It’s a strange experience, to stand before the checked pinafore dress that Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz. It is very plain, and its technicoloured blue has faded into a pallid grey. Yet it is instantly arresting, instantly fantastic. The word ‘iconic’ is as well-worn as an old jumper, but it’s an apt description of that simple dress and its place in Hollywood lore.
The Victoria and Albert Museum’s major autumn exhibition this year is to be Hollywood Costume. You might sigh in anguish that the V&A has devoted yet another show to clothes and cinema — this will be its fourth in the last couple of years after Grace Kelly: Image of a Movie Star, Fashion Fantasies and the Concise Dictionary of Dress. Guest curator Sir Christopher Frayling, cognisant of overkill, emphasises that Hollywood Costume is ‘not about red carpet glamour’; rather, it will demonstrate how costume design is an art, essential to the formation of a character on screen.
The show starts with Chaplin’s The Tramp and ends with Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming The Dark Knight Rises, passing by Ben Hur, Darth Vader and Kill Bill on the way. Frayling insists that there has ‘not been an exhibition like it before’, and he hopes that it will ‘reinvigorate cultural scholarship’ and perceptions about filmmaking.
Central to that aim is Deborah Landis, the designer of, among many other things, Indiana Jones’s costume and Michael Jackson’s Thriller, who has written the catalogue to accompany this exhibition. She retells the history of costume design through a selection of images, and explains how the costume designer has risen in prominence over the last century. Debbie Reynolds has penned the introduction to the book. She recalls being the property of a studio in the mid ‘50s, and its faceless costume hands would prepare her for red carpet events and galas as well as on set. Her mother was allowed to help on special occasions, but that was the limit of her independence.
That staid era has receded before one where designers collaborate in a more equal creative partnership with the director. One small photograph expresses that change most clearly: Alfred Hitchcock being lectured by the designer Edith Head on the set of The Birds, arguing about some detail on the lime green suit that Tippi Hedren spends throughout the entire film.
Head went on to win more Oscars than any other woman in history, which might not have happened had the studios’ autocracy remained unbroken.
Dorothy’s dress in The Wizard of Oz was made by a designer called ‘Adrian’. We know a tremendous amount about Judy Garland, but comparatively little is known about ‘Adrian’ and his
ilk. This exhibition promises to rectify that shortcoming.
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