Tough Acts to Follow

By Melissa Morrison
("How Films Fashion Our Lives" Part I; Moving Pictures Fashion issue, Aug./Sept. 2005)

If you had to pick The Most Famous Dress in the World, you wouldn't look on the runways of Milan or in the shops on 7^th Avenue. You won't find it draped on stick-thin models who never smile.

Instead you'd find it in film history, in the iconic image of a buxom blonde standing coyly over a subway grate in a forgettable romantic comedy.

Yes, Marilyn Monroe almost wearing that pleated white dress that plunged low and blew high in The Seven Year Itch created not only the image most often associated with her - quite an accomplishment, considering she was also photographed naked - but possibly the best illustration of the power of film to shape our image of fashion, with all its attendant associations of beauty, desirability and style.

A little about that dress: Costumer Bill Travilla took his inspiration from Greek robes - which was apt, since Marilyn was her era's embodiment of Aphrodite. Travilla made it with a deep neckline and starburst pleats - a multitude of straight lines directing our eyes toward the curviest of bosoms. It was also white, the color of innocence, which served Monroe's child-woman persona. And, of course, it was fashioned from a fabric light enough to billow up around her thighs for that indelible shot.

The Dress became more than an icon; an icon isn't sold retail. Maybe a woman in the audience couldn't have Marilyn's millions or her men, but she could buy her look. Versions of the dress were sold in stores and still reappear periodically in one variation or another. Type "Marilyn dress" into eBay today and it spits up 281 listings, from Halloween costumes to Goth gear.

Fashion may seem frivolous when considered among the ways movies can move us. But a film's power can come not only from the emotions it generates or the alternative universe it creates; it can come from something as prosaic as a dress.

Legends Off the Rack

Of course, The Most Famous Dress in the World ascended 50 years ago. Marilyn has long since been buried (in almond-green Pucci, by the way, not virginal white). Where is modern Hollywood's version of The Dress? Somehow, J. Lo in a cut-to-there Versace doesn't inspire the same awe.

Consider the fashion timeline of the Golden Age: Bogart's trench coat, Brando's motorcycle jacket, Audrey's little black dress - movies all helped bring those garments into the real world's wardrobe. Brando's outlaw biker in The Wild One, for example, turned what had been utilitarian WWII-era aviator gear into the uniform of the disaffected.

If it seems like Hollywood's Golden Age created more indelible images than our modern-day version, that's because it did.

Part of the reason was institutional. When studios were the boss of everyone, stars' looks were boiled down to their essence and remained that way for as long as the studio said so. Sam Christensen, a former MGM casting executive, says studios did what was effectively market research to determine a star's look based on statistics gleaned from fan mail.

"People would write in and say, ‘We love Garbo, she's so mysterious.' As statistics grew on ‘mysterious,' every department of the studio was instructed that mystery was one of the catchwords for developing Garbo," says Christensen, who has adapted the system into a private business advising actors, Sam Christensen Studios. "It was finding out the identification an audience had with a star and then underlying and emphasizing it."

Ergo Joan Crawford's severe sophistication translated into square shoulders and heavy eyebrows. Liz Taylor's lush überwoman was garbed in dresses with nipped waists and heavy busts. Cary Grant's urbane rake wore double-breasted suits in the then-new relaxed silhouette.

The looks translated off-screen uniformly because the studios had an army of image specialists on staff - fashion police, if you will - to ensure they did.

"The glamour of the old movie days was completely contrived by the studio," says Kevin Jones, curator of the costume collection at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in Los Angeles. "Anytime the stars were in public, they had to keep up that level of look that studio had groomed them to have."

Legendary costume designer Edith Head, for example, would design dresses both for the picture and then for the stars to wear to the premiere. Studio hairdressers and makeup artists were also part of the off-screen image brigade.

It took the studios a while to get to this point, however. It didn't even occur to the first filmmakers to design the actors' costumes. Lillian Gish's mother made the outfits her daughter wore in 1915's Birth of a Nation. Other filmmakers rented from costume agencies.

It wasn't until the 1920s that studios established in-house costume departments, and it still took until 1948 for costume design to earn official regard: That's when the Academy Awards first honored Best Costume Design. Even so, the studio heyday sparked costume superstars, such as Adrian and Head. Gilbert Adrian, known simply by his last name, designed 237 gowns for 1939's film version of Claire Booth Luce's play The Women, which was in many ways the "Sex and the City" of its day. Among Head's many legendary looks were those of Hitchcock's heroines, including Grace Kelly in Rear Window and To Catch a Thief.

Movies' fashion influence became so powerful that the government had to ask Paramount to do something about Lauren Bacall's and Veronica Lake's vision-impairing hairstyles, the emulation of which was causing accidents among working women on the factory floor during World War II. Clark Gable's revealing his bare chest in It Happened One Night reportedly caused American undershirt sales to drop 75 percent.

Today the influence is more diffuse. Television and music are far more influential on civilian style, from the Sex and the City-inspired Manolo Blahnik cult to rappers' baggy-pants-and-bling. The studios no longer employ fashion police via staff costume designers. It's now a freelance business, with stylists taking up the slack for designing stars for the red carpet. Or - God forbid - the star dressing him or herself, risking a Joan Rivers tongue-lashing.

Actors themselves are less easily categorized as macho or femme, with metrosexual stars like Adrien Brody and physically imposing women like Hilary Swank.

Costume designer Michael Kaplan, for one, misses the days when studio designers would garb for the red carpet the actors they had come to know and understand.

"All these actresses who go to the Academy Awards are doing a disservice being dressed in free clothes," says the man who dressed suburban assassins Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in Mr. & Mrs. Smith. "It's going to make them more beautiful, but they have no individuality. It seems very odd to be talking to the interviewer, saying, ‘Oh, this necklace was loaned to me, this designer gave me this dress.' I would be embarrassed.

"It just made a lot more sense when an actress would have her costume designer, who was part of the reason she got the nomination to begin with, do her dress based on their knowledge of the performer."

But few of today's actresses want to pay a costume designer for something Versace or Chanel is more than happy to provide for free, in exchange for de facto advertising.

"The only actress I know who's done that - and I really respect her for it - is Geena Davis," Kaplan says. The actress collaborated with costume designer Bill Hargate on at least three Oscar dresses, Kaplan said, including the notorious can-can dress that landed Davis on Worst Dressed lists. To which Kaplan says, Who cares? "There's something so wonderful about that, because it's asserting who you are."

As independent films have risen in influence, with an accompanying breaking of the Old Hollywood rules, beautiful actors are more likely to deglamorize for a role: Witness Christian Bale in The Machinist and Charlize Theron in Monster. Gone are the days when the Garbo heroine in Camille expired prettily of tuberculosis, radiant all the while.

In fact, at least as far as the last 25 years are concerned, the further removed an actress's role is from her glamorous red-carpet image, the more likely she is to be lauded for it. That's the point costume designer and historian Deborah Landis (The Blues Brothers, Raiders of the Lost Ark) made during a PowerPoint presentation before the last Oscar ceremony for a Fashion Institute of Technology audience. Landis juxtaposed images of the winning actresses in character and on the red carpet, starting with Katharine Hepburn's no-nonsense Maine retiree in On Golden Pond, passing through Hilary Swank's cross-dressing character in Boys Don't Cry and ending with Theron's serial-killer slattern.

Then Landis asked the audience to predict who would win next. Sure enough, Swank was soon to earn her second Oscar for her portrayal of a sweat-stained, working-class boxer in Million Dollar Baby. And she wore Balenciaga to claim it.

The lesson? "An actress can't be glamorous in the role or she won't be on the red carpet to get the award," Landis says.

Film vs. Fashion

Meanwhile, the off-screen association of stars with fashion designers is the chummiest it's ever been. The Oscar ceremony has evolved as much into a couture runway as an awards show. Actresses now outnumber models on the covers of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. InStyle magazine's sole reason for existence is to show us how the stars shop. Nicole Kidman chaired the gala opening for the current Chanel exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Cate Blanchett shills for DKNY, Uma Thurman for Louis Vuitton, Demi Moore for Versace, Luke Wilson for Serengeti sunglasses. In an echo of Edith Head, Giorgio Armani designed the costumes both for the 2004 Cole Porter biopic, De-Lovely, as well as the Cannes wardrobe for stars Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd.

Film and fashion would seem to go together like starlets and breast jobs. Except there's one problem: They don't.

"Please do not use the term ‘film fashion,'" Landis begs. "This simply does not exist. We do not create fashions for film. We create costumes for fictional characters. Costume and fashion have opposing purposes. They are antithetical."

Indeed, the former serve the character, the composition, the lighting and the mood of the scene. They flatter the two-dimensional world while fashion flatters the three-dimensional one. It may look as if the extras in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days' cocktail party scene, for instance, were simply told to show up in their best clothes, but every single item they're wearing was micromanaged to serve the scene - in this case, subdued colors so star Kate Hudson's character, wearing a butter-yellow dress, would stand out like a ray of sunshine.

Costumes don't have to feel good, just look good - which is why Marilyn's Pepto-Bismol pink strapless gown in her "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" number was stiffened with cardboard.

And no costume appears onscreen without the express approval of the director - the equivalent of no corporate employee coming to work in anything the boss hadn't okayed. And have you seen how Oliver Stone dresses? He is no Karl Lagerfeld.

Still, it's easy for the audience to confuse the two professions. From Scarlett O'Hara's barbecue dress to the Converse high-tops Will Smith laces up in the opening scenes of I, Robot, Hollywood and 7th Avenue can seem interchangeable.

The cross-pollination between costume designers and fashion designers reached an early apex with Adrian, who left Hollywood in 1941 to launch his own ready-to-wear line after more than a decade of dressing Jean Harlow in bias-cut silk and Crawford in anvil-shouldered suits.

And it's undeniable that the partnerships between certain designers and stars was crucial in creating the mystique for which we remember the latter today, such as Travis Banton and Marlene Dietrich, or Hubert de Givenchy and Audrey Hepburn. Even as long ago as the silent era, Natacha Rambova basically turned her future husband, a contract player named Rudolph Valentino, into Hollywood's first superstar by dressing him both onscreen and off.

But if costumes set fashion trends, it's only incidentally. Films are made up to one year ahead of the date they are released, Landis points out, making it nearly impossible for costume designers to forecast trends. So movies set in contemporary times tend to be designed "style neutral," so they won't appear out of date by the time the film is released.

Even garments that become mainstream classics, like Brando's leather jacket or Bogie's trench coat, were coincidences based upon the audience's identification with the character, not studio calculation.

"It may seem like they have spontaneously combusted," says Landis, who is currently compiling a decade-by-decade picture book of Hollywood costumes tentatively titled A Century of Hollywood Costume Design. "But the screenplay and the character come first. None of these actors, or the designers, could have anticipated the impact their characters and costumes would have on modern culture."

Hollywood 2.0

The end of the studio era didn't mean the end of style-defining looks. As recently as the ‘70s and ‘80s, characters from film have made definitive fashion statements: Annie Hall's menswear, Tony Manero's white disco suit, Jake's and Elroy's skinny black ties and Ray-Ban Wayfarers, Indiana Jones's fedora and whip.

Kaplan, who was responsible for mass sweatshirt shredding as American girls emulated Jennifer Beals' Flashdance character, had no intention of inspiring a trend when he cut the neck and wristbands off a fleece shirt. He had simply noticed how dancers were always trying to keep their muscles heated by wrapping themselves in warm-ups that they'd customized to facilitate movement. Beals' character, Alex, was a dancer as well as a welder, a working-class girl in a cold city, so it seemed natural to him she'd have a few sweatshirts around to butcher.

"People ask me, ‘Did you know it would have the effect it did?' I was just following the script and supporting the character through clothes," he says.

Indy's look, like the movies featuring him, is a direct homage the action-adventure serials of the ‘40s and ‘50s (there's that Golden Age again.) "Charlton Heston plays a very similar character in a 1954 film, Secret of the Incas, which Steven Spielberg screened for me," says Landis. "Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones is a kinder and gentler version of Heston's character of Harry Steele. The color palette for Indiana, whether in professorial tweeds or leather jacket and khakis, is the warm color of terra firma."

Though Indy's look is homage, it successfully superseded the original. That's likely because Secret of the Incas has pretty much remained a secret to latter generations.

In sartorial terms, though, Indy is the exception. Later looks pale when compared to their genre predecessors. Compare...

... Bonnie & Clyde vs. Julia and Brad in The Mexican
... Richard Roundtree's Shaft vs. Samuel L. Jackson's
... James Bond's spy style vs. Tom Cruise's in Mission: Impossible
... The bikini worn by Ursula Andress in Dr. No vs. the one worn by Halle Barry in Die Another Day

It could very well be that Hollywood has reached the point where it's begun to repeat itself. After all, movies are only as old as Drew Barrymore's grandmother. Early classics, such as The Women, may have indeed been based on material that already existed. But for the vast majority of audiences who didn't regularly patronize Manhattan's theatre district, the movie's look was as fresh as the morning's milk delivery.

Not so for today's audiences, who are often watching - whether they realize it or not - an homage to earlier film.

Jennifer Lopez's character in Oliver Stone's U Turn was based on Jennifer Jones's in Duel in the Sun. Gwen Stefani plays Jean Harlow onscreen and borrows Marilyn's look offscreen. Far From Heaven, Todd Haynes's nod to Douglas Sirk's '50s melodramas, copies the aesthetic, too, down to the New Look dresses and pointy pumps. Directors remake style-setting movies like Ocean's Eleven, The Thomas Crown Affair and Sabrina, without reproducing the influence of the original.

Another way to look at it is to ask who inspires drag queens today. Bubby Gram, a website that offers celebrity impersonator mail-o-grams, offers under its "female divas/female impersonators" category 10 Marilyns, seven Chers, six Barbras, six Madonnas and four Bettes, but only one J. Lo. And the only stars it lists who debuted in a movie filmed in the New Millennium are from the music world: Faith Hill and Britney Spears.

Emerging Archetypes

Indeed, a cynic could argue that no one has since done the blonde bombshell better than Marilyn or the brassy broad better than Bette, so why settle for the Hollywood Lite version? Pugnacious scholar Camille Paglia, for one, takes a withering view of today's stars, such as 2000 Oscar acting winners: "peevishly pursed and clunky Russell Crowe and the goofy, grinning, stork-legged Julia Roberts."

Christensen, the former MGM casting executive, is more complimentary, seeing in Roberts, for example, a latter-day incarnation of Claudette Colbert's Everywoman appeal. "The style changes, the haircut changes, the body type changes, but the mythic things that they represent to us in that Jungian way, that doesn't change at all," he says. "There's always going to be a Gable or a Hepburn."

The power of those earlier archetypes is such that an artist can dress herself in a few key items of clothing and wigs and immediately call to mind a movie that's never been made by a star that never existed.

Cindy Sherman drew on the physical trappings of cinema for Untitled Film Stills, the landmark series of photographs she made from 1977 to 1980. Disguising herself in wigs and thrift-store finds - full skirts, pointy brassieres, head scarves over bouffant hair - Sherman photographed herself as types recognizable from publicity shots for mid-century movies. There's the icy Hitchcockian blonde, clutching her coat to her throat, the Olivia de Havilland hysteric wearing a white nightgown and bedhead, and the dark-haired voluptuary adjusting her stocking.

"It had nothing to do with dissatisfaction, or fantasizing about being another person: it was instinctive," Sherman has written. In that sense, she represents the ultimate film fan, intuitively absorbing and channeling the aura of her favorite movie stars.

Christensen taps those archetypes in a contemporary way, helping his actor clients come up with an image he or she is comfortable selling. The process, which he estimates takes a total of 10 to 12 hours, involves a kind of market research, surveying strangers, for example, to find out what impression the actor makes on them.

"For example, if Robin Williams were a new actor and I was working with him, pretty soon we would discover ‘manic' shows up. Strangers who just glance at him, people who know him, when he's in good mood, a bad mood - that keeps showing up," says Christensen, who is turning his process into a self-help book called Don't Change a Thing, due out at the end of the year.

Actors may no longer have the studios to define their images for them, but, more than ever, they have a reason to do so themselves. That's because, unlike the Golden Era when stars had to look good for the monthly Photoplay or newsreel, today a million web sites, infotainment cable and network shows, magazines and promotional tie-ins barrage us with images of the stars. It's hard to settle upon a single, defining one to cherish and emulate.

Kaplan (who designed Fight Club) says it's too soon to tell what this generation of film's Marilyn-in-a-white-dress will be.

"It takes a long time for that to happen," he says. "When something's too fresh in people's minds it can't be iconic. It takes a while for history to prove what is good and what is great."

Maybe we'll have to wait - say, another seven years - to satisfy that itch. -MPM

Also see "How Films Fashion Our Lives" Part II: Public Image, Ltd.