Costume, Makeup and Hair

Adrienne L. McLean

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781784537562
• eBook ISBN: 9781838608224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

Costume, Makeup and Hair reveals how these three crafts have continually adapted to new conditions, making the transitions from stage to screen, from monochrome to colour, and from analog to digital. It considers them in relation to a wide range of film genres, from sci-fi spectacles to period dramas, as well as examining how they have been active participants in the marketplace for fashion and beauty products. Drawing on rare archival materials and lavish colour illustrations, the expert contributors provide readers in film and fashion with groundbreaking film history and an appreciation of cinematic costume, makeup and hairstyling as distinct art forms.

1

THE SILENT SCREEN, 1895-1927

Drake Stutesman

Silent film began in the midst of the tremendous noise of the nineteenth century transitioning into the twentieth. In 1895, cities and towns were crammed with opera houses, theaters, burlesque and vaudeville playhouses, music halls, saloons, circus tents, and minstrelsies. Audiences at this time were well used to the stage as a presence, a literal place in which the fourth wall was often breached as performers dazzled, excited, and provoked spectators and fed their Rabelaisian appetites. Performers sang to their audiences—who sang back—or talked to them and made them laugh, cry, or catcall; they threw them acrobatic tricks, dirty double-entendres, and raunchy gestures; they enacted silly, poignant, political, or riveting dramas. This was the stage space that cinema entered, a space with a “here and now” made out of an intimacy full of power.

By holding time in an eternal repetition, cinema created new perceptions for these audiences. By the mid-teens a breathing person could sit in a crowded movie house, intoxicated by a narrative that unrolled as a moving diorama, the fascinating actor now a gigantic face beaming gigantic feelings onto a mesmerized viewer. Cinema manufactured a literalness that, though two-dimensional and usually black and white, was all-enveloping. It embodied theatrical flesh and theatrical flash because cinema’s people never aged. But it also dimmed theater’s organic life into a ghostliness and made time into a present that was unreachable and inexplicable. How could the enticing world of live and symbiotic theater be remade for film, whose actors could no longer talk with, sing to, or eroticize an adoring audience? The answer much depended on the below-the-line crafts of costuming, makeup, and hairdressing (the last two initially grouped together as “makeup” by the industry) to transform cinema’s hypnotic but empty space into a surreal and successful reality.

These arts helped to humanize the alienating cinema “stage.” Costume, makeup, and hair, so often the underpinnings of cultural allure in everyday life, too, were a conduit through which the nascent film industry took hold of its public. In the 1890s storefronts, the 1905 nickelodeons, and the movie palaces of the 1910s and 1920s, who was looking at the screen? In 1900, a fifty-year-old American—whether of African, European, or Asian descent—would have lived through the Civil War or revolutions, enslavements, plagues, diasporas, and purges around the world. What appears as a period drama to an audience now could have had personal meaning to a cinemagoer in the silent era. Something as specific as the eighteenth-century French powdered wigs worn in Georges Méliès’s Cinderella (1899), in the Theda Bara vehicle Madame Du Barry (1917), or in D. W. Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm (1921) might have evoked fear, loss, comfort, or longing. On the screen, people saw things they had never seen before; they may have envied, loved, or despised what they saw; or they recognized what they already knew and felt deeply about.

Even tiny details could have been triggers. Did the spectator own a comb? Use oils, pomades, henna, or hairpieces? Braid her hair into elaborate styles? Have lice or alopecia? Was she suspicious of bathing (as many were in royal and society circles) or grimy from lack of water for washing? Were his clothes rotting? Made at home or fitted at the tailor’s? Did he powder with talc (newly invented in the nineteenth century, replacing lethal lead-based powders)? Did she rouge her cheeks with hot red carmine or wish for Sarah Bernhardt’s crimson lipstick?¹ And most crucially, what could cinema’s arts of costume, makeup, and hairdressing do with the influence implicit in these connections and the reactions they inspired?

Costume, Couture, and the Clothes Rack

In cinema’s first two decades, theater overlapped with the new screen world. When the 1912 French film Queen Elizabeth, starring Sarah Bernhardt and costumed by French couturier Paul Poiret, became a hit in the United States, Adolf Zukor, the distributor, capitalized on its success. He had created his first company, “Famous Players in Famous Plays,” with the idea of drawing “famous players” into prestige cinema. Initially stage luminaries refused to participate, though many young ones (Mary Pickford, the Barrymores) as well as vaudevillians (Marie Dressler, Charlie Chaplin, W. C. Fields) embraced film and made their fortunes. But once Zukor and Jesse L. Lasky drew American opera star Geraldine Farrar into a successful film career with a full-length Carmen (1915), directed by Cecil B. DeMille, other established stars followed.

It was not just Farrar’s star appeal that was important but her cultural persona as an actor who could, in film scholar Anne Morey’s words, “make a claim for the upper-middle-class carriage trade at the same moment that she helped to domesticate a cadre of risqué ‘brothel play’ roles.”² As such, Farrar, and others like her, was indispensible to film’s emerging identity, in part because she had theatrical gravitas and in part because her roles were ones already bridged by the nineteenth century’s courtesans and stage actresses and actors. In the 1880s, fashion-conscious European courtesans set the trends. With dizzingly high social positions, they were esteemed as sophisticates by both men and women and were the precursors, historian Susan Griffith argues, of celebrities as diverse as Greta Garbo, Gracie Allen, and Madonna.³ By the end of the nineteenth century, actresses such as Bernhardt, Lillie Langtry, Cécile Sorel, and Gaby Deslys—each one a household name with record-breaking international popularity—led the styles and broke the rules, a role that would be filled by screen stars within two decades. The industry learned how to blend new world attractions with those of the old, blends that helped lead to costume design’s centrality.

Cinema emerged just as fashion was shifting from an exclusive customer base into a large retail market. Early Hollywood films provided an unprecedented opportunity to view new clothing as fashion because the movie industry’s newly anointed stars⁴ initially wore their own clothes on set, often couture they had purchased themselves if they could afford it. As film costuming, no less than the actors who wore it, became vital to the studio system and the stories that films told by the late teens, American fashion and film costume design began to enter into a world economy together.

That said, at the beginning of the twentieth century, style revolutions continued to come from Europe. In the 1910s, Poiret rid fashion of the corset with his empire-waisted, loosely draped dresses, a look augmented by Leon Bakst’s extravagantly colored and widely admired Ballets Russes costumes. Stage and screen stars wore clothes from the top couture houses such as Poiret, Doucet, Paquin, Worth, Callot, Vionnet, and Lucile, and actresses often liaised with these couturières/couturiers for their costumes. Deslys’s were made typically by Maison Paquin (designer, Étienne Drian) or by Landolff, renowned for stage costume. But Deslys took fashion as a starting place. She wanted, as her biographer put it, “exaggerated adaptations of all current styles,” and she personally redesigned costumes for an “outrageous” and “bizarre beauty that bore a personal stamp.”⁵

Cecil Beaton’s rapturous remarks about Deslys (on whom he modeled his costumes for My Fair Lady decades later) and her own 1915 style—for instance, a magenta outfit and magenta makeup—point toward what became film’s formula of star glamour, “the most elusive of all qualities”: “Vulgar? Perhaps, but by whose standards? The gesture seemed to transcend vulgarity and create it own allure.”⁶ This formula, which could be said to be something through which cinema itself was created, would find its way into film costume design. Within the second half of the silent period, costume design both became integral to the story, in ways both fantastical and realistic, but also was specially suited to the actor’s body and character on and off the screen. Foundational to the new industry, costume also, in its ability to dazzle vast audiences, began to influence fashion rather than follow it. In a letter to Gloria Swanson, one of her era’s style setters, a fan relayed how important that appeal was: although the writer was “in hock,” she spent her “last fifty five cents / before pay day / to see you on screen!” (figure 1).⁷

By the twentieth century’s second decade, pushed by the sense that the United States lacked sophistication, American film producers began to spend money on European couture’s artistes. After Zukor’s success with Bernhardt and Poiret, others, such as Coco Chanel, Erté, Paul Iribe, and Jeanne Lanvin, were hired to design stars’ costumes. One of the most dynamic and complex bridges between fashion and costume (stage and screen) was the internationally successful British couturière Lucile (a.k.a. Lady Duff-Gordon). Lucile, whom Beaton called a “delicate genius,”⁸ was novelist/screenwriter Elinor Glyn’s sister and a progenitor of fashion promotion and runway shows. She clothed many theater stars, on and off the stage, and was at the forefront in cinema design, dressing Pearl White in The Perils of Pauline (1914),⁹ Clara Kimball Young in The Rise of Susan (1916), Billie Burke in Gloria Romance (1916), and Mary Pickford in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917), to name only a few.¹⁰ Dressed is the operative word. These clothes were rarely costumes per se but rather gorgeous fashions.

FIGURE 1: Gloria Swanson in a publicity photo for Zaza (1923), designers uncredited.

It is thus somewhat difficult to create a full picture of early silent film costume design history because so many different methods 1910s. For period pieces (westerns and eighteenth-century themes were as popular in film as on the stage), there was “wardrobe,” which was not a department but rather a clothes rack or, at best, a room that held special items. In 1910, Alice Guy Blaché’s Solax Studios opened in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and was one of the first to incorporate costume into studio premises. Along with a film processing lab and multiple stages, Solax had workrooms for dressing, sewing, and designing, a template similar to that followed by the Hollywood studios during the classical era. But many “period” costumes had little authenticity. Costume houses, where quality period costumes could be rented or reproduced, began to be founded on the West Coast in 1912. One of the first, Western Costume Company (still a major business), began with an inventory of genuine Native American clothing. The first prominent studio to amass a large permanent collection of reusable costumes was Selig, in 1912, then based in Chicago with a studio in Los Angeles. This enabled them to control the clothing condition (some clothes brought in by actors needed fumigation), have costumes readily accessible, and keep down rental costs.¹¹

For films set in the “present,” most actors in the swiftly made one- and two-reelers of the early silent era wore their own clothes. Thus, actresses wanting the job learned to dress well, knowing good clothes would make the film look better. (Swanson attributed her ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Behind The Silver Screen
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Silent Screen, 1895-1927
• 2. Classical Hollywood, 1928-1946
• 3. Postwar Hollywood, 1947-1967
• 4. The Auteur Renaissance, 1968-1980
• 5. The New Hollywood, 1981-1999
• 6. The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000-Present
• Academy Awards for Costume Design
• Academy Awards for Makeup and Hairstyling
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Plates
• eCopyright