Everyone thinks that the Academy Museum at Wilshire and Fairfax, was a repurposed May Company department store, but as a story in Curbed L.A. demonstrates, it was inspired by an oil refinery. We’ve been living around them forever!
And to prove it, the Museum is staging a new exhibition featuring the kinds of clothes people who worked in one of those industrial plants would have worn. In writing this, I am using sarcasm. I was utterly baffled to see an ad for an upcoming costume show at the museum. It’s as though the museum is determined to destroy the memory of Hollywood glamour that universally, and beyond, national bounds or ethnic or religious ones thrilled and enthralled audiences the entire 20th century.
