Hollywood Catwalk

Exploring Costume and Transformation in American Film

Tamar Jeffers McDonald

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781848850392
• eBook ISBN: 9780857733924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

The High School outsider takes off her glasses, puts on a dress, and becomes the Prom Queen; the dowdy woman has her hair done, buys some chic new clothes and starts to attract the men. Cinderella and Pygmalion stories still provide inspiration for the plots of Hollywood romantic comedies, dramas, and even action films. Their perennial use prompts a series of questions: is, for example, male agency necessary to effect the transformation, or can the woman change herself? Can she ever change him? Most pressingly, what do these images of change and transformation, of improvement and transcendence tell us, the viewers, about what we should be doing? Investigating these questions, this book examines a key but frequently overlooked aspect of film style: the costume. Across all the films discussed, costume and the body it covers becomes the crucial element in the transformation scene, exemplifying the 'before' and 'after' of the successful change.
Exploring the fantasies of transcendence and transformation sold through these films and exemplified in the costumes, this book examines "Calamity Jane", "Midnight Cowboy", "Clueless", "The Long Kiss Goodnight", "The Devil Wears Prada", and many other examples from both classic and contemporary Hollywood.

section three:

|Case Studies|

Having explored the visual and thematic tropes which operate within the filmic transformation via a range of brief examples, it is now time to investigate them in more detail. The texts in this section – The Bride Wore Red (1937), Calamity Jane (1953) and The Devil Wears Prada (2006) – have been chosen because they present intriguing instances of the metamorphosis at work, offering opportunities to see the transformation relating to its particular cultural and historical contexts in interesting ways while still displaying the dominant elements which recur in these films. These case studies thus both relate to their immediate times and show the continuity of presentation which marks, to me, one of the film-based transformations’ most noticeable features.

Of the films which will be examined, the first two, from the thirties and fifties, are easiest to set in their immediate historical contexts; the most recent is still too close to be able to analyse with any detachment. The distance of intervening years is necessary in order to point out the major preoccupations and concerns of any period. On the other hand, we can much more easily recall the topical allusions from recent films. The ideal position would be to capture both the immediacy of the current awareness of a film alongside the long-sighted view leant by historical distance. Lacking this impossibly perfect vantage point, it will be the task of these sections to attempt to recover as much of the historical contiguities as possible.

After a brief plot synopsis each chapter will explore the film’s immediate contexts, before considering how the transformation theme is used in the text and what combination of the tropes previously investigated are employed. The sections will survey the particular role of the costumes themselves in accomplishing the transformation, looking not only at style but also fabric and design symbolism. The case studies will be intent to look for the importance of a star’s specific persona and connection to costume intersecting with other narrative concerns. Individual costume narratives will be explored, along with whether they endorse or undermine the dominant narrative; sections will also check the possibility of costume forecasting future events – especially the transformation itself – as this contrasts directly with Jane Gaines’ declaration that costume ‘cannot anticipate narrative developments’ (1990: 205). Above all, the investigation of these exemplar texts will seek to show how simultaneously flexible and generic the transformation moment is; flexible in suiting itself to the particular star, narrative and contextual circumstances from which it arises, and generic in regularly employing the same handful of thematic and visual tropes to tell the story of personal transfiguration.

THE BRIDE WORE RED

Synopsis

At a casino with his friend Rudi Pal (Robert Young), Count Armalia (George Zucco) asserts that the only difference between Rudi and the waiter, both men in evening dress, is their societal function – one waits at tables while the other is waited upon. Rudi protests, but the Count insists there is no innate gentility, only external trappings. Later, visiting a waterfront bar, the Count meets Anni (Joan Crawford) and determines to prove his theory at Rudi’s expense. He enables Anni to buy clothes, giving her enough money to pose for two weeks as a rich socialite, ‘Anne Vivaldi’, at the exclusive hotel where Rudi is staying. Anni doubts him until she sees the money, but then determines to take this chance. She visits the couturier, ordering the appropriate clothes and a red beaded evening gown, a long-desired fantasy purchase.

When not met by its car, Anni drives to the hotel with the village postman Giulio (Franchot Tone) in his donkey-cart. Anni discovers her hotel maid is Maria, an old friend who also used to work in the bar. Maria confides that though she now works harder she is much happier – the implication is that this is honest work. Maria admires Anni’s good fortune and new clothes, apart from the red beaded dress, which she remarks cannot be worn amongst the hotel’s high society guests. Anni crossly puts the dress away.

With some of the hotel staff helping her navigate etiquette minefields, Anni meets Rudi, his fiancée Maddelena (Lynne Carver), the Contessa di Meina (Billie Burke) and Maddelena’s father Admiral Monti (Reginald Owen). The Contessa instantly suspects Anni of being a gold-digger and warns Maddelena, but she is too much of a lady to intervene and can only watch as Anni vamps Rudi. Giulio simultaneously tries to court Anni. She is both attracted to him and resentful of the danger he presents to her plans; reaching the end of the two weeks paid for by Armalia, Anni decides to stay on to extract a marriage proposal from Rudi.

The suspicious Countess writes to Armalia for information about Anni. This finally arrives by telegram at the post office: the Count confesses his game and Anni’s imposture. Giulio reads this but does not mention his new knowledge when Anni visits him. She and Giulio end up in an embrace and the telegram goes undelivered. That evening, the hotel holds a festival where the upper-class guests dress in peasant garb, and both the postman and Rudi propose to Anni there. Although she has only that afternoon kissed him, Anni rejects Giulio to grasp at the financial security Rudi represents.

Anni goes down to dinner on her last night wearing the red beaded dress. She is engaged in brittle conversation with the Contessa when Giulio arrives to deliver the telegram at last; he had waited for Anni to tell Rudi the truth herself. The Contessa reveals the contents of the telegram; Anni, both sarcastic and brave, relieves Rudi of his promise to marry her, urging him to treasure Maddelena. Shunned by the other guests and confronted by the angry hotelier, whom she has not paid, Anni leaves her gowns as compensation and departs with only the clothes on her back, hidden under a floor-length black cloak. As she walks away she meets Giulio in his cart. He renews his offer of marriage; Anni throws off the cloak to reveal she has kept only the festival dress, knowing this would best suit her future life as a postman’s wife.

Contexts

The two dominant, and overlapping, contexts against which to read The Bride Wore Red are the Great Depression and Joan Crawford’s own career and star persona. It seems significant that while the Great Depression took its toll on jobs, homes, finances, it did not, after an initial downturn, seem to affect attendance at movie theatres, as audiences continued to flock to see their favourite stars. Crawford’s stardom in particular received a boost in 1929, the very moment at which so many others suffered; this boost cannot be ascribed to the general good fortune of the movie business at the time, but seems more intimately connected with anxieties and fantasies about wealth and poverty into which her specific star tapped. As Richard Dyer has formulated, a star’s persona is the sum of her on-screen roles, off-screen appearances and the mass of extra-filmic information available about her, rather than anything pertaining to her ‘real’ personality (1979). The star attains prominence when the persona’s various connotations have a particular resonance with an audience. Dyer’s in-depth exploration of ‘when’ as well as ‘how, what and why’ stars mean, Heavenly Bodies (1986) explores Marilyn Monroe, produced and consumed in the 1950s as an embodiment of sexuality. Similarly, Crawford’s persona, which remained steady whether she was playing shop clerks, showgirls or heiresses, seemingly evoked connotations which chimed with contemporary audiences. Her chief characteristic is energy, sometimes directed into her physical performances when a showgirl and dancer, at others revealing itself as an iron determination to better herself and improve her circumstances. This can shade into ruthlessness in some roles or become a more brooding but passive unhappiness in others. Crawford’s energy frequently provides the motor for the narrative’s plot; her resolve to get a lover, or a job, or leave either, serving to set the story going. Above all, her robust strength of character seems to be most often directed to bettering herself, climbing out of whatever circumstance fate has cast her into by sheer force of will. The refusal to quit and the energy to keep on plugging away can be seen to be uplifting qualities given the contemporary circumstances, perhaps accounting for the star’s enormous popularity during the period.

Crawford was signed by MGM in 1925 and was granted various minor roles until her first major hit in Our Dancing Daughters (1928). Although immediately afterwards she did return to playing more minor roles in three films, the vitality she brought to the part of a jazz-age flapper ensured that she came to the public’s notice. Biographers note that this film brought the star a welter of fan mail (Quirk and Schoell 2002: 41); from this point her studio began to bally-hoo her. A full-page advertisement in the June 1929 issue of Screenland magazine inaugurates Joan into the MGM ‘Hall of Fame of Stardom’:

Now Joan Crawford…the girl of the hour, vibrant with the spirit of youth, enters the roster of ‘More Stars Than There Are in Heaven’. You’ve seen Joan in ‘Our Dancing Daughters’. Her great new starring picture will be ‘Our Modern Maidens’, a sequel to that classic of up-to-date jazz-romance. (112)

While in this role she is comfortably wealthy, she did not always play socialites, but working girls and showgirls as often too.¹ In 1932 alone, for example, she appeared as impoverished stenographer Flaemmchen in Grand Hotel, socialite-with-a-past Letty Lynton, and prostitute Sadie Thompson in Rain. This alternation between wealthy and working-class roles continued throughout both her silent and talking pictures and it is possible that audiences saw no jarring disjunction between Crawford as hard-working office worker in one film and rich socialite in the next. Her narratives generally reward her with the success she strives for, so by the conclusion of many of her working girl roles she has attained wealth and success. In this way it is possible to see her vehicles overall as enshrining the ‘before’ and ‘after’ motif of the filmic transformation, as her characters go from offices and department stores to mansions and nightclubs, both within specific films and across her movies as a whole.

This dominant and repeated narrative trajectory can thus be associated with Crawford’s star persona, which itself had been carefully crafted and presented, in studio-sponsored publicity material and stories about her in film and fan magazines, as an analogous rags-to-riches tale. A biographical piece held on file for use in publicity by Warner Brothers after the success of Mildred Pierce (1945) pronounced that ‘The life story of Joan Crawford is the real Cinderella story of Hollywood’,² while a 1942 account of the star’s life purportedly written by Crawford herself in Ladies Home Journal, ‘I Couldn’t Ask For More’, continues the association:

It is a little embarrassing for me to write my autobiography. Not that there is anything I’d rather hide, but the events of my life, set down in cold type, make me sound like such an unmitigated Cinderella. (13)

As frequently reported in film and fan magazines, Crawford’s obscurity-to-stardom story was couched in terms of fairy tale and fantasy; as Lucille LeSueur she had been spotted dancing in the chorus of a show on Broadway and offered a film contract. She came to Hollywood and, famously, in 1925 her studio launched a competition through the film magazine Movie Weekly³ inviting readers to name the new starlet: ‘Joan Crawford’ was the eventual winning entry. Perhaps because they had thus not only witnessed her design and construction as a star, but been invited to participate in it, audience members, especially female ones, adopted Crawford as their heroine. It is easy to imagine that the actor could represent to other poor, hard-working women the acme of success to which they could aspire; certainly, this is the story of her working girl films in a nutshell. Not only, though, could such audience members vicariously enjoy success and riches through Crawford herself and the characters she was playing on screen; she could also be utilised as a role model: Motion Picture Magazine, dubbed her ‘The Most Copied Girl in the World’ (May 1937: 30–31).

The Bride Wore Red itself provides a wryly audacious instance of self-reflexivity over this: when Count Armalia, on seeing her eat, asks her ‘Where did you get such charming manners?’ Crawford’s Anni responds ‘I go to the movies. I watch the ladies of your world’. Here the film comments overtly on Crawford’s position as a star who, her biographies said, had learnt her genteel manners from watching films, and who could be trusted as a role model worth copying. The star was indeed constantly held up by the movie press as being the star that female audience members tried to emulate,⁴ significantly for her clothes and accessories as well as her manners.

Joan Crawford’s screen persona, biography and many of her roles thus all tapped into the master rags-to-riches narrative. The Bride Wore Red can be seen as providing another instance of this tale, although a certain amount of ambivalence inheres in this story about what fate Anni deserves. While she was associated with these fairy-tale-like narratives, however, Crawford’s status as a modern-day Cinderella was not based only on the arc of her rise from obscurity to fame, but also specifically on that rise being both marked and assisted by clothing. Oft-told tales, once she had become an established star, underlined that in her past she had been as impoverished and sartorially challenged as any of her fans (Silver Screen, May 1939: 31); Jane Gaines cites a famous story about Crawford, when a struggling actor, being leant fourteen dollars to buy ‘something decent to wear’ (Gaines and Herzog, 1991: 86).

In confirming Crawford as a ‘Cinderella girl’, articles and press materials also frequently emphasise that the star has got where she is because of her own determination to work at aspects of her appearance and personality, to improve herself again and again. This concept confirms Crawford as the appropriate star for others to emulate in making self-improvements. One article, ‘The Girl You Can Be’, in August 1932’s issue of Silver Screen, utilises this idea and links it to the metamorphosis undergone by the caterpillar:

Consider the butterfly, who, as a caterpillar, dares to dream of beauty and glory, and intoxicated by such a lovely vision falls asleep and awakes to find itself the most beautiful of living creatures, flying free amid flowers and golden sunshine.

Deep in the soul of every woman is the desire and dream of becoming a beautiful creature. But she must have a vision of what she wants to be, she must be willing to work at it, to build step by step vigilantly and heroically just as Joan Crawford did in turning herself from an ordinarily pretty girl into the flame-like compelling star she is today. (Lee 1932: 44)

Even today, something about Crawford’s trajectory as a star, going from flapper to working girl across the silent/talkies divide, inevitably invokes the idea of transformation: contrasting two photographs from Crawford’s early career, for example, author Samantha Barbas (2001) uses the ‘before’ and ‘after’ phrase which signifies a sartorial metamorphosis.⁵

Press snippets about Joan Crawford during this period (1929–39) repeatedly stressed that she was the most important star to watch and copy for fashion trends. Adrian’s 1929 series of style notes for women in Silver Screen posed Crawford as the ‘future modern maiden’ (46), neatly managing to publicise both the star and her then-current film. Similarly, a gossip item in the September 1934 issue of Silver Screen noted:

Joan Crawford went a-dancing the other night and introduced the latest fashion style – modified hoop skirts for evening wear. She got the idea from several little numbers Adrian ran up for her in ‘Chained’, and with Joan setting the style it looks like we’re going to be hooping it up this fall. If only you and I could wear hoops as beautifully as Joan does. (15)

Here the continued reputation of Crawford as a star who affects fashion choices for keenly appraising fans is attested by the author of ‘Topics for Gossips’. A curious inclusiveness is created by the writer with her audience using the star as the embodiment of perfection to which they all, including her, aspire, seemingly with equal hopelessness. The author also assumes her readers know that Crawford is habitually dressed by Adrian, while allowing the star herself some agency in what she wears off screen (‘she got the idea…’). A comic article about star copying, ‘That Flair for Being Glamorous’ appeared in the following month’s Silver Screen also, in which Crawford heads the list of stars the author attempts to imitate in a humorously fruitless bid to borrow some of her glamour (Wilson, 1934: 16–17, 60–61). And Dorothy Spensely in Motion Picture, in May 1937, the year The Bride Wore Red was released, enthused:

She has changed the fashion notion of a nation of women. Even a world of women. From Boston to Budapest to Bali they copy the way Joan Crawford walks, the way she dresses, the way she does her hair – trains her brow – paints her lips. (30)

Eventually this position as what might now be called a fashionista became less welcome to Crawford and she came to feel it a stigma, giving other film personnel a reason to undervalue her. As Robert J. Corber (2006) notes in a recent article on Mildred Pierce, the director, Michael Curtiz, was initially very reluctant to cast Crawford in the role as he perceived her solely as a ‘clotheshorse’ (2), not so much an actor as the mannequin she had played so often in films. During the 1920s and 30s, however, her film roles often overtly played up the importance of costume, with The Bride Wore Red a notable, if ambivalent, example. Close examination of the costumes themselves in this film reveals that Adrian, in designing Crawford’s wardrobe, was following the usual indust...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Section One: Costume and Film
• Section Two: Tropes
• Section Three: Case Studies
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography