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

"What do you mean?" Paul said.

"What do you mean, 'What do I mean'? What is all this stuff?"

So Paul opened one of the bags and pulled out the garments neatly folded inside. "They're filled with dresses?" Louise said. "You've got to be kidding me."

PHOTO BY STAR FOREMAN

Molly Morgan models a dress from the Brockmanns' collection.

PHOTO BY STAR FOREMAN

Paul and Margot Brockmann's dress collection now fills a warehouse.

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"He'd built, like, little partitions, and a second level," she recalls.

"What are you going to do with them?" Louise asked.

"I'm gonna leave them to you," Paul said.

"Oh no, you're not."

Louise, who has her mom's unsentimental practicality and her dad's bullheadedness, is 55 years old. When she was growing up, her dad was interested in hunting, fishing, golf, hammers and nails. She had absolutely no idea he was collecting dresses.

"Well," she reconsiders, "I guess that's not quite the most truthful statement." For a while, when her father was thinking about moving from Arizona to Los Angeles and he'd visit Louise in Santa Monica, he'd want to go to vintage clothing stores. It struck her as odd, "but you don't really second-guess your parent."

Earlier still, when she was a kid, she remembers him helping her mother design dresses to sew. They'd lay the patterns out on the dining room floor. "I never thought that was weird. My dad's a good mathematician. I didn't realize he was that interested in clothing."

True, he'd always had a thing about dresses. Margot was a stay-at-home mom. Every day, she made her kids sit down at 4 p.m. for cake and coffee, a German tradition, after which they were allowed to go out and play. Margot may have worn shorts during the day, Louise says, but "when my dad came home, mom always had stockings on, heels and a dress."

To this day, Louise wears dresses during the holidays to please her dad. "It's better not to deal with the aftermath. He gives me a hard time if I wear pants."

His household remains old-fashioned, formal and patriarchal. Louise bristles at the thought of her mom always in a dress. "That kind of pisses me off. Why do you have to tell her what to wear? Really? If we go to a baseball game and it's freezing outside, she'll wear stockings and a skirt."

In Ohio, Paul hid the dresses in his workshop. In Arizona, he and Margot lived in a huge, unfinished house with 2,000 square feet of storage. There the dresses hung until the Brockmanns decamped to Los Angeles, where the dresses took over the closet, then the garage, then the shipping containers and now a warehouse in Gardena.

"I walk around here and I still can't believe it," Louise says. She's at the warehouse, and as she takes in the double-decker garment racks her father installed, the pile of unopened plastic bags underneath a tarp in the corner, a small mountain of yet more dresses, her voice becomes clipped and insistent. "Honestly, I don't think he had any idea what was gonna happen with these in the future. It's like, what are you saving them for? What?"

Paul never had an answer.

"We've got to sell," Louise decided.

They argued about selling — whether to sell, how to sell, how much to sell for: "My father and I are two peas from the same pod. We're both hardheaded. He has his ideas and they're antiquated in some respects, and I have mine."

Mainly they argued about whether the dresses were worth anything at all. Louise thought they were probably ruined. Sitting in railroad cars out in the middle of a field, how could they not be? Some had been out there for 25 years. "They're probably moldy," she told him. "You're probably paying for clothes that are just rotten."

"No," he insisted. "They're not."

They picked the oldest container and brought it home. "When I saw the way he packed them," Louise says, "it looks like somebody's closet in there." He'd built closet rods inside the shipping containers, carefully placed the dresses in plastic dry cleaning bags and hung them. The floor, he layered with more bags of dresses.

Some were indeed ruined. The purples and dark blues had bled into the neighboring fabrics. But otherwise, the colors were vibrant. The whites were still bright. The dresses, amazingly, were in great shape.

"The more I saw these clothes," Louise recalls, "the more I thought, 'Dad, you have something here.' "

At first she took the dresses to swap meets. Then to the Vintage Fashion Expo in Santa Monica, where she met buyers and other people in the fashion industry.

On the advice of local designer Yotam Solomon, she hung the dresses by color, to make them more soothing to the eye. Her fingers cramped and turned black from gripping thousands of hangers. There were dresses in pale blues and seafoam greens and pinks and reds and yellows. There were wedding gowns with trains and bustles straight out of Gone With the Wind. There were cute ones and garish ones and massively puffy ones with pearls and bows and ribbons as far as the eye could see.

Don't look at them, she learned. Otherwise it will take forever.