Hollywood Costume: About the Exhibition

20 October - 27 January 2013

Robert de Niro as Travis Bickle in 'Taxi Driver', 1976, costume designed by Ruth Morley. Columbia /The Kobal Collection

Dorothy Gale costume from 'The Wizard of Oz', designed by Adrian, 1939

'Clothes are never a frivolity, they always mean something' James Laver (1899–1975), first Keeper of the V&A Theatre Collections

Costume designers are storytellers, historians, social commentators and anthropologists. Movies are about people, and costume design plays a pivotal role in bringing these people to life. Hollywood Costume illuminated the costume designer’s process in the creation of character from script to screen including the changing social and technological context in which they have worked over the last century.

This ground-breaking exhibition included over 100 of the most iconic and unforgettable film characters from a century of Hollywood filmmaking, 1912–2012. Hollywood Costume took us on a three-gallery journey from Charlie Chaplin through the Golden Age of Hollywood to the cutting-edge design for 'Avatar (2009, Costume Designer Mayes C Rubeo, Deborah L Scott) and 'John Carter of Mars' (2012, Costume Designer Mayes C Rubeo): Act 1, Deconstruction, put us in the shoes of the costume designer and illuminated the process of designing a character from script to screen; Act 2, Dialogue, examined the key collaborative role of the costume designer within the creative team; Act 3, Finale, celebrated the most beloved characters in the history of Hollywood and the ‘silver screen’.

These galleries were filled with cinema costumes that had never left the private and archival collections in California. Most of these clothes had never been publicly displayed and had never been seen beyond the secure walls of the studio archives.

Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones in 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', 1981, costume designed by Deborah Nadoolman. Lucasfilm/Paramount/The Kobal Collection

Act 1: Deconstruction

'On every film, the clothes are half the battle in creating the character. I have a great deal of opinion about how my people are presented. We show a great deal by what we put on our bodies.' Meryl Streep

Movies are about people. It’s the people, the characters in the stories, who hold our attention and who are of endless fascination to the audience. The people are the emotional core of every movie and it’s their story that moves us. The costume designer must know 'who' a character is before they can design their costume. No matter the era that the story takes place, the audience is asked to believe that the people in the movie are real and that they had a life prior to the start of the movie. We join our cast of characters at one moment in their life. Everything about them must resonate true, including their clothes.

Whatever the genre, the designer’s creative process starts with research. This was explored in case studies including 'Fight Club' (Costume Designer Michael Kaplan, 1999) and 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' (Costume Designer Deborah Nadoolman, 1981) and concluded with a dissection of designer Alexandra Byrne’s 'Elizabeth: The Golden Age' (2007) accompanied by a royal court including Bette Davis as 'The Virgin Queen' (Charles LeMaire, Mary Wills, 1955), 'Marie Antoinette' (1938, Costume Designer Adrian), 'Marie Antoinette' (2006, Costume Designer Milena Canonero), 'Dangerous Liaisons' (1988, costume Designer James Acheson), 'Shakespeare in Love' (1998, Costume Designer Sandy Powell).

Kate Winslet as Rose DeWitt in 'Titanic', 1997, costume designed by Deborah L. Scott. 20th Century Fox/Paramount/The Kobal Collection

Act 2: Dialogue

'What’s great about costume is it’s the visual representation of the internal side of people. That’s what I love.' Tim Burton

Dialogue examined the intimate creative collaboration of great filmmakers and their costume designers with four pairs of especially commissioned on-camera interviews. Over the past century, costume designers work within a rapidly changing social and technological landscape: from silent to sound, black and white to Technicolor and from the Golden Age to 20th-century multi-national corporations and art house ‘indies’. Costume designers have embraced innovations such as Joanna Johnston’s slinky bombshell Jessica Rabbit in 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' (1988) and 21st-century motion-capture, exemplified by Deborah L Scott, and Mayes C Rubeo who helped bring the magical characters of 'Avatar' (2009) to life.

The section concluded with the ‘Art of Becoming;’ two case studies with the participation on camera of the great American actors, Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep. Both actors, celebrated for their transformative skills, discussed their use of costume to channel their new ‘people.’ Five costumes chosen from their most memorable roles were on view.

Act 3: Finale

Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow in 'Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End', 2007, costume designed by Penny Rose. Walt Disney Pictures/The Kobal Collection

'If you (the costume designer) can make the audience feel the actress is the character, then it’s a good job of costuming.' Edith Head

Entering the last gallery, our visitors entered the most glamorous Hollywood nightclub in the world, filled with familiar famous faces who have taken their permanent place in international popular culture.

Finale was a celebration of Hollywood heroes, villains and femme fatales. Screen sirens including Mademoiselle Amy Jolly (Marlene Dietrich) in 'Morocco' (1930, Costume Designer Travis Banton), Sugar Kane Kowalczyk (Marilyn Monroe) in 'Some Like it Hot' (1959, Costume Designer Orry-Kelly), Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) in 'Breakfast at Tiffany’s' (1961, Costume Designer Hubert de Givenchy), Fanny Brice (Barbra Streisand) in 'Funny Girl' (1968, Costume Designer Irene Sharaff), Roxie Hart (Renee Zellweger) in 'Chicago' (2002, Costume Designer Colleen Atwood), in Cecilia Tallis (Keira Knightly) 'Atonement' (2007, Costume Designer Jacqueline Durran) were seen alongside a dynamic grouping of action, fantasy, sci-fi and superhero characters including 'Matrix' (1999, Kym Barrett), 'Harry Potter' (2001, Judianna Makovsky), 'Twilight: New Moon' (2009, Tish Monaghan) and 'Spider-man' (2002, James Acheson)

Costumes are one channel by which a character is transformed from the written page to a multi-dimensional people. The costume designer gives the clothes to the actor, the actor gives the character to the director, and the director tells the story. When a character and a film capture the public’s imagination; the costumes can ignite worldwide fashion trends and influence global culture. Cinematic icons are born when the audience falls deeply in love with the people in the story. And that’s what movies, and costume design, is all about.

Deborah Nadoolman Landis
Senior Guest Curator, 'Hollywood Costume'

Video: Hollywood Costume

View transcript of video

Deborah L. Scott: All of us get up everyday and decided which shoes to wear. You know if we need a new blouse, we go: where are we gonna go buy that, why we need it or what it means to us or if we have an article of clothing that was passed down through a family member or just something that is sentimental that you wore at a particular time. All these things you put on to establish your persona to the world, its exactly what we do as designers.I think the costume designer’s main rule in a movie is to express the visuals that are needed to bring a particular person in a particular place, in a particular place alive. As a designer you often have the choice to design in all sorts of genres and I have been particularly lucky to be able to do, you know: period, contemporary and a certain amount of fantasy and science fiction. It’s amazing that the process, no matter how different the results are, the process is absolutely similar from film to film. What we are doing is still designing something to create a person who lives in a particular place and time. If that is two thousand years in the future or one hundred years in the past. Director of a film is the most important person to the costume designer and I think to anyone on a film. On Titanic, Jim (James) Cameron, one of the things he was concerned about from the beginning was Kate Winslet’s dress for the drowning looked good under water, because she was as she was to spend so much time in it. We did a lot of tests in it with different kinds of fabrics, because the visual of that was part of the cinematic storytelling.Shay Cunliffe: The costume designer is responsible for what every single person wears in a film. For an actor, finding their look is part of finding their character. One of the interesting challenge about costuming a character like Bourne is that by his very nature he is supposed to disappear, he is supposed to be a master of blending. Yet I want him to stand out so the audience can find him in a crowded scene. I had about twenty different styles of jacket and I knew I wanted something anonymous, everyman, utilitarian could go through different seasons, different countries you wouldn’t really give it the time of day. I tried it on with Matt (Damon) I brought about twenty different styles of things and also a muslin for a jacket because I was sure we would make it, we wanted about thirty of them. As it turned out in that it was the muslin that, after discussing the other jackets styles, we went for the muslin and that finding the exact right point that he wanted his hands to be going into extremely deep pockets that could hid things. Details in fact that doesn’t really show on the film, but to the actor are relevant.Prof Deborah Nadoolman Landis: The Hollywood Costume exhibition came about from years of being a practitioner working in the movies. I have been working on the exhibition for five years. Doing it at the V&A, having Hollywood costume at the V&A just feels absolutely right. I could now imagine it anywhere else. Every single studio in Hollywood has contributed something to this show, so it is remarkable in that respect. I tried to… show the best work of what was available in each genre. So it wasn’t for me never ever ever ever about the clothes it was really about the films that mean so much to people.Keith Lodwick: When I first met Deborah Landis in 2008, she was so incredibly passionate about this project and pulling this project together. That is when we began work in early 2008. Where we looked at where objects might be held, where were they. There’s a really stunning dress and cape worn by Heidi Lamare in the 1949 production of Samson and Delilah designed by Edith Head and the dress itself was owned by Debbie Reynolds in a private collection. It was sold in June 2010 and bought by Paramount Pictures, ironically who had made it in the first place. We were then able to borrow the cape, which was covered in two thousand peacock feathers from the Cecil B Demille Foundation. So the first time since the film we will be reuniting the dress and the cape to make one complete object. The whole exhibition has been filled with these treasure hunt stories of how we have brought it all together. Many of our costumes and pieces and objects are scattered quite literally around the world they are in museums, costume houses, they are with individual private collectors who were really beholding to. People such as Larry Mcqueen who has been collecting film costumes for over thirty years, have just been absolutely essential to making up this exhibition.Larry Mcqueen: I never thought that I would collect costumes, I was always interested in theatre and I was interested in film and in the early eighties all of these things were being sold in junkshops around Hollywood and I thought that’s kind of cool. So I started to collect. I was at the right place at the right time, before anybody cared what this stuff was.Prof Deborah Nadoolman Landis: Many people will come to this exhibition to see their favourite character, to see their favourite person. But I hope that they are going to leave with a much greater understanding of the costume designer’s contribution to the story telling.

Video: The Western Costume Company

View transcript of video

Eddie Marks, President Western Costume Company, California

Western Costume has been around for 100 years. Our company began in 1912 with a gentleman named Lou Burns, it went through several different ownerships and in 1989 the current owner, Bill Haber, purchased the company and here we are today.

Our building here is 120,000 square feet, we have eight miles of costumes, so there’s quite a versatility from 1900s, 1920s, even 1800s clothes, for the costume designer to pick from. In the ‘50s they got away with putting zippers in 1800s dresses, they didn’t think the camera saw and it didn’t matter, if it helped get the actor or actress in and out of a costume fast. Today, authenticity is everything to a costume designer, they wouldn’t dream of putting a zipper in anything that didn’t have a zipper back then. Everything is as it was in the real period. It’s real important for us, in a lot of the clothes that we have are unwearable, or they’re great for seeing how something was constructed back in the 1800s.

All the artisans that work for Western Costume, meaning our men’s tailor, our milliner, Maurizio who does shoes, our lady seamstress, everyone is such a perfectionist at what they do. In my eyes, they’re the best people that I could possibly have. They’re sticklers to details, they want to make sure that the customers are happy, that we maintain the clothes to make sure that they hold up. After all, we are a rental company, so we want to make sure that they’re done professionally and that these clothes are going to be around for quite a while.

The original ruby slippers were actually a shoe that was already constructed from the Inner Shoe Company. The costume designer [Adrian] came to Western Costume to have us cover them with sequins and beads, so that’s how Western got involved. In 1989 Western was contracted with Turner to create 500 pairs of ruby slippers to sell. We only made about 30 pairs, it was a certain type of person that really wanted to get a pair, they were $5000.

A few months ago Deborah Landis [Senior guest curator of Hollywood Costume] came to me and said that they were having a hard time trying to track down one of the original pairs of Ruby Slippers and asked if we could go ahead and create a pair for the V&A show. Well without hesitation I said ‘of course we would’.

Hollywood Costume was kindly sponsored by Harry Winston.

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Closed Exhibition – Hollywood Costume

Hollywood Costume: About the Exhibition

20 October - 27 January 2013

Act 1: Deconstruction

Act 2: Dialogue