Material Girl

It is an article of faith that for most collectors, more is never enough. Over the last 25 years, Rita Watnick has amassed one of the largest collections of museum-quality clothing in this country. When she acquires something, the fact that she alone owns it brings her temporary contentment, but the anticipation of what she’ll buy next soon looms. Her obsession with clothes is so huge that it couldn’t remain a hobby; she has turned it into a lucrative business as well.

Six days a week, she holds court in the densely packed Lily et Cie, surrounded by racks of haughty Diors and flirty Valentinos. The vast, open, main space of the one-story building near the Beverly Hills Civic Center gives way to back rooms that could be a pack rat’s fantasy. The space might appear stuffed to capacity, with boxes of meticulously packed clothes stacked on built-in lofts, but there is always room for one more Galanos gown of handmade lace, or an Oleg Cassini design just like one Jacqueline Kennedy was photographed wearing.

“I love the thrill of what’s coming next,” Watnick says. “I feel sorry for people who think they’ve already gotten the best thing they’re ever going to own. Because the more you learn, the more you have, the more prepared you are to go out and buy something better. Buying teaches you how to buy better. I like making mistakes.”

What mistakes has she made?

“Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t made any in a long, long time. Now I know way too much.”

The magnificent clothes Watnick has assembled are extravagant and almost unreal, but her personality is equally outsized. While she was building an encyclopedic knowledge of 20th century fashion, acquiring the complete archives of couturier Jacques Fath and the great American designer Pauline Trigere and more than 40,000 pieces of costume jewelry, she also gained a reputation as one of Beverly Hills’ more colorful characters. Almost everyone who’s shopped at Lily has a story.

She even cops to the fact that many would-be customers feel intimidated or insulted and retreat because their desire to find something wonderful and unique isn’t strong enough to withstand Watnick’s condescension. They don’t get that she couldn’t be such a notorious diva if she didn’t enjoy the role. Yet those who have persevered often tell of finding the most extraordinary dress they’ve ever owned. It’s doubtful there’s a better, bigger, more comprehensive collection of fine clothing anywhere.

John Hayles, head of the custom costume department at Universal Studios says, “Rita was the innovator. She has a terrific eye, great style and had the foresight to see how important vintage clothing would become.” Yet, he adds, “she’s crazy, eccentric and has her own way of doing things, and that doesn’t go over well with everyone.”

She sneers at collectors who have two or three hundred pieces of a favorite designer. She might buy that many in a day. She’s not impressed by museum costume departments, and complains they don’t have the space, time or money to take care of valuable clothing the way she and her staff of six do. She doesn’t attend auctions, because during any given year fewer than 1,000 items are sold at them. “There’s definitely a hierarchy among collectors,” she says. “A lot of people will spend serious money on vintage clothes. The big dogs will also spend on everything that goes with them.”

Dressing Big Stars

Watnick is always ready to teach new collectors how to bark. One afternoon in late July, she tells a team of designers from a ubiquitous chain of clothing stores who’ve come looking for ideas that she has the perfect dress for them. It will captivate millions of women in countless American malls who’ll have no clue that they’re buying something inspired by a Geoffrey Beene design from the late ‘60s. Her belief that every piece in her collection is fabulous, brilliant, important, transforming and great, great, great, gives life to old clothes as surely as blood rejuvenates a vampire.

So the visitors quickly agree that they have found as much excellence as one dress can embody. One of them, a stick figure of a woman who’s happily braless in the backless dress, models Watnick’s selection.

“It’s gorgeous,” Watnick says, as the young designer strikes a pigeon-toed Twiggy pose in the black minidress. “It’s scary good. And you don’t have to have a perfect body to wear this dress. It would look great on anyone.”

In fact, the dress would be scary bad in a size 12, but Watnick’s authority trumps argument. She can advise these professional grave robbers, who will spend nearly $100,000 in two days of mining only a fraction of the half a million pieces in Lily’s inventory, because she knows clothes. She knew when she bought the St. Laurent shirt-jacket and the Pucci sundress that this group will spirit away, that they were “major.” She had to have them, loved owning them and is ready to pass them along.

Watnick’s sense of what’s major told her to relegate Courreges to her warehouse two years ago at a time when other vintage dealers were beginning to display it, and to buy 100 sequined Norman Norell gowns that initially languished in storage. She believes what will sell isn’t as important to collect as what she considers good. More often than not, the good is eventually recognized, even if it takes someone like Demi Moore, who sparkled in a navy jersey Norell at the 1997 Emmy Awards, to start the stampede. “After I dressed Demi, that gown became the most coveted piece of vintage fashion,” Watnick says.

The situation that fosters the most intense jealousy in the catty fashion business is that Watnick’s extensive collection has given her something many contemporary fashion designers would kill for--the opportunity to dress big female stars for highly publicized events like the Academy Awards. She’s unapologetic about her naked self-assurance, yet knows it and her success haven’t done much to build her fan club.

“How could I be popular and please myself?” Watnick asks. “I don’t suffer fools gladly, and I’m really outspoken. I am not humble when I say I’m fully responsible for elevating vintage to the stature it now holds. And there’s something about being the best at what you do that doesn’t win friends. Anyway, if I was popular, I’d be so much less fun, wouldn’t I?”

Fresh and Modern Look

Watnick doesn’t divulge her age, but she’s probably in her late 40s. Her face is unlined, and often her dark hair is pulled back into an indifferent ponytail. When she’s in the store, she invariably wears an oversized man’s shirt, neat blue jeans and brown suede Chanel loafers; her only other accessory is her Lhasa apso, Trouble. The studied casualness of her uniform is deliberate. Her voice could be the husky alto of a ‘30s movie star.

“I used to dress really well to come to work every day, and I knew that people found me intimidating, and realized that how I dressed contributed to that,” she says. “To start with, you’ve got my voice. Add to that that I’ve done very well and I know what I’m talking about, and it isn’t a pretty picture.”

Cameron Silver, who began his Decades vintage store in West Hollywood concentrating on the ‘60s and ‘70s, says, “Being intimidating is like a shtick. The savvy person knows it isn’t real. Anyone who’s into vintage will shop everywhere and put up with anything. I always recommend Lily to people when they’re looking for that caliber of clothing. I wouldn’t have my store if it weren’t for her.”

Shoppers unaccustomed to buying a dress that costs as much as a Range Rover can be put off by the prices. Watnick says when she buys, she knows the value of a Givenchy couture suit from the 1950s. And when she’s ready to sell it, the price will be based on what she paid.

It’s possible to find a dress or sweater for $100 or less at Lily, but a historically significant piece could run $100,000. Price tags hang on whatever’s on display in the store, but when something is brought out from the warehouse, only Watnick knows what it will cost. If she says something is “fifteen,” it could be $1,500, or, as likely, $15,000.

“Tom Ford [the Gucci and St. Laurent creative director] has said that people cannot be well-dressed unless they include vintage clothing in their wardrobe,” she says. “I’ve helped my customers understand that. How do you set yourself apart? How else can you be unique? Every time I’ve done a dress for the Oscars or some huge event, until someone identified it as vintage, no one really knew. When clothing is truly timeless, it always looks fresh and modern.”

When Watnick isn’t at Lily, she wears vintage and new clothes. Current favorites are anything new from Chanel, Hermes and Jeremy Scott, and Christian Louboutin shoes. She describes herself as “a die-hard ‘50s junkie.” Never married, she lives in Beverly Hills with her companion of 12 years, Michael Stoyla, who also works at Lily.

“There are people who get joy from just looking at something,” she says. “I actually don’t. If I see something I really like, I want to own it. If I could, I’d spend all my time collecting, but if I did that, I’d just fill up warehouses and I wouldn’t have any money left. My mother always says I got in this business because I had too much money and not enough common sense.” Yet she has financial limits. “If I didn’t, I’d buy much more.”

Childhood Hobby

At first, she collected new clothes. “I was an avid clothing aficionado when I was 12,” she says. Her father, a structural engineer, and mother, an official for the city of Vernon, gave her a clothing allowance. “More than any person could have is what I had to have, and my parents indulged me,” she says. “My grandfather, Morris Schneider, was the designer for a company called Lilliann, and whatever they were making in their factory, he would do a child’s version for me.”

She wore a tailored suit to her Fairfax High School prom, and by the time she was 17, Watnick’s closet was full of St. Laurent, Pucci and Louis Feraud. Everyone knew how much she loved clothes, so when a friend of her mother’s died, leaving behind a wardrobe purchased between 1920 and 1960, the woman’s husband bequeathed it all to Watnick.

But the gift came too early. “I wasn’t appreciating old clothes yet,” Watnick says. “My mother kept that collection for me, but she started giving pieces of it to friends of mine. Then I realized how great they were. All these years, my quest has been about trying to get back what was given away. No matter how much I have, I’ll never recapture that wardrobe.”

After studying English at UCLA and USC, Watnick worked in public relations for Van Cleef & Arpels, as a salesperson for Cartier, and under Jack Miles, the legendary European couture buyer at I Magnin. By the mid-’70s, Watnick had rented a storefront in West Hollywood to house her collection. She’d often putter there late at night, admiring and organizing her finds. Rita Riggs, a Hollywood costume designer, peered in and knocked on the door one evening and became her first customer.

Lily officially opened in 1979, named for Watnick’s grandmother, and also as an homage to women designers like Lily Dache. After the shop overflowed into two neighboring spaces on Third Street, Watnick moved it to its current location on Burton Way, in 1994.

By then, the vintage boom had exploded, and hunting for treasures was not difficult. Friends of Watnick’s family and friends of friends would invite her to buy from their collections. Most acquisitions still come from individuals. A typical seller is a 75-or 80-year old woman who’s spent the last 50 years buying designer clothes. Watnick understands such collectors and appreciates their drive and taste. “It would be unlikely that I’d only be interested in a small part of a collection,” she says. “People don’t buy one good piece of clothing in their lives. If someone buys good, they buy good all the time.”

“A great collection in Los Angeles will have a broad range,” she says. “There’ll be Balenciaga, Balmain, Givenchy and also Thea Porter, Ossie Clark and Zandra Rhodes. The chic Frenchwoman is a myth. Americans always bought couture and the best European designers, so the most beautiful clothing I find is all here.”