How Did Paul Brockmann End Up With 55,000 Dresses? One Purchase at a Time

In Germany, Margot wanted to be a seamstress, but when she came to America, she had kids — a daughter, Louise, who works as a property manager in Beverly Hills, and a son, who now lives in Michigan. Paul became a general contractor and was gone 20 hours a day and "that was the end of all that stuff." Sewing fell by the wayside.

So Paul shopped by himself. He'd buy the dresses before work, after work, sometimes during work. "I keep my eyes open and I go shopping." It's not that he'd go out looking for the dresses, exactly. Not unless there were end-of-season sales at department stores, in which case he'd visit Sears and JC Penney, where he'd befriended the sales clerks. "And they showed me the dresses. For reasonable prices. That I couldn't let go." He'd bring home 30 dresses at a time.

Otherwise, yard and estate sale signs were like catnip. He could not resist. "I was happy-go-lucky," he says. "I did it not on inspiration ... " He struggles to describe the thrill of driving by a yard sale and glimpsing a wisp of shiny taffeta hanging on a garage door.

PHOTO BY STAR FOREMAN

Some of the thousands of dresses in the warehouse

PHOTO BY STAR FOREMAN

Related Stories

• Fanatics! All You Have To Do Is Let the Music Play
  August 9, 2013
• Fanatics! Henry Rollins' KCRW Show Tomorrow Night: Great German Music
  August 3, 2012
• Henry Rollins: The Column! I'm Not Dead Yet
  February 9, 2012
• Ask Mr. Gold: This or That Little Piggy. Going Ham for the Holidays?
  December 9, 2009
• GOING HAM FOR THE HOLIDAYS
  December 10, 2009

More About

• Bremen
• Paul Brockmann
• Santa Monica
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Ballroom Dancing

He bought regardless of size. He didn't even check. He was, in other words, completely impractical. "If there was a dress that I liked, I could visualize what she would look like in it. And I had to have it," he says. "Even if it was the wrong size." It is a notion both romantic and impertinent.

Margot's size changed over the years, he notes. She shoots him a look that says, "You are treading dangerous waters now, buddy." She wore a size 6 when they met but today wears a 14. "You know, it's a crazy idea, but I kept thinking maybe my wife grows into them," he says, laughing at his own ridiculousness. "Whether losing weight or gaining."

Occasionally, she would alter a dress if he came home with one he seemed especially smitten with. But for the most part, they remained unworn.

Paul did not set out with a budget. "I spent whatever I had in my pocket. If I was broke, I'd wait until next week." Sometimes he bought 15 dresses, sometimes one. "Depends what I came across."

The most he ever spent was $300. "Let me show it to you," he says, and fetches a plastic Nordstrom bag. Inside is a black gown with gold lace ruffles. Margot has never worn it. She has never seen it. "I guess it went straight to the garage," she says.

The garage is where the dresses went when Margot's walk-in closet eventually, inevitably, maxed out.

"Would you quit?" Margot would say, when Paul came home with a dress, or two, or 10. And, "You've been shopping again?!" And, "I don't need all those dresses!" And, "You're crazy!"

At what point does a collector become an insane person? Paul is by all other accounts a steady, reasonable man. A hardworking man. A businessman. Yet Margot's protests fell on deaf ears. "It was not going to stop me. I was gonna buy dresses no matter what," Paul says. "I never thought of having enough. It didn't matter how many I already had. I didn't care. I had to have that one, because it was not in my collection yet."

Eventually, he took to hiding them from her. He'd sneak the shopping bags in, whisking them directly from his truck into the two-car garage.

"A lot of times he wouldn't tell me," Margot says.

"There's a new bag in the garage. Where'd that come from?" she'd ask, though she knew perfectly well.

Paul: "That's been here for quite some time."

Margot: "Oh no, it's not. The garage is getting fuller and fuller. I'm not blind."

Stop, she'd beg. Please. But he couldn't. "It just got to be a habit," Margot says.

When the garage of their house in Lomita filled up, Paul rented shipping containers, six total. He kept them secret. Imagine what people would say. What kind of man collects dresses? "They maybe think there's something wrong. Who's this idiot? They maybe think that I was wearing the dresses, or off the wall, or that I didn't have the right mind."

Out dancing, friends would remark on Margot never wearing the same dress twice. Where do you get them, they'd ask?

"And little bit I lied," Paul admits. She sews them, he'd say.

"Most men, they don't care what their wife puts on," he says. "I'm different. I like my wife to look good at any time."

If Paul had his way, Margot would change clothes three times a day.

Yet at some point, Margot, once the collection's ostensible raison d'être, had become an afterthought in his obsession.

"It was always in the back of my mind, we're going to have to do something," she says. "We couldn't keep on keeping them."

Things went on this way "until last year," Paul says, "when my daughter walked into my garage and said, 'What's all this?' "

What Louise actually said was, "What the HELL is all of this?"

The garage door was open. The space was crammed floor to ceiling with black trash bags.