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Before we get into who might win the Oscar for costuming it is important to know what the role of the costume designer is in a film.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

The wardrobe department includes everyone involved with caring for, creating or procuring (borrowing from studio stock, renting from outside companies, buying at stores)  the costumes used in a film. The wardrobe or costume supervisor is responsible for the management of the staff and stock of this department — if something goes missing it’s their problem.

The costume designer styles and creates garments, usually just for the principal actors but they also work with assistants who style the walk-ons and background extras. While the costume designer’s job is the most creative it is also the most responsible as they have to work with the art director, film director, and principal actors to create the right look that will contribute to the success or failure of the production. Lastly, the costumers (aka wardrobe assistants/dressers) are responsible for handling the costumes worn by all the actors, from stars to extras. It is here that future costume designers learn their trade, working their way up the food chain to becoming a costume designer.

Coco Avant Chanel

Last year the Oscar award was clearly a race between two relatively new costume designers, Catherine Martin for Australia and Michael O’Connor for The Duchess (O’Connor won.) This year there is another race between two costume designers, but this time it is between two who have a track record of award winning costume designs. The nominees for 2009 costume design are: Janet Patterson for Bright Star; Catherine Leterrier for Coco Avant Chanel; Monique Prudholme for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus; Colleen Atwood for Nine; and Sandy Powell for The Young Victoria.

Although Monique Prudholme, costume designer for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, has been in the business for twenty-five years, her usual fare has been wardrobe for ‘B’ movies and horror flicks (by wardrobe I mean buying off-the-rack contemporary clothes and styling the actors rather than creating original garments.) It’s also difficult to compare the costumes of a fantasy or science fiction film with an historical drama because the imagination of the costumer and the size of the budget are the only real limitations. Prudholme has no previous awards from other films and is clearly this year’s longshot for the Oscar.

Nine

Catherine Leterrier, designer for Coco Avant Chanel, has received accolades for other films, most notably the Cesar (French film award) for costumes for the entertaining World War II comedy thriller Bon Voyage, as well as The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. The problem is that Karl Lagerfeld did the historical Chanel clothes for the film. Similarly, Edith Head won a costume award for Sabrina in 1955, but the most glamorous clothes were designed by Hubert de Givenchy for Audrey Hepburn, a similar gamine beauty to Audrey Tatou who plays the young Chanel. Leterrier’s costumes are well done but unlike Sabrina in 1955, the connection between costume designer and couturier have been well publicized and should take her out of the running.

Colleen Atwood, costumer of Nine, has been a costume designer for twenty-five years. She has been fortunate to find films where she can show off her ability. Although she has won various awards, including Oscars, for several of her films, most notably Memoirs of a Geisha and Chicago, Atwood tends to change history to suit her aesthetics. In the case of Chicago this wasn’t an issue because the film is a musical fantasy, but in Memoirs of a Geisha I found the Japanese dress distracting because it was not authentically styled. Many will argue that a costume designer has the right to be creative rather than just reproduce history, but I argue that it depends on the type of film; the more liberties taken with history, the less authentic and compelling the story. For me, historically set films that receive high accolades but have egregious costuming errors (such as Titanic and Atonement) have been difficult to sit through.

The Young Victoria

I think the race will be between Janet Patterson, designer for Bright Star, and Sandy Powell, designer for The Young Victoria. Both have been in the business for about twenty-five years and both often receive nominations for their work. Janet Patterson’s most notable films include Oscar & Lucinda, and The Piano. Her costuming is always exceptionally authentic, to the point that watching her films is an education in period style and movement. Sandy Powell’s most notable films include The Aviator, and Shakespeare in Love. She is a master of finding the right balance between authenticity and aesthetics.

Bright Star

I would be thrilled to see either Powell or Patterson take home the Oscar this year as both are exceptional costume designers who know how to recreate and use historical styles in film. Patterson has not been as prolific as Powell and although she is frequently nominated for her work by Hollywood she has only won awards in her native Australia. Whereas the English born Powell has received English and American awards in the past and is probably more familiar with Hollywood. Its a tough call, and who knows, I may be wrong!

Added March 9 - but I wasn’t, Sandy Powell won for The Young Victoria.

My bookmarks are overflowing with interesting links to fashion, both historical and contemporary, and I thought I would share some today:

Let’s start with a video about the_future_of_shopping that was just sent to me yesterday.

Need to identify costume jewelry marks? Or do you need a jewel identification? If you need to find out how to identify the differences between lucite, bakelite, and celluloid, try the plasticfantastic website.

If you haven’t heard of The Sartorialist then you are even more out of touch than I am! This site started up 5 years ago as a blog that photographed fashionable New Yorkers on the street. It is now a well-followed site and a valuable document of contemporary style.

Read Dyeing to be Fashionable at the Vintage Fashion Guild to learn why arsenic was so fashionable

If something more historical appeals to you, how about a site that shows you stewardess uniforms from throughout time, or a site about the rise and fall of the American mall (hey, that rhymes!)

I am sure you have found the Vintage Fashion Guild by now, but make sure you check out the Label identification page, and of course the many and varied helpful and interesting features and articles from fur identification to the history of colour (but I am partial to that one because I wrote it…)

Forgive this brief update but life tends to come in waves and there hasn’t been much of an ebb around here the last few weeks… I have been finishing up the editing for my next book with Thames and Hudson entitled Shoes A-Z: Designers, Manufacturers, Retailers and Brands, to be released this fall. There are still captions to do, but the bulk of the work is now complete!

Also, an interview I did with The Collectors Weekly on shoes was launched last week. And while not ’solely’ about shoes, there is also a great article that came out in the most recent addition of Worn Fashion Journal about the Fashion History Museum.

Our next goal is to get the website up for the Fashion History Museum, so stay tuned!

Grenfell mission hooked mat made from silk stockings depicting dog sled with medical supplies, c. 1928 - 1932, from the Paula Laverty collection

One of the goals of the Fashion History Museum is to create a Canadian fashion databank that will keep information and images on all Canadian designers, manufacturers and retailers, past and present.  In all my years of collecting I have had only a few items go through my hands with Newfoundland labels, but I recently had this hand knit sweater cross my path. The label ‘NONIA - Newfoundland’ meant nothing to me but a quick online search turned up a history of the NONIA label.

Newfoundland and Labrador’s fishing industry was based in small isolated coastal communities accessible only by boat. In 1892 a Dr. Wilfred Grenfell arrived in Newfoundland and began to work on improving medical services for the inhabitants of these villages. He set up the Grenfell mission in 1900 and in 1908 began to raise money for the mission by organising the production and sale of hooked mats, a popular local craft tradition. Between 1918 and 1931, Grenfell mats were popular folk products, traded and sold for the benefit of the Grenfell medical mission. The Depression of the 1930s decreased sales and Grenfell mats ceased being made commercially by the time Dr. Grenfell died in 1940. The mats were made from silk and cotton stockings, and the shift to nylons after the war ended the remains of the tradition in the post war years.

However, when Grenfell mats were just becoming successful, they were an inspiration for the creation of the Newfoundland Outport Nursing and Industrial Association (NONIA), founded in 1920 and incorporated as a non-profit business in 1924. It was also established to assist Newfoundland communities by creating better access to health services, raising money from the sale of hand-knit garments to pay the salaries of public health nurses. The health care portion of NONIA’s operation was taken over by the government in 1934 but the industrial side was maintained and continued on. Today, NONIA employs approximately 175 knitters and weavers across the province to knit sweaters, socks, hats and mitts, and weave scarves and table linens.

NONIA Newfoundland label from sweater, c. 1955Sweater by NONIA, c. 1955

Sweater by NONIA, c. 1955

Congratulations to all who sent in their answers to the fashion designer quiz. All questions were answered correctly but not by one person! There was a three-way tie for first place with a score of 10 out of 12 by VIntage Visage, Linn Alber, and Mary-Jane Enros but the first person to submit their answers was Mary-Jane Enros of Poppysvintageclothing - CONGRATULATIONS!

1 - This designer survived the sinking of the Titanic

The answer is Lady Duff Gordon who worked under the name Lucile. She opened her dressmaking firm in London in 1891 but only became well known after she married Sir Cosmos Duff Gordon in 1900. In 1909 a branch of Lucile was opened in New York and another branch opened in Paris in 1911 - she was on her way from Paris to New York when she boarded the Titanic in April 1912. The lifeboat she and her husband were in had left the Titanic nearly empty and did not go back for survivors, leaving the Duff-Gordons open to speculation of paying off the boatmen. Her reputation never fully recovered and by 1918 her romantic dress styles were less appealing to modern woman and her London business closed. The New York and Paris shops closed with the onset of the Depression in about 1930. Lady Gordon died in 1935.

2 - This designer’s first job was designing skiwear for White Stag in 1948

Pucci is a leading figure in Italian fashion of the 1950s and 1960s, but his designing career began when he was commissioned by the American company White Stag to design skiwear after Pucci was photographed for Harper’s Bazaar in 1948, wearing a ski suit of his own design. In 1950 he opened his own couture house in Florence and gained a reputation for colourful casual clothing. By the mid 1960s his clothing was seen everywhere including as stewardess uniforms for Braniff airlines. At the height of his fame as a designer he served as a Member of Parliament for Florence between 1964 and 1973.

3 - This designer was known for wearing dark glasses decades before Karl Lagerfeld or Anna Wintour

Admittedly this was a bit of a trick question, because I didn’t specify it was a FASHION designer… Edith Head, the costume designer wore dark blue lensed glasses as a way to see how costumes would look in a black and white film. The glasses became her trademark and although she was rarely photographed with out her blue glasses, she commonly wore clear glasses when out of public view.

4 - This shoe designer trained for the Italian track and field team for the 1960 Olympics

Most people probably don’t know his name but they will know his shoes… Armando Pollini was an athlete before he settled down to shoe design. His most famous was a clog mule with a leather strap that sold millions of pairs in the late 1970s under the brand name of Candies.

5 - This designer redesigned the Girl Scout uniform in 1948

Born Main Rousseau Bocher, he served in WWI and stayed on in Europe after the war, eventually becoming the fashion editor for French Vogue. He founded his own atelier in Paris in 1930 and quickly became a very successful couturier as well as the first American admitted to the couture syndicate. He fled Paris in 1940 and went to New York where he was quickly embraced as a prodigal American designer. In 1948 he was commissioned to redesign the Girl Scout uniform. Before opening his atelier in Paris, his name was properly prounounced as Main ‘Bocker’ or ‘Bosher’. However in Paris he took on the French pronunciation of his name - ‘Mahnboshay’.

6 - This designer survived the explosion of the Hindenburg

Philip Mangone was the son of an immigrant Italian tailor. He learned his craft from his father before working at numerous different firms eventually opening his own business in 1916. He became famous for his tailored wool coats and suits that were often made of European wools. After one of his European fabric buying trips in 1937 he headed home, with a severe cold, aboard the Zeppelin Hindenburg.  He was badly burned in the crash and spent most of the next year recovering in hospital. Upon his release the first thing he did was to board a flight to Chicago to prove to himself he wasn’t afraid to fly.

7 - This designer was engaged to Grace Kelly before she married Prince Ranier of Monaco

Oleg Cassini was working in Hollywood as a costume designer when he met and married the actress Gene Tierney. However, the marriage suffered, especially after Gene’s daughter was born retarded - caused by Gene having been exposed to measles while pregnant. The story became the inspiration for Agatha Christie’s novel ‘And the Mirror Cracked’.  After the couple divorced in 1952 Oleg Cassini took up with Grace Kelly and had proposed to her on several occasions before finally being rebuffed for Prince Rainier of Monaco.

8 - This shoe designer’s ancestor is Sun Yat Sen, the first president of the Republic of China in 1912

Beatrix Ong is fairly new on the scene of shoe design. She worked at Jimmy Choo under Tamara Mellon before striking out on her own. Beatrix can trace her ancestry back to a great uncle who was Sun Yat Sen.

9 - This designer survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima

As a seven year old, Issey Miyake lived on the outskirts of Hiroshima. To this day he says he can remember the bright light and black cloud and the desperation of the people running about after the explosion. The only good to have come from it for him was a passion to create rather than destroy.

10 - This designer consulted a psychic before opening his Parisian atelier to make sure the timing was right

Isaac Mizrahi, Paul Poiret, Coco Chanel - many designers used psychics, fortune tellers, mediums, and ouiji boards to foresee the future and their success. However, Christian Dior was probably the most avid follower of psychic visions. At a young age he was told he would become very important for women, and before agreeing to open his own atelier he sought the advice of a psychic to make sure the timing was right. In matters of business, the psychics were absolutely right in all the advice they gave Dior.

11 - This designer dated a German officer who had worked as a spy in Paris before World War II

During World War II, at the age of 56, Coco Chanel took up residence at the Paris Ritz hotel, along with Hans Gunther von Dinklage, a German officer 13 years her junior, who had been living in Paris since the 1930s, working as a spy.

12 - This designer changed her last name to be the same as the richest person in America

The story goes that Viennese born Henrietta Kanengeiser emigrated to the United States at the age of eleven and trained as a milliner. Before opening her first hat shop in 1909 she realized her last name would not pull in wealthy clients so Henriette or ‘Hattie’ called her shop ‘Carnegie - Ladies Hatter’, after the richest man in America at the time, Andrew Carnegie. By 1914 she was known simply as Hattie Carnegie.

I commented earlier that films set in time periods within living memory can be more difficult because audiences will notice errors. The costumers for Taking Woodstock avoided this problem by thoroughly doing their homework - researching, sourcing, recreating and styling the extras and stars with great attention to detail and authenticity. The director also realized the limitation of the budget and didn’t push his costumers to perform beyond a realistic expectation.

This scene takes place in 1966, although the actors are dressed more accurately for 1973

This was not the case for Talk to Me, which so obviously relied upon racks of period party dresses from costume houses for the extras to wear in daytime crowd scenes. The costumers focussed on the stars but tended to over-dress them in nth degree fashions that were inappropriate for the date of the scene in the movie. The anachromisms were plentiful and not just with the costuming (as a background check at the IMDB confirms).

The film takes place primarily between 1966 and 1972 - a hugely important era in social history, especially in the United States. It was in this era that American black culture transitioned from marginalized to mainstream. The filmakers however, blended the period into one giant cliche, with only one character, the straight-laced radio executive who hires Petey Green, showing any sense of his growing black self-identity through his clothing. Although the film is described as a comedy, the only thing I found comical were the costumes. This film gets a very poor 4/10 from me.

1910 postcard

In 1910 the Edwardian era came to an end with the death of England’s King Edward VII. It was also the year Mexico had a revolution, Japan began its empire with the annexation of Korea, the women’s suffrage movement was gaining momentum, and Father’s day was first celebrated.

Some fashion milestones from 1910 include the founding of Elizabeth Arden in New York (women were beginning to wear small amounts of rouge on their cheeks and lips.) The death of King Edward in May 1910, was just before  Ascot, which resulted in England’s elite wearing full mourning to the races. A half century later, this event inspired Cecil Beaton to costume the Ascot race scene for My Fair Lady in black and white.

The fashion designer Paul Poiret introduced his “Liberateur” line which freed women of corsets, and Jean Patou, an architect of modern fashion through the development of sportswear, opened his fashion atelier in 1910. Casual and sporting activities such as sea bathing, picnicking, golf, and motoring were on the rise, just in time for the word ‘week-end’ to be coined to reflect the half Saturday and full Sunday being enjoyed by the majority of the working classes for the pursuit of leisure (the two day weekend wasn’t common until the 1930s.)

But most amusingly, according to a snippet from the New York Times, March 22, 1910, long hat pins were being banned!

“It is now a misdemeanor for any woman to wear a long hatpin in public places in Chicago. Any woman caught wearing one is liable to arrest and a fine of $50… A crowd of women had gathered to protest against the measure on the ground that the city had no right to attempt to regulate women’s wearing apparel, and that long hatpins often at night formed women’s only weapon of defense.

The ordinance decrees that “no person while in the public streets…shall wear any hatpin, the exposed point whereof shall protrude more than one-half inch beyond the crown of the hat…”

The argument for the measure was that long hatpins worn in crowded places endangered the eyes, noses, and faces of people. When the vote was announced cries of ‘Shame! Shame!’ came from women in the galleries.”

Thomas Hoving died last week. His name may not be familiar to most, but in the museum field Thomas Hoving is remembered as a controversial director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the late 1960s and 1970s. Hoving immodestly recounted his experience at the Met in his book “Making the Mummies Dance”. He was not always likable, or ethical, but he knew how to sell tickets at the door, and the museum world is still dancing in the shadow of Thomas Hoving’s influence every time a blockbuster exhibition opens.

Hoving was influential in changing how museums present themselves. The visitor experience has improved in the last forty years because museums now consider their audiences, producing relevant and popular exhibitions rather than navel-gazing academic diatribes. One of the more popular topics have been fashion history exhibitions. Under Hoving, Diana Vreeland produced the first contemporary retrospective exhibition about Yves St. Laurent. This may not seem like a controversial idea now, but for a museum to mount an exhibition about a living designer was, at the time, unheard of.

Whether a good idea or not (some day I will blog about why I don’t think curators should do retrospectives of living designers), that show proved to museums that the public likes to look at clothing. There had been little respect for the field of fashion history at the time, and only now is the field gaining respect as a serious topic. I was cleaning out an old file (part of the end of year ritual) and came across a brochure from a 1998 conference at the New York University entitled ‘Fashion: The Newest Art’ suggesting it was only then being recognized as something above a trade.

I have had a file called ‘Collectors and Museums’ for over twenty years now, and every time I got a brochure or found an article about some interesting fashion, costume or textile collection somewhere I added it to the file. Coming across this file inspired this blog, but not in the way I thought it would. I thought I might turn the contents of the file into a blog about little known historical fashion and accessory museums but when I started searching out details, I discovered most of these collections had closed.

It’s no secret that the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the Brooklyn museum’s costume collection this year. This will make the Met the largest repository of historical fashion in the world, even after de-accessioning Brooklyn artifacts that duplicate the Met’s already extensive holdings.

Both the Denver Art Museum in Colorado, and Castle Howard in York, England had spectacular ‘Every Dior Out the Door’ close-out sales of their historic fashion collections a few years ago. Similarly, the Nottingham museum of costume in England closed its doors, but I am not sure what happened to their collection. More recently, the Fashion Museum in Abilene Kansas and La Crasia glove Museum in New York City have disappeared (no websites exist and their phone numbers are no longer operational.) Even corporate collections are quietly disappearing, like the Maidenform Museum collection in New York (again no contact information was working when I checked). I don’t know where these collections ended up - perhaps at auction…

It has been difficult to keep up with all the recent museum deaccession auctions. Although I am all for museums honing their collections rather than just amassing huge quantities of junk, some museum auctions have ended in controversy. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) experienced negative publicity for selling off garments from their collection. Usually museums quietly discard their ‘also-rans’ but LACMA advertised their clear-out which resulted in some buyers using the LACMA connection to springboard their own careers. One ‘artist’ bought fifty items and then used the destruction of these garments through redesign for the purpose of promoting himself. One of the worst was a Claire McCardell dress turned into a hobo satchel and witches’ hat.

Like everything else in life, museums are not necessarily forever and its a shame when carefully acquired collections are scattered to the winds. However, despite the disappearance of some collections, and corporate-like buy-outs of others, there are new collections being formed, from the Museo de la Moda, in Santiago Chile, to our own Fashion History Museum (website to be launched in early 2010), in Ontario.

If you know of any little gems of fashion and costume related museums, drop us a line in the comments - I would love to amass an updated resource of exceptional fashion museums still in business, and keep tabs on what is being shown and when.

Here’s one to get the ball rolling: The Museum of Vision Science at the University of Waterloo.

Advertisement for Grendha Jellies - March 1985

Jellies (molded rubber shoes) were popular once again this past summer - this time with high heels rather than the usual flat sole styles. The first time they were hits was the mid 1980s as this advertisment from the March 1985 US Vogue proves. The pair in green offered in the advert by Grendha, the Brazilian manufacturer, is identical to the red pair marked Thierry Mugler.

Red Jellies labelled Thierry Mugler, 1985