Edith Head: Hollywood's Costume Designer
Oct 7, 2024 23:28:51 GMT
topbilled, Andrea Doria, and 8 more like this
Post by BunnyWhit on Oct 7, 2024 23:28:51 GMT
Edith Head: Hollywood’s Costume Designer
Oklahoma City Museum of Art
415 Couch Drive
Oklahoma City, OK 73102
During its final week, I spent a day at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art taking in an exhibition of seventy film costumes designed by Edith Head (28 October 1897 - 24 October 1981) between the 1930s and the 1960s. The items displayed ranged from the glamorous gowns of her early work, to the more humble costumes produced for films during the war years, to painstaking historical design garments, with some flashy high energy musical number costumes thrown in for good measure.
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The red silk velvet and silk taffeta gown worn by Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress (1949). Through the course of the film, Catherine Sloper (de Havilland’s character) evolves from a young girl in ruffly, slightly ill-fitting garments that illustrate her youthful insecurities into a severely tailored woman, embittered by all she’s experienced.
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Selections for the exhibit came from the Paramount Pictures archive, the Collection of Motion Picture Costume Design by Larry McQueen, and the private collection of Greg Schreiner. Internationally renowned textile conservator Cara Varnell was tasked with every aspect of transporting and handling the collection (including the supervision of grinding down the mannequins as they were too big to accommodate garments that were made for diminutive Golden Age stars!). On exhibit were costumes worn by Jean Arthur, Olivia de Havilland, Veronica Lake, Angela Lansbury, Barbara Stanwyck, Gloria Swanson, Natalie Wood, and many others.
Edith Head began to make her splash in the days when male costume designers ruled Hollywood. Adrian, Orry-Kelly, and Travis Banton were among the cream of the crop, and they all made lasting impressions on movie goers. But if you ask a random, average film enthusiast today who Howard Greer was (Head’s mentor at Paramount) and who Edith Head was, chances are most will know only one of those names.
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The sarong worn by Dorothy Lamour in Aloma of the South Seas (1941) is made of foliage patterned silk crepe rather than the traditional cotton. An attempt was made to fit the garment to Lamour using only ties as was traditional (though a truly traditional sarong would have tied around the hips with no bodice, which obviously would not have happened), but that garment did not perform well when wet. Head also designed matching undershorts as a safeguard, and Lamour’s appearance in the film immediately influenced the bathing suit market.
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Head began her work in Hollywood in 1924 when she simply answered an ad calling for a sketch artist at Paramount. She had been teaching French and art at a girl’s school in La Jolla. The first film she worked on was Herbert Brenon’s Peter Pan (1924) as sketch artist for Howard Greer. She came into her own quickly. Head was eager, diligent, creative, intelligent, and perhaps above all, confident. Some have criticized Head’s lack of humility, but there frankly is no time for being humble when you are supervising costumes for forty-seven films in a calendar year, as was the case for her in 1940. Still, she also knew “her place.” She knew that it was not her job to snatch ideas from the ether. She was not creating fashion. (Even in the 1970s and 1980s when Head was designing home sewing patterns for Vogue Patterns, she did not believe that she was creating fashion: “I don’t consider myself a designer. I’m a scientist using fashion as the catalyst to bring out the best in a person, and to help develop a whole new character.”) Costume ideas were already prescribed by the script, the director, the context, and the physical attributes of the actors and actresses she would be dressing. Her job was to work within those restraints, broad though they be, to do what was best for the film. She performed this task until her final film, Carl Reiner’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982). Reiner specifically asked for Head for the film, and she remarked that she knew she’d “come full circle” when she was asked to design the same dress for Barbara Stanwyck and Steve Martin.
In all, Edith Head worked in one capacity or another on more than one thousand films. Thirty-five Academy Award nominations garnered her eight wins making her not only the winningest costume designer, but also the woman with the most wins.
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The peach rayon gown (which reads flesh toned in the film) worn by Juliet Prowse in G.I. Blues (1960) is embellished with silver and gold bugle beads and has a carwash skirt to facilitate dancing and accentuate her long legs. The gown would be worn again by Connie Stevens in The Grissom Gang (1971).
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For those of you interested in seeing more costumes from the exhibit and reading my thoughts on them, I’ve included some more of them in a post that is first in what will be a series on the “Is That What You’re Wearing?” thread. For those interested in seeing the Edith Head costumes but who do not regularly follow the thread, I’ll post a notification here when I’ve posted a new installment.
