragon really comes from, the two parts she was refused for being too Chinese to play Chinese, the nine months in China, the auction of her own wardrobe, and the television series she pitched herself and which no longer exists. Part One, The Certificate of Identity, covers 1905 to 1931.
Oct 22

Anna May Wong, Part 1: The Certificate of Identity

Anna May Wong was born in Los Angeles in 1905 and spent her life carrying a card that certified she had been admitted to her own country as a native, on a doctor's word. Part 1 of 2: from a laundry on Figueroa Street to a Broadway stage in 1931, by way of Berlin. The modelling job at ten, the Chinese Exclusion Act file, the Technicolor lead at seventeen, the production company she founded at nineteen, and the reasons she gave for leaving America. Part Two, The Dragon Dress, covers 1931 to 1961.
Oct 19

Patrick Kelly: The First American in Paris Ready-to-Wear

Patrick Kelly was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi on 24 September 1954 and died in Paris on New Year's Day 1990, aged 35. In between he sold hand-sewn dresses on the street and out of flea markets, got six pages in French Elle before he had a house of his own, and in June 1988 became the first American and the first Black designer ever voted into the Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter, the body that governs Paris ready-to-wear. This episode covers the grandmother whose mismatched buttons became his signature, the one-way ticket the model Pat Cleveland left at his door, the golliwog logo he put on his own label and the argument it started, Bette Davis wearing his clothes on American late-night television, the five-million-dollar Warnaco deal, the Mona Lisa collection he called Lisa Loves the Louvre, and the eight hundred and sixty pieces of his work that survive at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Oct 15

Bob Mackie: The Costume Designer Who Dressed Cher and Carol Burnett

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.
Oct 12

Elizabeth Keckley: The Dressmaker Who Bought Her Own Freedom

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.

Every designer who changed the world left a story most people never heard. The Fashion Memoir gives full biographical portraits to the style icons who shaped culture and rarely got credit. Each episode follows one designer or icon through their life and the mark they left on how the world dresses. Made for anyone who loves fashion and history. New episodes every Monday and Thursday.

Creator

Roseanna | The Memoir House Productions
Years Active

2026
Episodes

18
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© Roseanna | The Memoir House Productions
Show Website

The Fashion Memoir