When “The Americans” — the riveting FX espionage-marital drama about a pair of Russian spies embedded in a Reagan-era Beltway suburb — concluded in the spring of 2018 after six seasons, my husband and I mourned its end; in his grief, he rewatched the searing finale several times.
And then, to find closure, we kind of went nuts at the online memorabilia auction.
Keri Russell’s costume boots and trench coat (both Coach) for me; several shirts worn by her TV (and real-life) partner Matthew Rhys for him; a framed print from the show’s prop department for our stairwell. A year later, we repeated the cycle when our next favorite series, HBO’s “Veep,” concluded — designer neckties, a sturdy laptop bag, jewel-tone sheath dresses for days.
Memorabilia collectors have always run up the prices on particularly iconic costumes — Dorothy’s ruby slippers or gingham dress, Darth Vader’s helmet, Indiana Jones’s fedora, Ursula Andress’s “Dr. No” bikini. But over the past several years, online auctions have capitalized on the fervent fandoms surrounding certain prestige TV shows by offering entire wardrobes of castoffs to the public. These are the showbiz equivalent of estate sales, so we’re not just talking about precious collectibles to keep under glass.
Think of it more as savvy thrift-shopping — where the bargains come with an amusing backstory. My husband now owns two Tom Ford ties worn by Hugh Laurie, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s dashing romantic foil in the later seasons of “Veep,” paying roughly $70 for both, he recalls. And yes, if you compliment those ties or the fake Soviet propaganda poster from “The Americans,” a bold graphic of three farmworkers that lends a pop of color to the exposed brick along our stairs — he will tell you about the pedigree.
But it doesn’t come up much. It’s just our stuff.
Hollywood has a long tradition of recycling its stuff. After shoots would wrap, some items ended up on the curb, and some made their way home with an actor or crew member. But most were returned to studio storage or a rental service, to await future productions.
In the early 1980s, when an actors strike paralyzed the industry, a CBS staffer got the idea of opening a small secondhand shop selling studio castoffs in the San Fernando Valley. It’s a Wrap! now has two sprawling outlets, in Beverly Hills and Burbank. That’s where Darcy Sawatzki bought a blouse from the set of ABC’s “Abbott Elementary.”
“It looks like a blouse an elementary schoolteacher would wear,” said the 46-year-old health communicator — something she can throw on if she needs to look professional in a Zoom meeting. “It’s not a standout piece, but I’ll tell everyone anyway” where it came from. Her daughter bought a purse from “Jane the Virgin,” which aired on the CW from 2014 to 2019, and thinks she later spotted it in an old episode on a major character’s arm.
“We like thrifting anyway, and thrifting with a story is even better,” Sawatzki said. “In Burbank, you know you’re surrounded by the people who make these cool shows. It’s a way to participate without being in the industry.”
In recent years, splashy online auctions emerged as a way for studios to allow devotees to “extend the ride” when a beloved show comes to an end, said Joe Maddalena, executive vice president of Heritage Auctions.
“Better it belong with a fan than in a cardboard box somewhere.”
Heritage, one of the world’s largest online auction houses, frequently gets first crack at a popular show’s costumes and props, allowing it to “curate something that will be a fan experience,” he said. An auction announced in the final weeks or months of a show’s run can hype up fans for the finale, and an emotional farewell to a show can juice the prices for fairly banal items.
“When ‘Lost’ was the biggest show on television, we had the auction a couple days after the series finale,” Maddalena said. Frenzied fans paid up to $2,000 for matchboxes — yes, cardboard matchboxes — with the logo for the fictional Dharma Initiative, a shadowy research project that propelled much of a convoluted plot you’ve probably long since forgotten. The highest price in the 2019 “Veep” auction (operated by ScreenBid, which later merged with Heritage) was the $5,000 commanded by a mere tube of lipstick, which had its own poignant story arc in the series finale.
We are not collectors. So when we stood on the precipice of “The Americans” auction, we had no intention of buying anything we wouldn’t actually use. (During the $1.85 million “Downton Abbey” auction last summer, I checked out Lady Sybil’s fashion-forward “harem pants” outfit but couldn’t imagine a way to incorporate it into my life. It sold for 9,600 pounds. And as much as I loved “Game of Thrones,” chain mail and corsets wouldn’t get a lot of wear in my work life.)
Seven years later, my husband has finally worn out the last of Rhys’s shirts. Both my boots and trench coat — or should I say, Keri Russell’s boots and trench coat — were true value plays, about $100 each but still in regular rotation.
“Veep” focused even more heavily on professionals in a more-or-less contemporary setting, and I assumed that this would be my opportunity to dress like Louis-Dreyfus, whom I had clocked at star-studded Washington events as having a height and build similar to my own, with immaculate decision-making in how to flatter her shape.
What better cheat sheet for how to dress myself than to simply buy the things she had already worn on TV?
Well, obviously a lot of small women with deeper pockets had the same idea. Of course they did: On the show, Louis-Dreyfus’s Selina Meyer wore labels like Saint Laurent, Carolina Herrera, Oscar de la Renta, Zac Posen, Dolce & Gabbana — the kinds of quiet-luxury wear that can fetch four figures on the secondhand market, even without an as-seen-on-HBO certificate.
Instead, I ended up looking to the more affordable work attire worn by Anna Chlumsky, who played Selina’s beleaguered chief of staff Amy Brookheimer. (She turned out to be my size as well — or at least my height.) This actually seemed more useful. There are days when I might need to look as pulled together as a Capitol Hill staffer; there are never days when I need to look like a camera-ready presidential candidate.
So I bought — well, I bought a lot of Amy’s clothes. (And at least one skirt-and-top combo worn by the actress who played Selina’s secretary, Sue.)
A funny thing about “Veep”: As much as it skewered Washington, it also flattered this city. By the final season, Amy was wearing very nice stuff. It may have looked on TV like what you’d imagine staffers wear on Capitol Hill. In real life, these were premium brands like Theory, L’Wren Scott, Karen Millen, Diane Von Furstenberg. Even Sue was wearing Tory Burch and Hugo Boss, it turns out. Most of the dresses I bought were more suitable for big nights out rather than days in the newsroom. One requires much better-defined deltoids than I have time to achieve; another is a pure white sheath so sharply nipped and tailored that it could be worn only by the mystery dame who shows up at a private eye’s office with a smoking gun and an unlikely story. Within a couple of years, none were very relevant to our new world remade by the pandemic.
A funny thing about auctions: You may think you’re getting a bargain. But there’s always an auction-house percentage you somehow skimmed past in the fine print when you submitted a bid. Plus tax. Plus shipping. …
I’m sure we weren’t the only people who went overboard with these auctions. But I had no luck finding any of those women who outbid me on the “Veep” frocks. I did, however, track down one kindred soul still consumed by the plight of undercover KGB agents Philip and Elizabeth Jennings and all their stuff.
“It was such a gut-level impact, and it was a work of art,” Robert Stone, a psychiatrist in Salem, Oregon, said of “The Americans.” He rewatched the series at least twice — including the scenes featuring Gabriel, the Jennings’s fatherly spy handler, played by Tony-winning stage and film veteran Frank Langella.
So he knew exactly what he was looking at when he found his wife, Anna, in the kitchen one day.
“I walk in, and she is wearing Frank Langella’s apron!” he told me. “And she is cooking in it!”
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