We’re conflicted to report that costume designer Jean-Pierre Dorléac (1943-2026) — ahem, Jerry Paine — passed away recently. And while we have hearts, and are sorry for anyone who cared for him and is sad right now, whether family, friend, and/or fan, New Shit Has Come to Light. Apparently not only did Dorléac lay awake at night being irritated at Kendra for pointing out where his costume designs veered away from Actual History, he was an online troll AND someone who lied not only about his own background, but also about knowing many famous Hollywood people who he totally disparaged. Had we known this (sorry Dorléac, we know you couldn’t quit us but we actually didn’t spend much time thinking about you), we would have happily outed him right from the start. But with Dorléac’s passing, writer Farran Smith Nehme has done a DEEP dive on Dorléac that shows he wasn’t who he said he was, didn’t have the credentials that he claimed he did, and shared misogynistic snark that he likely had made up for views.
Hurry up and read “The Man Who Would Be Dorléac,” because it may go behind a paywall soon, and it’s a WILD RIDE.
“The discrepancy between things Dorléac had said in the past, and things he said now, bothered me. The fact that I couldn’t find a record of Edith Head mentioning Dorléac that didn’t come from the man himself also bothered me. I don’t like unsourced Hollywood stories. They make me itch… More bluntly, I don’t like liars, and I really don’t like a man elbowing his way into the life story of a famous woman after she’s dead and can neither confirm nor say ‘Hey, I don’t know you like that.'”
Now that we know what a liar and a jerk Dorléac was, we are happy to share with you that The Legendary Email came from him — thanks to a reader (I’ll let her identify herself if she wants to) who figured out the connection by following his Twitter, which has now been deleted; he’d posted something snarky about librarians that was clearly a reference to Kendra (who is a professional academic librarian). From The Legendary Email:
I have been studying your snippety reviews regarding costumes for films listed in “Frock Flicks” for over a month on their website. With a great deal of reservation, considering I try to avoid dunderheads such as you, I have decided to write and let you know, in short, that although you seem to pride yourself with your preposterous theories, you know NOTHING about costume designing and little to nothing about period fashion.
Remember the claim to be “a costume designer who has an PhD in fashion and textile from Oxford University in London”? Not only is Oxford University is in the city of Oxford, England, but as readers quickly pointed out, they have never offered a fashion and textile PhD. But also, apparently Dorléac more often liked to claim he had a PhD in “historical apparel” from l’École des Beaux-Arts in Paris; Nehme hilariously points out that the Beaux-Arts does not, and never has (as far as she can tell), had such a degree. (Readers? Do your thing!). Sounds familiar!
So what pissed off Dorléac? Well, he didn’t like that I called his FILMS (NOT his designs) “shlocky” in my review of his designs for Mae West (1982).
The shittiest thing imho about Dorléac is that he tried to hide his identity. His first screed came from “Deborah” at “UCLAcostumes@gmail.com,” a made-up email address that was clearly trying to impersonate the esteemed Deborah Nadoolman Landis (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Three Amigos, Burke & Hare; two term president of the Costume Designers Guild and researcher/author who has published several influential books about Hollywood costume). Of course Landis had emailed us before from her REAL email address, so, nice try.
What’s hilarious is how two-faced Dorléac was. In his legendary email to us, he pointed out Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) as a film whose costumes were inventive if not historically accurate (we think the same thing!). But on Twitter, he snarked the film (sorry I can’t quote him, his Twitter was taken down almost immediately after he passed and it’s not captured in Internet Archive). He made fun of Victor/Victoria (1982) for an obvious zipper.
He also snarked Lucy Worsley, calling her a “coy, saucy hack.”
But Dorléac couldn’t quit us. Next, he commented that he had “discovered” that back-lacing dresses were historically accurate to the 18th century, in a comment that Trystan (who unfortunately keeps the comments civil) deleted:
He was a jerk on our review of Goya’s Ghosts (2006), again using a fake name:
In fact, he left enough shitty comments on our site that we ended up blocking his IP address.
But I think my personal favorite was when he emailed me (Kendra) AT MY WORK EMAIL to share this gem:
(I enjoyed this recent Facebook post about the Pinckney dress by someone who knows enough to report that the dress was damaged not only by pests but also “alterations and continued wear by generations of descendants.” I’m only sorry Dorléac isn’t around for me to share this with him!)
In fact, we did an Easter egg of a Snark Week post with a guide to his frock flick work, which funnily enough, he never responded to!
So, ad astra, Jerry Paine. We know you’re spinning in your grave because, as I wrote you back:
Did you have any run-in’s with Dorléac, on Twitter or elsewhere? Spill the tea!
Wow. I can’t say that I ever heard of this guy, although I did watch some of the shows he worked on when I was a kid.
Seems to be somewhat of an honour to be singled out by him as a target of abuse. You can honestly say that he put you in the same class as Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly.
The sad thing is that he did leave behind a fairly solid body of work. Being such a thin skinned asshole is more the hallmark of a failure than a success.
I appreciate the work you and the Self-Styled Siren have done in documenting the man’s misogyny.
We honestly debated quite a bit about outing him as our most dedicated (and unhinged) hater after his death, because despite being nitpicky, we aren’t generally petty. But this guy was next level obsessive in his fixation on Kendra. If he wasn’t an old man at the time, I’d be more worried about it escalating beyond attacking emails to her work email. This shit is never ok.
The “Oh I bet this just vexes you to no end” makes me laugh. I’m sure the three of you were tearing your hair out over being corrected by the Great Costume Designer with his “Oxford, London” PhD…
I had honestly forgotten about him and all the email meltdowns he sent us over the years until I saw his obituary (or, should I say, “o-BITCH-uary”?). We’ve gone toe-to-toe with better thin-skinned professional costume designers than him, lol.
I just like the fact that Oxford is in the name. How do you get that wrong?
“Vex” is a fine, underused word. Many things vex me these days: Donald, beachy 19th-century hair, ICE, lack of headgear, etc. Thank goddess for Frock Flicks and the Golden State Valkyries.
Bay Area represent!
I would also like to submit vex’s adjective cousin vexatious for renewed use as well.
I have a faint memory of him reacting to the Snark Week post on twitter. And while I slightly wish we’d kept the comments I deleted, at the time he just wasn’t worth it. Trolls be trollin’!
I SO wish you’d kept those comments! He was such an asshole!
This is a bizarre and fascinating saga, haha! I remember that snarky email and thinking, “Huh, Oxford’s suddenly in London.”
And he used the moniker “Tyler Durden”. That tracks. ::Rolls eyes::
Anyway: love ya folks!
What burns me up about him is that he was SO thin-skinned that he couldn’t handle the absolutely lightest of criticism about his own work (and later, his behavior), but he’d be absolutely vicious about others who weren’t around to defend their character. Always throwing some long-dead actress under the bus, but HEAVEN FOREFEND anyone utter his own name in anything less than glowing terms.
Number one rule of snark is, “Don’t dish it if you can’t take it”!
What a splendid takedown of a pretentious and misogynist wanker!!!
One very slight correction: Dickens Faire definitely existed in the late 70s. According to their site, started in 1970, I worked there as a teenager in the late 70s.
Excellent! That makes the joke even better :)
The lies, the excessive insults, obsession with specific people, and getting oh so high on his own farts… He sounds like the spiritual ancestor of one of my exes.
Wow. I’m more a student of painting, but costume has always interested me, because my mother was a seamstress who worked on some amazing stuff as a pattern cutter and grader, and sample machinist. Our house was always full of toiles and brown paper patterns, “What’s this, Mum?” “Leave that alone!” Designers would sell clothes to companies who had to promise never to sell the original, and then they’d make commercially viable versions for big stores like Debenhams and Harrods. They would take the clothes apart, make patterns that fitted on the least amount of fabric, and then they put the clothes back together sans labels, and take them home. So I saw the insides, so to speak! And because I was at one point a perfect size 10, I spent a lot of time standing on a footstool with my arms out.
I’ve always been deeply in love with 18th century costume, and for sure that gown was altered later. A bit like those “Regency” genre paintings produced at the turn of the 19th century into the 20th. The tall, busty girls in those would never had been considered beauties in the Regency!
This man sounds insecure, as if any minute he’d be afraid that he’d be found out. Or maybe he was just that arrogant.
I don’t even know where to start. To be honest, the first I heard of this was a story in the Daily Fail last week. They repeated a number of his statements on Audrey Hepburn, and there were actually reader responses defending the bile. Audrey is my heroine, and she was my mom’s role model, so I brook no disrespect to the lady. I took my time reading the above as well as going to the blog post before it gets paywalled. The lead photo above and some of the things in the blog post took me back in time to late 70s/early 80s West Hollywood and the company of certain gay men, one of whom had been a good friend since we shared theater classes in high school. We didn’t so much have a falling out as I pulled back from him after college because he also turned out to be a certifiable liar who was particularly vicious about lesbians or women who didn’t live up to his standards of glamour. The family business was garment manufacturing, including for big designer lines, as well as making boutique items for a shop in Beverly Hills that was famous in its day. Unless there were receipts, as you put it, I realized I couldn’t believe any of the more fantastical stories if I hadn’t been there when unique events took place or certain celebrities were present, because multiple other people had pointed out discrepancies because they’d been there for a story that wasn’t true. I just wonder at the need for embellishment and outright lies. Clearly Jerry Payne had some talent – Jane Seymour’s costumes for “Somewhere in Time” are some of the most beautiful things ever seen on film. Even her “Battlestar Galactica” wedding ensemble was stunning, and original with it’s crystal ray headdress. But why invest so much energy in battling people with opposing points of view? Why get so nasty about people you didn’t know, especially film icons of refinement and style? Why lie about them? It seems to me that his fabrications about his origins were a throwback to the Hollywood of the teens and 1920s, when studios would make outlandish claims about stars being born to the purple, or in one case that an onscreen negligée was made from the wedding veil of the murdered Tsarina. Crazy. So maybe pushing all those European connections was a way of hiding deep seated insecurity? Not excusing the man his venom, but being an Air Force brat means continual moves and always being the new kid in school, and perhaps being subject to bullying. So maybe coming up with a fantastical backstory, along with claiming mentorship by the then most recognized name in costume design was a way of compensating. It’s funny that he chose Edith Head, because she was known in town for being less than forthcoming about certain things. It’s been documented she borrowed a fellow student’s portfolio and signed her name to her classmate’s drawings to get the costuming job at Paramount. Whatevs. Maybe she was his role model because she got away with so much due to her political skills. The funny thing is that the more academically inclined readers here realize that the PhD process involves specialization to earn the distinction. You become an expert on a particular time period, artist, method – whatever. Once you have the dissertation defended and degree awarded, you can then branch out and deep dive into other topics that interest you. Knowing “everything” – an OVERVIEW (not deep dive) of the big picture comes in the first couple of years of a BA. So to claim that because of his “PhD” he had to be an expert on “everything” is kind of a red flag. When I was working in a museum that had no permanent collection, that relied on traveling exhibits, it meant doing research into each new subject and becoming enough of an expert to answer a broad range of general questions by audiences who ranged from kindergarteners to visiting Smithsonian librarians. We can’t possibly know everything there is to know, even on our favorite topics – there’s ALWAYS more to learn. So I’m put off by people’s arrogance when they are so sure of themselves yet don’t know what they don’t know. Maybe his beef with Kendra was based more on the fear of realizing that librarians have serious research skills and his genuine past could be uncovered. Feeling that lashing out would be enough to instill some sort of fear – why I don’t know – that someone wouldn’t dig deeper and discover how deep the BS was piled. At any rate, he’s gone and maybe some people will miss him. I’m kind of glad I missed the drama while it was happening. This world is stressful enough these days without having all that kind of ugliness directed at people who are just appreciating beauty and skills and having some fun with the anachronistic side of the profession. If the bitchiness ends up being his legacy, rather than his sometimes beautiful work – yeah – well, he brought it on himself. I’m sorry y’all had to deal with his nastiness, but for better or worse, the last 30 years of connectivity has meant the disintegration of civility.
I’m absolutely not painting with a broad brush when I say this, and I am preparing to get blasted for it, but I feel like it still needs to be said: SOME men suck and just hate women and it shows. Were there ANY women this guy liked (other than Edith Head)?
Thank you for the shoutout, I appreciate it. I’d read Kendra’s merciless dissection of The Bastard, and the “mysterious” email, but I wasn’t surprised the folks here had been unintimidated by his whole circus act. Even more striking to me than Jerry’s attempting to pass himself off as Deborah Nadoolman Landis (a woman he’d repeatedly insulted in his usual toxic way on Twitter) was his use of the term “gynocentric.” I mean—the hell? This from a man who had described himself, more than once, as “the least misogynistic person in the world”! Thanks again for putting more truth out there; and in the meantime, the Dorléac saga keeps getting stranger.
Stranger & stranger!
Re: Deborah Nadoolman Landis, I find it endlessly amusing that he happened to pick the ONE costume designer who actually had reached out to us before to say how much she enjoyed the blog. That was such an unintentionally hilarious aspect to the whole thing.
Okay, may as well pull a Clark Kent here…I was that ‘RIP Bozo’ commenter and I sent that message partly cos I had my own run-in with that nasty old narcissist a few years ago. Unfortunately, I was much younger so I ended up a little bit in his influence, as I was new to researching costuming (we all start somewhere…) and I think not doing well (I was more immature and in my mid 20s, 2020 was not a great time for most people as is)
But yeah, while for a brief spell I was under Jerry’s influence, even at the time I was feeling ‘hm’ about so much of his stories, and while it was a little funny in a ‘ooooh get im’ way for 5 seconds, it just ended up apparent that this was a deeply bitter and bigoted man who was so clearly online addicted
And then there was me actually doing 5 seconds of research that proved he was a massive liar, the story of Battlestar Galactica and him NOT JUST stealing Andrew Probert’s credit for the Cylons, but also spinning a design by Philippe Druillet – one of the best comic artists ever – as his own!!
And boy, that detail about Nadoolman Landis, jesus christ lol. As someone who was basically in a really embarrassing remake of Apt Pupil with the guy for a spell, I heard soooo many stupid lies and stories he told about other costume designers. You think he was bad on Sandy Powell, just want til you hear about his phoney story he told me about James Acheson trying to sexually molest/assault him ‘at an Oscar dinner party’ (I may refrain from posting the full ”story” cos while it is so ludicrous I cant believe I fell for it for 5 seconds, I dont want a talented designer’s name publicly associated with a TV hack’s lies)
Which, Jerry’s first, last and only Oscar nomination was for 1980’s Somewhere in Time. Acheson’s first Oscar nomination was for 1988’s The Last Emperor. (Also, do ‘nominees’ even GET invited to Oscars? Cos he told a very pathetic and untruthful story about Anthony Powell for winning the Oscar for Tess). The ride never ends with this guy…
I tried commenting on your blog post, but I’m not sure if Google ate it or what. But I’ll just say here that I thought your post about your personal interactions with Dorleac was incredibly revealing about the sort of person he was, and I’m sorry that he intimidated you into abandoning your blog. What a fucking thin skinned little man. I hope you pick up your blogging again!
Just got round to approving it! Yes, I keep comments on hold to prevent spam (the most common form of comment) or drive-by troublemakers (ie like the late Jerry). Again, you were not the only costume-related blog he went after as I laid out in that eulogy.
And thank so much! Yes, I hope one day I will be able to get round to semi-regularly updating it…it would be fun to cover more Donati and Tosi costumes, and Ken Russell stuff, etc… And also, keep on doing the good work too!
PS. also now knowing how relentless he was in his harassment of your blog – jesus christ, making dupe emails and impersonating another costume designer, that is online addicted behavior – I do have to wonder how he interacted with other fan bloggers he tried to intimidate or hated. God knows what Marcel Damen endured from him. I know Filmsketchr was basically pleading with him to stop on Twitter cos he wanted Andrew Probert’s name ENTIRELY removed. What a sad, strange little man.
PS it’s actually very, very funny that he also regularly tried to say that Milena Canonero’s costumes for Barry Lyndon and James Acheson’s costumes for Dangerous Liaisons were ‘REALLY INACCURATE’, given his own foray into 19th century costume is not something to be proud of at all.
Even his costumes for Somewhere in Time are a level below what you’d expect a costume house like Western Costume Company, Bermans & Nathans, Tirelli Costumi to make…which, I do suspect he must have been made persona non grata at Western Costume (he did have some Buck Rogers costumes made there), Whether it was cos of his nasty character or that seasoned employees at Western Costume sussed him out as a fraud (again, he was telling all these lies as far back as then! and no doubt someone at Western Costume would know Edith Head…much more likely than Jerry knowing her). Or maybe both?
RIP Jerry Paine
Costume designer of Tequila & Bonetti
‘Costume designer of Tequila & Bonetti’ HAH. Thank you for bringing more of this to light.
*foray into 18th century costuming, sorry
Honestly for his later period productions covered in the snark retrospective, I suspect he just used wardrobe stock anyway. The guy was guilty of EVERY sin he lambasted in EVERY OTHER costume designer alive. I can only think of three or four contemporary (at the time, sadly these ones died a few years before his twitter cult was in full swing) designers he didnt rag on for being ‘hacks, ‘sluts’, ‘producer’s wives’ or ‘failed home economics teachers’.
I completely missed this post yesterday (work meeting). HOLY CRAP! The irony is that his career would have still been impressive without all the lies. And why be so bitchy? Oh well, sad trombone. :)
Dearest darling Kendra, it’s been years, but this freakazoid who stocked you on your work email should have been ousted . It’s one thing to have an opinion and another a dull sword. If you have a paid job as a librarian and can get documentation you know, for real stuff( ooooo) you keep wearing that librarian Tiara.
Trystan. Forever the free speech sewista sister to all. Keep fighting.
Shit, hope some AI mofo doesn’t find all that missing plagiarism and evil fuckwit crewelty…….wait, can AI shot haunt you from the grave.
There are at least two classy responses to critiques of your work – a dignified silence or politely thanking the reviewer for paying such close attention, no matter the outcome of such close scrutiny, then proceeding to a dignified silence.
Well, there’s also “Get in on the joke”, but that one doesn’t work for everyone.
Of all the lies he told, his story about having been born in France during WWII because he French mother decided, while pregnant, to leave California to go back was… an interesting choice. And one that I’m really surprised people didn’t push back on. I mean, could a lone, pregnant, female civilian even just go to France then? I feel like that answer would be a resounding no.