EDITH HEAD
COSTUME DESIGNER EDITH HEAD TRAILBLAZED HER WAY THROUGH THE 20TH CENTURY. WE SALUTE A TRUE HOLLYWOOD RENEGADE
The incredible true story of one of Hollywood’s greatest, and most iconic, fashion designers. No capes!
THE EARLY CAREER OF HOLLYWOOD’S most famous costume designer gave no hint of superstardom. Edith Head would go on to become an icon not just of her profession, winning eight Academy Awards for her work — still a record for the category — but of Hollywood itself, memorialised in pop culture thanks to her trademark blunt black bob, dark round glasses and stern expression. But she cut her teeth on two near-disasters that might have ended her career before it truly began.
In 1924, shortly after joining Paramount as a sketch artist, she was asked to design the ladies’ gowns for the infamous ‘Candy Ball’ scene in Cecil B. Demille’s extravagant 1924 picture The Golden Bed. It was her first major assignment, and told the story of a rich girl who loses her fortune and tries to ensnare a newly wealthy confectionary magnate. At the Candy Ball, all of the women’s gowns were made of real sweets, to be devoured by their suitors. Head was excited by her first big job, and went to town. She stuck to the script a little too rigorously, however, and made the costumes out of real chocolate and other sweets — which melted under the sweltering heat of the studio lights.
A year later, she began work on Raoul Walsh’s The Wanderer, on which she was tasked with dressing the lead elephant. She made a vivid wreath out of flowers and fruit, but filming was delayed for several hours, and the animal began to merrily tuck into its own wardrobe. “How was I to know elephants eat fruits and flowers?” she recalled in her book Edith Head’s Hollywood.
Head was never unprepared again. During her long career, which began in the silent era and continued right through until her death in 1981, she redefined what it meant to be a costume designer, referring to herself as “a combination of psychiatrist, artist, fashion designer, dressmaker, pincushion, historian, nursemaid and purchasing agent”. She became famous as a dispenser of waspish anecdotes and no-nonsense fashion advice, on call to the biggest female stars of their times. She also learned not to design costumes that were quite so appetising.
MUCH OF EDITH HEAD’S LIFE WAS presented exactly how she wanted it to be. She was born Edith Claire Posner in San Bernardino, California, in 1897, though her early years remained mysterious until after her death in
1981. Reporting the news of her passing, the New York Times fabulously referred to her as “Miss Head, who never admitted her age, but was believed to be in her early eighties”. She began her career as a language teacher, eventually teaching French at the Hollywood School for Girls. To earn more money, she also started to teach art, though had exaggerated her abilities in the subject, and had to take evening classes to develop her skills with a pencil.
During a summer break from teaching, Head saw an advertisement for a sketch artist at the Famous Players-lasky studio, which would go on to become Paramount. In need of some extra cash, she applied — using her classmates’ drawings. “I was studying seascapes and all I could draw was oceans,” she said, in Edith Head’s Hollywood. “I needed a portfolio, so I borrowed sketches — I didn’t steal them... It never occurred to me that it was quite dishonest.”
It never occurred to Howard Greer, then chief designer at the studio, that the drawings were not Head’s own work. “I hired the gal on the spot,” he wrote in his 1951 memoir, Designing
Male. “She came to work the next morning and looked out from under her bangs with the expression of a frightened terrier.” Eventually, Head would make her austere expression a trademark, though it emerged under less contrived circumstances. She was self-conscious about her teeth, having her two front incisors missing, and never smiled with them on show. It made her look stern, but it wasn’t until Barbara Stanwyck, with whom she worked on 25 pictures including Double Indemnity, asked her why she never smiled that she let her insecurity slip. Stanwyck promptly marched her off to the dentist to get them fixed.
In early publicity shots for Paramount, Head did not wear her glasses, but soon made them part of what we would now call her personal brand — an image that became iconic. Incredibles director Brad Bird likes to play down the similarities, but the franchise’s fictional fashion designer Edna Mode was clearly partly inspired by her. Head’s little round glasses were darkened, initially so she could see what colours would look like when filmed in black-and-white. She preferred to wear two-piece suits, and in only four colours: black, white, beige and brown. The simple sternness of her image played into her canny eye for myth-making, but it also had a practical purpose. According to Jay Jorgensen’s 2010 biography, Edith Head: The Fifty-year Career Of Hollywood’s Greatest Costume Designer, Head, who was barely five feet tall herself, explained exactly how her demeanour worked in her favour. “Stars don’t like to look past the mirror and see a designer in a brightly coloured dress. When I’m at the studio, I’m always little Edith in the dark glasses and the little beige suit. That’s how I’ve survived.”
Head had a way with leading ladies and she inspired great loyalty in her female stars. During her 44 years at Paramount, she was often “loaned out” to other studios at the request of actors such as Bette Davis, who personally requested that she work on All About Eve. “Throughout my career I have used clothes to turn drudges into princesses, plain Janes into glamour girls, frumps into fashion plates,” she wrote, in the introduction to her fantastically sassy 1967 advice book, How To Dress For Success.
Her first big name was Clara Bow, whom she dressed for the 1927 military classic Wings. Initially, the pair clashed. At the time, Head was a stickler for authenticity, while Bow kept trying to put a more flattering, though not official issue, belt around the waist of her character’s army uniform. Legend has it that Head was on set at
all times, to snatch away the belt whenever Bow tried to sneak it on. Head remembered Bow fondly in her memoirs: “I still cherish an old photograph she gave me inscribed, ‘To Edith with love, but why don’t you put your goddamn belts around your waist where they belong?’” Later, she learned to be more flexible around female stars; one of her most famous quotes was, “You can lead a horse to water and you can even make it drink, but you can’t make actresses wear what they don’t want to wear.”
Despite their conflict, Head became a confidante to Bow, a role she later played for many other female Hollywood icons. She dressed Mae West in She Done Him Wrong (1933), the first film in which “Costumes by Edith Head” appeared on the credits. Head said she fell in love with West the instant they met, and they worked together on and off up until Myra Breckinridge in 1970. She dressed Marlene Dietrich for six films between 1930 and 1935.
Head recognised kindred spirits and enjoyed her collaborations, relishing the intimacy of a joint approach. When Bette Davis asked her to work on All About Eve, they ironed out a particularly pressing issue together. A dress Head had designed for Margo Channing’s (played by Davis) big party scene was made the night before it was needed. Head arrived on set, and found “Bette, already in the dress, looking quizzically at her own reflection in the mirror. I was horrified. The dress didn’t fit her at all.” There had been a mistake, and the bodice and the neckline had been made too big. Head said that Davis pulled the neckline down, “shook one shoulder sexily, and said, ‘Don’t you like it better like this, anyway?’ I could have hugged her.” Davis later confided that she bought the dress, and had a signed Edith Head sketch of it hung up in her home.
Head was the first Hollywood designer to dress Audrey Hepburn, whom she called “the perfect mannequin for anything I would make”, and whose appearance was markedly different from that of the other bombshells of the 1950s, such as Elizabeth Taylor (whom Head often dressed, and adored) and Marilyn Monroe (Head said it was one of her great regrets that she never designed for her). When she dressed Hepburn for Roman Holiday in 1953, Head showed the powers of her profession, as well as her characteristic bluntness. “I called attention to her long neck so that people began to describe her as ‘swanlike’ and ‘graceful’ instead of ‘gangly’,” she said. “I emphasised her broad shoulders to draw the eye up to her face, but nobody ever said she looked like a football player.” She later marvelled that “the reed-slim silhouette” Head created for Hepburn remained her “most sought-after” look, and Roman Holiday won both Hepburn and Head an Oscar. For Head it was a fifth.
Not every A-lister received her lifelong friendship. Though she worked with Demille again after the Candy Ball fiasco, their relationship remained testy, and she reserves a rare harsh word for him in her autobiography.
She won another Oscar for 1950’s Samson And Delilah, though her recollections of the experience are not fond: she called Demille “a conceited old goat” who “never did an authentic costume picture in his life, and in my opinion that made him a damn liar as well as an egotist”. She had reservations about Hedy Lamarr, its Delilah, too. “She never registered any enthusiasm at her fittings,” she complained in Edith Head’s Hollywood. “Since I was fitting Olivia de Havilland for The Heiress, Bette Davis for All About Eve, Gloria Swanson for Sunset Boulevard, and that sweet, young Elizabeth Taylor for A Place In the Sun during the same months, the contrasts made it all the more difficult to enjoy working with Hedy Lamarr.” It must be one of the greatest humblebrags, and insults, in the history of Hollywood. That she could reel off the names with such easy familiarity shows the extent of her enormous entanglement with the greats of cinema.
EDITH HEAD CLAIMED TO HAVE WORKED on 1,131 movies during her 58-year career. She weathered changes in fads and fashions, and even global crises. During World War II, the
US government issued restrictions on the amount of fabric that could be used. There could be no more silk for lavish gowns, and no unnecessary frills. After dressing Dorothy Lamour in a sarong in a number of movies, from The Jungle Princess to Hurricane, Head had made the item a staple of western fashion. By the time Road To Morocco was made, in 1941, even Lamour was feeling the pinch. Head substituted cotton for silk, and painted goatskin gold to make a fake metallic trim. “It all worked, thanks to some ingenuity and clever lighting effects,” she said.
However, by 1944, Head was indulging in a little excess once again. She designed what became known as ‘the mink dress’ for Ginger Rogers’ character in Lady In The Dark, which, at $35,000, was one of the most expensive costumes ever made. “Actually it was a mink overskirt which was lined with sequins, worn over a matching sequinned bodysuit. There was also a mink bolero and muff,” Head said. If the director Mitch Leisen had had his way, it might have been even more extravagant. He originally asked for the skirt to be lined with faux rubies and emeralds, but they made the skirt so heavy that Rogers couldn’t lift it, never mind dance in it, and the jewels became sequins.
In 1945, Head made her first appearance on Art Linkletter’s radio show House Party. She had been dispensing to-the-point fashion advice in the pages of Photoplay magazine, responding to full-length photographs readers sent in of themselves with appraisals and tips, and Linkletter saw her star potential. She appeared once a month to talk fashion, and peppered her words of wisdom with anecdotes about the stars she had dressed. “As her confidence grew, she became more and more blunt with the ladies, but they never took offence,” Linkletter recalled, according to Paddy Calistro, who co-wrote Edith Head’s Hollywood.
Her bluntness became as much a part of her personality as her glasses and hair. She wrote two other books in her lifetime, The Dress Doctor in 1959, and the aforementioned How To Dress For Success. Both are still in print, and though their advice has not aged well in terms of gender politics — “while the boys ogle and applaud the charms of Venus Unadorned in art galleries, night clubs and between the covers of some magazines, it’s the covered girls rather than the Cover Girls they invariably marry,” she wrote in the latter — their wit and some of their wisdom remains unparalleled.
She followed House Party from radio to television, and continued to appear as a regular guest until its demise in 1969. By this point, she had moved from Paramount to Universal, on the recommendation of Alfred Hitchcock, with whom she worked on eight films, including
Rear Window, The Birds and Vertigo (dressing the two characters played by Kim Novak). At times, Head was criticised for her sartorial conservatism, but it ensured a fruitful, close partnership with Hitchcock, who thought that unless they made a point, bright colours distracted from the story. “If the script called for a girl in a red dress, that was one thing, but to put her in a red dress for no reason was out of the question in a Hitchcock film,” she said.
She won her final, eighth Oscar in 1974, at the age of 76, for George Roy Hill’s The Sting. Unusually for her, it was for dressing its two male stars, Robert Redford and Paul Newman. “Just imagine, dressing the two handsomest men in the world, and then getting this,” she said, upon collecting the award. “I simply couldn’t be more happy, or more grateful.” And even in her eighties, she appeared to be enjoying her fame. Today’s legendary costume designer Colleen Atwood recalled catching a glimpse of her out on the town in 1980. “I saw Edith Head in New York when I first moved there, at Studio 54,” Atwood told the Los Angeles Times. “It was a great moment. She had a huge entourage of gorgeous young boys. She was ancient, had a black turtleneck and long floral skirt, was really turned out for the evening.”
Head continued working right up until her death, just two weeks after she finished her final film, Carl Reiner’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. Again, she drew on her considerable expertise to design its 1940s, noir-inspired costumes. The film was dedicated to her memory.
As befits an icon of Head’s standing, Bette Davis delivered the eulogy at her memorial service. “A queen has left us, the queen of her profession,” Davis said. “She will never be replaced.” Which is, you suspect, exactly how Edith Head would have liked it.