The red carpet at the Oscars continues to provide one of the most important runway shows in the fashion world, second perhaps only to those at Fashion Week in New York and Paris. Movies have always had a profound influence on what people wear, the classic (if perhaps apocryphal) instance being the dip in undershirt sales after Clark Gable revealed that he wasn't wearing one in It Happened One Night. Studios hired skilled designers like Adrian, Travis Banton and Walter Plunkett to craft a special look for their films. So why did it take more than twenty years for the Academy to get around to awarding an Oscar for costume design? Was it the misogyny of a male-dominated Academy? (No woman has ever been nominated for cinematography, for example, and the vast majority of winners in fields like sound and special effects have been men. The establishment of the costume design award eventually made Edith Head the most-honored woman in Oscar history.) Or was there a touch of homophobia, given that fashion designers are popularly assumed to be gay? (Adrian, who was, had a "lavender marriage" with Janet Gaynor, who may have been.) In any case, this was the first year for the award, and it's noteworthy that at its outset, the nominees and winners skewed more toward costume (i.e., clothing designed to evoke a particular historical era) than toward contemporary fashion.
And the nominees were ...
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... when they should have been ...
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- Edith Head, Gile Steele, The Emperor Waltz
- Carven, Jacques Fath, Mattli, Dorothy Edwards, The Red Shoes
And the Oscar went to ...
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Furse, who also won for production design, provided the expected doublets and tights for his Shakespearean characters, but gave them a fanciful, almost fairytale spin with elaborate embroidery and accessorizing. He also worked with Laurence Olivier on his films of Henry V and Richard III. His two Oscars for Hamlet were his only ones.
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Edith Head was characteristically frank about losing the Oscar to the designers of Joan of Arc on the occasion of her first nomination: "To my mind," she wrote in her memoirs, "there was no way Ingrid Bergman's sackcloths and suits of armor could win over my Viennese finery." Walter Wanger's expensive box-office flop was designed to be an awards blockbuster, but had to content itself with Oscars for cinematography and costumes, plus an honorary one for Wanger. Jeakins had grown up poor in San Diego and Los Angeles, but won a scholarship to art school, worked on arts projects for the Works Progress Administration, and began her career in the film industry as an "inker," painting cells for the Walt Disney studios. Her work as a designer for I. Magnin impressed Richard Day, the production designer for Joan of Arc, and he brought her to the attention of director Victor Fleming. Barbara Karinska used her surname professionally; it was the feminized version of that of her second husband, Nicholas Karinsky. He fled Russia after the Bolshevist revolution, while she remained behind and remarried. Eventually, she too left Russia, winding up in Paris, where she became the costume designer for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Her work for the ballet -- she would eventually become the costumer for the New York City Ballet under Balanchine -- was the central focus of her career, but she also worked in theater and films. Although Karinska was the more experienced and prestigious designer, the lion's share of the costuming for Joan of Arc seems to have been done by Jeakins. This was the sole Oscar for Karinska; Jeakins would go on to win two more, and accumulate an additional nine nominations.
... when it should have gone to ...
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| Jean Marais and Josette Day in Beauty and the Beast |
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| Marais, released from his enchantment as the Beast |
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| The goddess Diana, a statue come to life in Beauty and the Beast |
Although Castillo and Escoffier are the credited designers for Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, there is ample evidence that much of the costume design for the film was the work of its production designer, Christian Bérard, including Cocteau's own diary while the film was being made. Castillo later won an Oscar for Nicholas and Alexandra. Escoffier had a long career as a costumer, primarily in Europe, and was nominated for a Tony for his designs for the 1963 Broadway production of The Lady of the Camellias.
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There are several credited costume designers for The Red Shoes, but the unifying vision really belongs to art director Hein Heckroth. Perhaps the Academy thought that his nomination for production design was sufficient to cover the film's exceptional costumes. Heckroth won that award, of course, but what makes the film such a perpetual visual delight is the integrated whole, as the pictures above suggest. The pastels of the male dancers, the way Moira Shearer's dress picks up the colors of the flowers and sets off her red hair, the exotic look of the climactic ballet, and so on. Carven, Fath and Mattli had primary careers as couturiers, and only occasionally supplied designs for the movies, but Edwards was a mainstay of the wardrobe departments of the British film industry for more than forty years, starting with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in 1944. This was one of her few credits as a designer, specifically for the costumes for Ludmilla Tchérina.
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