“People think I’m a Beverly Hills bitch, but really I’m a Beverly Hills witch,” said Liz Goldwyn, a writer of the Substack newsletter “Starf*cker” and a filmmaker. She was reflecting on her life as a native Angeleno with a famous last name, now seen at some remove.
Ms. Goldwyn, 48, moved to Hawaii last year because, she said, “I am a hippie who wants to be barefoot, riding my bike, climbing on rocks.” She has returned home for a week to decide how much of her former life she wants to preserve.
This week, she is selling a portion of the enormous collection of vintage clothes she began acquiring as a teenager. They are currently housed in a climate-controlled storage unit meticulously organized with sections that include “vintage coats, 1920s-2010s.”
On May 22, a preview of the sale will be held at Arcade Vintage in Los Angeles for any of her 10,000 Substack subscribers. The next day, the pieces will go on sale to the public in person and online.
The Saturday before the sale, Ms. Goldwyn was eating a chopped salad at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, just down the street from the home she grew up in, which was a stop on the Hollywood Maps to the Stars tour and is now owned by Taylor Swift.
Her father, the producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr. (her grandfather is Samuel Goldwyn from MGM and one of her five siblings is the actor Tony Goldwyn), was a clotheshorse who wore John Lobb shoes and bespoke suits. Her mother, Peggy Elliott Goldwyn, occasionally wore Chanel but was on the board of Planned Parenthood.
“She was so feminist that back-to-school shopping was a struggle,” Ms. Goldwyn said. “She’d be like, ‘What about this nice rust-colored thing?’”
On weekends as a child, Ms. Goldwyn would join her father at the hotel’s coffee shop for breakfast. He would also get a weekly haircut and a manicure at the hotel, and it was there that she got in trouble for stealing an issue of Playboy with Madonna on the cover.
More rebellious years followed. “I got invited to leave Westlake,” she said of a local prep school, “for, like, smoking cigarettes, smoking weed, experimenting with all sorts of drugs.” After graduating from Concord Academy in Massachusetts, she moved to New York to study photography at the School of Visual Arts.
There, she fell into a fashion crowd, interning for the art director Fabien Baron, working at Sotheby’s and as the New York editor of French Vogue.
Ms. Goldwyn’s friends included Chloë Sevigny, Dita Von Teese and Natasha Lyonne, among the crowd of women who were often considered “It” girls, although she never thought of herself as one. Or a muse, even though designers like Nicolas Ghesquière were friends who designed for her.
How does she identify? “Zelig,” she responded with a laugh.
She directed a documentary, “Pretty Things,” and wrote a book, “Pretty Things: The Last Generation of American Burlesque Queens,” on burlesque. She wrote a novel, “Sporting Guide,” and started a sexual health and education online platform called TheSexEd.com.
In November 2020, she went to Hawaii to work on an early version of a book “Sex, Health and Consciousness: How to Reclaim Your Pleasure Potential,” which led to her permanent move.
Ms. Goldwyn’s varied personal history, including a breakup over Venmo with a cheating partner, is chronicled in dishy detail in her newsletter. As are interviews with adult film stars, thoughts on the current political climate, the time she was talked into auditioning for “The Real Housewives” and tips for a well-lived life.
To wit: “A family friend in her 80s who was BFFs with Tennessee Williams and the inspiration for Maggie the cat in ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ (famously played by great beauty Elizabeth Taylor), used to tell me that to keep your beauty you had to take a nap every day, and it didn’t count unless you were completely naked and got under the covers.”
The next day, Ms. Goldwyn was downtown at Arcade, where she stood next to a garment rack of items she had elected to sell. She was wearing clothes made by friends: a T-shirt from the Andy Irons Foundation, cargo pants by Rocket Ahuna made out of a camouflage from plants native to Hawaii and pointed shoes from Le Monde Béryl. On one finger, she wore an emerald ring made from her grandfather’s shirt stud.
She said she wore mostly bikinis, pareos and Birkenstocks in Hawaii, but her ambivalence, even agony, over getting rid of anything in her collection was obvious.
“I don’t want to sell this,” she announced as she showed off a dress printed with line drawings of men with bowler hats by Sorelle Fontana, an Italian fashion house founded by three sisters who also made costumes for the films “La Dolce Vita” and “Roman Holiday.” “The construction is so beautiful, but I have never worn it.”
Also on the racks was a green and black suede coat from the 1930s with buttons made of Bakelite and a collar and cuffs of monkey fur, and a fuchsia version of a coat designed by Yves Saint Laurent that Catherine Deneuve wore in “Belle de Jour.”
Many of the items evoked vivid memories. Spotting a pair of custom-made Levi’s bell-bottom jeans from when she had a band called Hot Lunch, Ms. Goldwyn recalled that she had worn them with a leotard and a fur cape. A tan knit dress by Patrick Kelly with a heart made of buttons sewn on the front reminded her of when she wrote about his career for French Vogue. She pulled out a hand-painted Ungaro dress.
“There’s a picture of me in Paris on a skateboard in this and wearing Balenciaga high heels,” she said.
Several pieces for sale had trompe l’oeil patterns, including a Moschino black dress with beads embroidered to look like a shirtdress and a Bob Mackie dress with a wide appliquéd belt.
“This actually sucks, I hate this so much,” she said, sort of joking as she pulled out a silver and black Geoffrey Beene gown and then an Army green and red reversible Celine trench that once belonged to her mother.
Ms. Goldwyn was selling a few dresses from Martin Margiela’s early collections and a pair of the first Margiela white Tabi boots. “I only wore them once to a bodega because I was too afraid to get them dirty,” she said.
She will leave for London the day the collection, which will number about 200 pieces, give or take second thoughts, goes on sale and will spend a few months working in Europe. She is developing a documentary set in the world of surfing and researching another project, which she called “a metaphysical autobiographical tale that also delves into fascism and the occult.”
And still, her desire to collect will go on. She will continue to order things from sites like the RealReal, which will eventually lead to more sales. Just not anytime soon.
“There’s still so much stuff,” she said. “I have this padded skirt from Comme des Garçons in pink someone asked me to put in the sale, and I said, ‘No, but try me when I’m 60.’”
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