Exhibition Reviews: the Costume Designer: Edith Head and Hollywood

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Ferrero-Regis, Tiziana (2018) Exhibition Reviews: The Costume Designer: Edith Head and Hollywood. Studies in Costume and Performance, 3(1), pp. 122-127.

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Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Sub- mitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) can be identiﬁed by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appear- ance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. https://doi.org/10.1386/scp.3.1.97_5 Exhibition Review: The Costume Designer: Edith Head and Hollywood Bendigo Art Gallery, Bendigo, 29 September 2017- 29 January 2018

Dr Tiziana Ferrero-Regis Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane

This exhibition, curated by Tansy Curtin, was both a homage and a reflection on the most famous costume designer in Hollywood history, Edith Head (1897-1981). The exhibition also explored the position of the costume designer in the well-oiled machine that was Hollywood during the Studio period. The show brought together more than 70 garments along with 35 sketches from a number of collections (Randall Thropp representing the Paramount Pictures Archive; Larry McQueen of the Collection of Motion Picture Costume Design, Los Angeles; Nicholas Inglis; and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles collections). Edith Head was the longest serving costume designer in Hollywood history and the most decorated, having worked for fifty years during which time she was nominated for 28 Academy Awards for Best Costume and won eight. The exhibition displayed only a fraction of the designer’s work over her long career. The Bendigo Art Gallery offered a fitting home for the exhibition, having already hosted a series of international exhibitions dedicated to cinema icons. In 2012, the Art Gallery hosted Grace Kelly Style Icon, and in 2016 the Marilyn Monroe show. Both exhibitions displayed costumes from the stars’ films along with items from their personal wardrobes. Museum or gallery costume exhibitions have become popular globally in the last decade, enjoying large numbers of visitors. This phenomenon follows on the heels of the increasing popularity of museum fashion exhibitions in the last twenty years. The presence of fashion in the museum has contributed to lending a respect to fashion, once considered in academia the poor cousin of visual arts. Likewise, scholarship about costume beyond the handbook for professionals (Cole and Bourke: 2014; La Motte: 2010), or the coffee table style book (Nadoolman Landis: 2003, 2007, 2012a, 2012b, 2013) has become increasingly visible, while the display of costume in international and local exhibitions in the respected spaces of the museum and the art gallery has raised the status of costume design. In particular, film costume, traditionally seen and theorized as a prop to character and narrative, is now regarded as an art form in itself. In Australia, there have been a number of iconic exhibitions dedicated to costume design. Among these was the international exhibition Hollywood Costume (Victoria and Albert Museum, 2012-13), curated by Deborah Nadoolman-Landis, and presented at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne in 2013, which attracted more than 200,000 viewers. A similar exhibition, based on private collections, was Costumes from the Golden Age of Hollywood, held in Brisbane, which attracted over 160,000 visitors. The Australian television series Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries made possible two costume exhibitions (2013 and 2016), and 40 costumes from the box office hit The Dressmaker were exhibited in

1 2016. The first foray into the celebration of individual costume designers occurred in 2015, with a homage exhibition to Australian Orry-Kelly at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne.

Within a traditional display and use of space, the Bendigo Art Gallery chose to display Head’s costumes on dress forms, shifting away from the traditional mannequin. The use of a dress form recognises costume design as a practice whose ultimate product is an object. The use of a mannequin would have focussed the attention on the glamour that film costumes often elicit, whereas the dress form reminds the viewer of the métier, the work, the craft, and the practice at once that is involved in the making of a costume. The retrospective brought together a reflection on the costume as an object with the opportunity for the display of costumes that celebrate Edith Head as an individual artist, recalibrating the position of costume design within the filmmaking process of the Hollywood Studio System (1927-1950). In fact, the rise of Edith Head’s career must be contextualized within Hollywood’s economic practices of the time. The Studio mode of production involved increased standardisation of economic practices which then coalesced into a powerful oligarchic system that controlled production, distribution and exhibition (Staiger: 1995; Neale: 2012). The film industry began in a general industrial structure of well-developed corporate capitalism, thus it was positioned between the economic practice of standardisation for efficient mass-production and product differentiation and profit. Hollywood’s traditional storytelling was, and has been until today, a linear closed sequence of events with emphasis on the psychology of the main character as a motivation for narrative action. For this reason, costumes, props, sets, and make-up have been defined as subservient to the narrative ever since. Even today, Nadoolman-Landis writes ‘The role of the costume designer is to create the best costume for the character within the context of the narrative and the visual style of the film’ (2012, 12). During the Studio System, also known as Hollywood’s Golden Age, wardrobe departments grew akin to small industrial units that functioned as assembly lines, employing hundreds of workers, from seamstresses to the chief designers. These workers were organized in a hierarchical way and head designers could be loaned to other studios. Within this system, Head started her career as assistant to Howard Greer at Paramount in 1923, where she was initially assigned to dressing lesser stars or design for B grade movies. In 1937, she was finally elevated to head costume designer at Paramount, substituting Travis Banton. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Hollywood film industry reached its maturity and consolidated the classical style of narrative which well suited the studios’ factory-like modes of production. The Studio System allowed the accumulation and recycling of props, costumes and sets for Hollywood’s rationalized assembly-line process. Understandably, an exhibition entirely dedicated to a costume designer who worked in such a context suggests the re-writing of the position of the costume designer commonly understood as just a part of Hollywood’s industrial regime. This is possibly one of the most understudied aspects of the costume designer’s role within a film production. Edith Head wasn’t the greatest designer, as it is commonly understood within the parameters of individual inspiration, innovation and creation. Her drawing skills were absent, for a start (in her own

2 words, as outlined in a short film interview displayed at the exhibition). She fitted perfectly within the Hollywood system because she was an excellent collaborator and negotiator between the requirements of the production and the star’s body and whims. Famously, Edith Head explained that Hitchcock asked her to pad Grace Kelly’s breast in Rear Window (1954), but Ms Kelly refused to wear falsies. In response, Edith Head designed a halter neck top that draped at the front and enhanced Kelly’s small breast (Chierichetti: 2003). Her extraordinary design ability was in using different forms of cut and drape to highlight physical attributes or disguise faults in the actresses’ and actors’ bodies. Clearly, the draping of Ms Kelly’s white alter neck top could be defined as just a good dressmaker’s trick, instead of innovation in design. However, it was Head’s ability to accommodate director’s requirements, understanding of the human body, flexibility for movement, elegance, glamour and eye- catching costumes that earned Head her long-standing career and reputation. Thus, this exhibition throws up some questions: How do the individual and collective work and creativity intersect in film production based on collaboration? And ultimately: what is costume design? The exhibition successfully addresses some of these questions by displaying the costumes close to the viewer. This allowed the viewer to appreciate the cloth, the fine stitch work and the attention to detail. Large black and white stills from films showed some of the costumes worn by actresses and actors in the film, while film excerpts rolling continuously drew attention to the costume in movement and the actors’ or actress’s embodiment of it. The juxtaposition between the tridimensional costume and the black and white stills and footage allowed the viewer to appreciate the dialogue between the object and the context of the film, but, above all, the costume fitting on the body of the actor (see Fig. 1). The curator’s intention was to provide hints on the make and the material and social culture that the object represented, and the breadth of Head’s work spanning from historical costumes to others that were contemporary with the production of the film. The exhibition presented Head’s costumes akin to the work of a famous fashion designer, extrapolating them from, and at the same time immersing them in the history and context of Hollywood filmmaking. The display could be considered traditional in the use of space, with Head’s famous aphorisms printed in large fonts along walls, while costumes were exhibited in both glass cases and open pedestals in traditional white and rectangular rooms (see Fig. 2). However, the display allowed the costumes to stand out. Highlights in the exhibition were costumes made for Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments (1956), Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face (1957) and Kim Novak’s green ensemble of sweater, blouse and skirt worn in Vertigo (1958) (see Fig. 3). Edith Head was expert in finding a midway between flamboyant costumes and silhouettes that addressed Hollywood glamour. She skilfully used classical draping to highlight feminine attributes without falling into ostentatious sexiness. This was illustrated in the exhibition with the white dress worn by Corinne Calvert in My friend Irma goes West (1950), for which Head cunningly used fine fringing to represent fine pleating (see Fig. 3), and Gloria Swanson’s black nightgown in Sunset Boulevard (1950). Sadly, the most flamboyant costumes that Edith Head made for Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief (1955) and Rear Window (1954) are not in the exhibition. This is not an oversight, but a direct result of the systematic dispersion of Hollywood costumes that resulted from the dismantling of the studios and their costumes departments in

3 the 1950s (Reynolds 2012: 240). Also, many famous actors had the right to keep their costumes, such in the case of Grace Kelly, or the textiles were very fragile and did not survive the many re-uses, as costumes were passed on and readapted for other film productions. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue that shows the breadth and depth of Edith Head’s skills along with essays that describe Head’s life and work in Hollywood and as a celebrity in her own right. Importantly, the subtext of the exhibition was the valorisation of a woman as skilled and important. Her influence on film and fashion remains undisputed.

Captions Fig. 1: Corinne Calvert wore this classical style in My friend Irma goes West (1950). Fig. 2: One of the exhibition’s rooms. Fig. 3: The green ensemble worn by Kim Novak in Vertigo (1958). All images courtesy Bendigo Art Gallery.

4 References

Chierichetti, D. (2003), Edith Head : the life and times of Hollywood's celebrated costume designer, New York: Harper Collins Publisher.

Cole, H. and Burke, K. (2005), Costuming for film: The art and the craft, Beverly Hills: Silman-James Press. La Motte, R. (2010), Costume design 101: The business and art of creating costumes for film and television. 2nd ed. California: Michael Wiese Productions. Nadoolman Landis, D. (2003), Costume design, Burlington MA: Focal Press.

Nadoolman Landis, D. (2007), Dressed: A century of Hollywood costume Design, New York: Collins.

Nadoolman Landis, D. (2012a), Film craft: Costume design, Lewes, UK: The Ilex Press.

Nadoolman Landis, D. (2012b), Hollywood costume, London: V&A Publishing.

Nadoolman Landis, D. (2013), Hollywood costumes, New York: Abrams. Neale, S. (2012), The Classical Hollywood Reader, Abingdon, New York Routledge. Reynolds, D. (2012), ‘Actress and Collector’, in D. Nadoolman-Landis (ed.), Hollywood Costume, London: V&A Publishing, pp. 236-241. Staiger, Janet (ed.) (1995), The Hollywood System, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.