Rare Photographs From Inside a Hollywood Costume Archive

Mimi Haddon’s Artful Photographs of Vintage Accessories

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Mimi Haddon

By Alice Newell-Hanson

• June 6, 2018
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It’s impossible to miss Palace Costume as you drive south down Fairfax Avenue in West Hollywood. The vast costume rental wardrobe, one of the largest collections of vintage clothing in the country, has a three-unit-wide stucco facade airbrushed with murals of ghosts and mythical creatures. The building is eccentric even by Hollywood standards; one doorway doubles as the mouth of a large trompe l’oeil gargoyle.

But the archive is also a serious business. Founded by its owner, Melody Barnett, as a vintage clothing store in the late ’60s, Palace Costume has since grown into an important resource for the film industry: professionals can search through some 500,000 garments and accessories of every era and aesthetic to find the perfect rhinestone rodeo jacket, Victorian petticoat or reproduction medieval tunic. And while Palace Costume’s wares have appeared in major movies from “Beloved” to “Boogie Nights,” its doors remain closed to visitors who don’t work in film production.

A rare exception is the Los Angeles-based artist and photographer Mimi Haddon. She met Barnett though a stylist friend a decade ago and immediately fell in love with her collection. “When you walk in, you see these amazing vignettes with mannequins. It’s not just a warehouse — there are all these displays arranged with love and humor,” Haddon explains. In 2015, while studying for her M.F.A. in fiber art at California State University, Long Beach, she started documenting the archive’s pieces. Once a week, she would make the trip to Hollywood to photograph a different set of treasures: a troupe of '40s dancing shoes on one visit, a collection of lace collars the next. Though she recently graduated and has since increased her visits to twice a week, “I haven’t even scratched the surface,” she says. “It would take a lifetime.”

The images Haddon shares here depict one of Barnett’s many glove collections, a set of delicate lace-trimmed pieces from the ’20s and ’30s. Impressed by their intricacy — “they almost look like miniature dresses” — Haddon photographed each pair on a lightbox to illuminate its construction. Next, she plans to assemble the images in a book. Along with this series, it will include photographs of what are perhaps her favorite pieces at Palace Costume: “Melody actually lives in the space, and in her apartment is the most amazing vintage lingerie collection you’ve ever seen.”