The creative mind behind Hall of Wonders, Melanie Gillis, gets real with Display Copy about pandemic-era rebranding, vintage accessibility politics, and the mind-bendingly gorgeous designs of Valentina. 

Display Copy: You’ve been a beloved vintage curator in LA for quite a while now. How did Hall of Wonders come to be? 

Melanie: In the last couple of years I’ve gone through a vintage existential crisis. I’ve always been kind of an outsider in the high-end LA vintage scene, although I’ve been a part of it for a long time and have many friends in that space. I’ve never felt fully comfortable there. There’s always a part of me that’s like, “fight the system.”

In 1998 I started selling on EBay and then I moved business over to Etsy in 2012 while I worked in the film and television industry with my production company Cluebell. Back then, vintage was all about “seeking.” I was trying to find treasure, and I did. In 2018, a friend of mine who works in marketing helped me do a rebrand and I kept coming back to this idea of wonder and magic... like you can suddenly have this powerful feeling hit you; like you found something. [I was adopted and I have this whole backstory about finding my parents.] So, I was always seeking and digging and doing detective work. But in the last couple of years that switched and I’ve put it all to rest. Now, I’m more interested in alchemy. Taking something that exists and turning it into something else. Finding things that aren't necessarily the Holy Grail or things that are kind of gauche and figuring out how to make them beautiful. 

I’ve also been thinking about accessibility a lot. Like, is it really sustainable to sell vintage if nothing is accessible to people? If everything is $1,000, who are we doing this for? I’m like a Boxcar Child. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that series, but that’s where my soul is right now. I don’t want to go and stand in line at estate sales anymore. I’d rather dig and pick and scavenge. That’s the disconnect between where I was before and now. If I told my clients, “Yeah, I scavenge for a living.” They might not be cool with that. Even though deep down they must know that’s what we do. I want to take away some of that facade. Maybe that’s not apparent in my brand but this is the stuff that’s going on behind the scenes.

Display Copy: I think there’s a lot of people who will resonate with you on all of that. You’ve been in the industry for a long time so can speak from a place of wisdom.

Melanie: I started this in the late 90s. I was selling on Ebay and if you were doing that back then you were a weirdo. That crew was totally different! [laughs] I don’t know if you’ve seen the show Girlboss about the rise of Nasty Gal. That’s all true. I know those people. All the Ebay ladies that were like, “don’t cut up old dresses!” They banned me from the Vintage Fashion Guild. So, I have a history with all of that. It was a totally different world. Full circle, I admire those ladies. They were reservationists who didn’t care about fashion and more power to them. That makes me sound like one of those girls who's like, “I’m a friend of the band.” [laughs]

Display Copy: Is there a memory that sticks out to you when you realized you were interested in starting a business with sourcing vintage?

Melanie: There’s two core memories I have. I grew up in Nebraska and when I was around 8 or 9, my family was having a neighborhood garage sale. I remember going down the street to another neighbor’s sale and buying this little tile sampler kit. Then, I went back to my garage sale, took out my puff paints and drew all over them, glued magnets on the back, and sold them for a mark-up at our garage sale. [laughs]

Display Copy: The business mindset was there!

Melanie: Yeah exactly. Another memory I have was from when I was in college. There was an antique store near campus and in the basement they had all of this vintage clothing. I was digging underneath this rack one day and found a flattened hat. I don’t know how I knew what it was or what to do with it but I took it to my friend who worked in a costume shop and she steamed it back to life. It was this 1920s, blonde horse hair cloche that came down over one eye and had black buckles with rhinestones. I put that on Ebay and it sold for over $400. So that was the tipping point when I knew I had this instinct. 

Then I went full force into studying vintage. I became really obsessed. I was always on the MET’s website looking through every single thing that they uploaded to their online collections. The internet was so different back then. I was on message boards and would learn from people who had been doing this a long time. You’d upload photos from your digital camera and exchange pictures of labels. It was such a weird process. You couldn’t just reverse Google image something. You had to learn the hard way. Tens of thousands of hours of research. But I could take in a lot of disparate information and just absorb it.

Display Copy: So, how did you develop your own curatorial style from there?

Melanie: I wish it was more instinctual. I tend to operate a bit like a machine. Sourcing is almost academic for me—I watch all the runway shows and decide what speaks to me. I’m also really interested in trend cycles and how people think about clothing. I source with a blank slate with all of that bubbling in the background. If I find a crinoline, what does that mean fashion wise? I don’t want to just sell it as a crinoline, I want to put it into context. Well, Simone Rocha is doing a bunch of poofy skirts right now, so, let’s spin that out and see where it goes. I work in collections. Almost like a designer more so than a dealer.

Display Copy: What was going on internally when you decided to do a rebrand?

Melanie: I think it was probably a mid-life crisis. I gotta be real. Pandemic, mid-life crisis, whatever you wanna call it. We all had a Come to Jesus moment. “What does this all mean and what am I doing?” 

Display Copy: Is it a part of your personal ethos to not pigeonhole yourself to one idea of what your business is supposed to look like?

Melanie: Yeah! I don’t want to be boxed in. I just want to do what feels good. Why else run your own business? I could go work at a corporate job and have someone else tell me what to do but at least I wouldn’t have to post on Instagram about it. [laughs] 

Display Copy: With your background as a fashion history deep-diver, what styles are you personally drawn to and who are some of your favorite designers?

Melanie: Style-wise, I used to be very preppy, menswear inspired; kind of BODE-esque. Very Grace Wales Bonner. I moved away from that. Now I’m more drawn to Dune-core type stuff. I’m imagining what we would wear in space. This shift happened the same time as my mentality shift with vintage. Deep down there's a subversive edge even if I can’t fully create it. It’s the midwesterner in me that always brings me back, like, “Is this decent!?” [laughs]

In terms of contemporary designers, I like Sandy Liang and Simone Rocha. For a while I was really into Jonathan Anderson and Loewe. During the pandemic, I found it really inspiring when he was styling on dress forms. There’s also a collection I referenced recently, Spring 1994 Jean Paul Gaultier which is really iconic. Everyone has nose rings, maybe it’s appropriative or set in the future, probably both, but I love this Waterworld, Mad Max thing. 

Historically, Valentina is one of my favorite designers. She has a really interesting story. She’s Russian and was raised by nuns and lied about her age; she was like an early influencer. She was frenemies with Marlene Dietrich. Her stuff is absolutely, mind-bendingly gorgeous. It was often made out of leno gauze, think Madeleine Vionnet style draping but without all the pretense. She dressed Katherine Hepburn quite a bit who’s definitely a style icon for me. She’s basically cosplaying as a man sometimes. I tend to gravitate towards things that have kind of a genderless vibe. 

Display Copy: How did this affinity for Valentina begin? 

Melanie: I found one of her pieces. I got a bunch of stuff at a farm auction in Illinois. This is a long story so I’ll try and condense it for you. But, it’s also one of my coolest experiences in terms of buying. 

I went to this auction site in 2017 and it was all farm equipment mixed with Tiffany’s silver and was photographed really badly. I was going through the pictures and looking at these items of clothing and was like, “wait a minute. That’s a 1930s designer piece, who are these people?” In hindsight I should have bought everything. My package finally arrived and the star of the lot was this Paul Poiret gold gown from 1927. I saw the tag and just burst into tears. That had been on my bucket list. It went to auction in 2018 and it's in a museum now. 

One of the other pieces was a Valentina cape. That thing was one of the most beautiful pieces of clothing I’ve ever owned. It was so simple, like a black basketweave rayon floor-length cape with an interesting closure and that’s it. Perfect construction. Like Charles James level. And being the weird researcher that I am, I had to find out who these people were. Turns out, the mother of the woman who owned the farm was an heiress in the Chicago area and her husband was a famous architect who built a lot of houses in the Gold Coast area. She did a living memoir through the University of Chicago at Urbana-Champaign so I hired a researcher to go into their archives. 

Her memoir was so funny. She wanted to be a rancher but had these ultra-wealthy parents who dumped her and her sister off at boarding school in Paris while they went to party in the South of France. Her mother had an insane shopping habit and spent a million dollars a year [in the 1920s] shopping with Poiret and Callot Soeurs and all these big designers. These people were spending money like it was going out of style. 

We weren’t able to find the exact receipt for the dress but we found receipts for everything else, including a bunch of hats. There was a woman Madeleine Panizon who designed for Poiret and examples of her work simply do not exist. I can still access the farm auction listing on my computer and I can see now in the photos that they had one. It was just thrown on the grass. It hurts my soul to think about, I’ve literally had entire days where I’ve been depressed over it. But someone got them! 

Display Copy: Do you still have any of those pieces?

Melanie: I kept the cape for a long time, I couldn’t let go of it. But Kerry Taylor wanted it. I still have one Valentina piece, it’s a hat from the 40s, which is a bit after, to me, her best work. I don’t keep much. I still have a Lanvin dress from 1916 and a 1920s juliette cap that’s bejeweled. I sold almost everything during the pandemic. I quit! That’s where the change happened. [laughs] I got burnt out and I sold everything. The girls I talk to these days are like, can you find me some True Religion? 

Display Copy: What is it about Y2K that you think really appeals to Gen Z at the moment?

Melanie: Nothing. I think it’s part of the trend cycle. In a way, it’s bigger than a 17-20 year cycle. There’s probably a million think pieces about this. It’s pre-recession, pre 9/11, pre #MeToo. There’s always a sense of nostalgia for a time that you think was better. A time before you. Somebody’s going to romanticize this present moment right now someday. [laughs]

There’s a girl who sells on Whatnot who is around 20 and I keep telling her, “You’re the real Y2K.” She’s not like the Paris Hilton type, she has a face tattoo and she’s slightly trashy in an amazing, Charli XCX way. To me, she represents what we were really doing at that time. But, that’s just her, there’s no artifice. Her natural state of being is wearing low rise pants and having her hair up in chopsticks. 

Display Copy: How would you define authentic style?

Melanie: I think very few people have something that they attach themselves to for their entire lives. Think of Vivienne Westwood. But it’s because they're attached to a group, right? I’m a floater and a part of many different groups, so it’s hard to then be like, “Yeah this is my style.” Style is a part of trying to figure out your in-group. But what about those of us who aren’t in the in-group and we were never built to be? Where does that leave you? So, I kind of reject that. You can’t always be “authentic.” 

Display Copy: How are you feeling about the vintage world right now?

Melanie: I actually feel super hopeful and optimistic about the future of vintage. People love to say, “It’s over, everything is picked over, it’s oversaturated.” But look around, it’s not going anywhere. There’s enough for everybody. Maybe your job will be harder but it’s also easier in a lot of ways. The only thing that matters is that you’re adaptable. 

Display Copy: So what’s next for you?