DESIGNED BY EDITH HEAD

It's ironic that the costume designer whose name virtually everyone would recognize lacked a fashion style with any signiture. And few would be able to identify her costumes save for a few movie costume aficionados, researchers, and the fashion savy with long memories. Regardless, Edith Head was the ultimate costume designer. She could be a strong-willed promoter of herself, but never so at the expense of the costume she designed nor of the star she was to dress. Her costume designing was fully engaged in furthering the role of the actor and the needs of the scene. Her dresses and gowns needed to catch attention certainly, but Miss Head was not intent on creating a fashion statement. Look carefully at the stars wearing her designs. They look all-of-a-piece. No garment jars unless it is meant to. None is flashy unless the role is. When the role dazzles so do the gowns. She often bent to the desires of the stars, just as she did to  that of the directors. After looking at scores of her costume sketches, I can attest that many of the actual costumes were changed by the time the actors wore them on screen. She did not hold a rigid idea of what the design should look like. Yet many of her costume designs have become as memorable as the roles portrayed and the stars that wore them. As examples, look back at Liz Taylor wearing the white gown with a big tulle skirt and white violets covering her bodice in A Place in the Sun; Kim Novak in the blue-gray suit in Vertigo; Bette Davis in the brown satin coctail gown with off-the shoulder, fur-trimmed sleeves in All About Eve; Gloria Swanson in the black dress with white fur muff and white fur-rimmed hat and white plume in Sunset Boulevard: Barbara Stanwyck in the white belted dress and house pumps with pom-poms in Double Indemnity; and any of the costumes Grace Kelly wears in To Catch a Thief or Rear Window. These are a few of the thousands of costumes she designed in a career that spanned nearly fifty years.

Edith Head is pictured above wearing her favorite necklace made of antique French theater tickets carved in ivory. She willed the necklace to her friend Liz Taylor at her death.

Susan Claassen as Edith Head

We no longer have Edith Head. We are very fortunate however, to have Susan Claassen, who has brought Miss Head back to life in her one-woman show, A Conversation with Edith Head. Susan Claassen is the Managing Artistic Director of the Invisible Theatre in Tucson, Arizona.  Paddy Calistro, author of Edith Head's Hollywood, and Susan Claassen co-wrote the play that A Conversation is based on. The play begins late in Miss Head's career, as she reflects on the accomplishments and defeats of her life, and her eight Oscars. Miss Claasen http://edithhead.biz/  brings it all back to life. You share Miss Head's life-story monologues like a guest in her own studio. You laugh and cry with her. Should Susan Claassen and A Conversation with Edith Head  come to your town, don't miss it. If it comes to the region, make the trip. It will be worth it.

Edith Head had a very long career as a Hollywood costume designer. She became the head designer at Paramount in 1938. She had been hired there as a sketch artist by Howard Greer in 1923 and later mentored by Travis Banton. She was still designing costumes at the Universal Studios when she died in 1981. The sheer range of fashion styles makes her work extensive. Besides her lack of a signiture style, her costume sketches were mostly rendered by different sketch artists, and Miss Head went through many in her long career. Thus, the look of the sketches themselves vary greatly over the years and decades.


This sketch was done for Ann Margret for The Swinger, 1966. With Ann Margret as lead, and the fast times of the 60s, a more exuberant and "swinging" style was needed than what Miss Head had been used to. But she knew how to be flexible.

This princess gown was designed for Natalie Wood for Inside Daisy Clover, 1965.

This costume sketch was designed for Eleanor Parker in Detective Story, 1951. It was made almost exactly as rendered in the sketch, a rarity. It was designed for a hard-boiled police drama with Kirk Douglas in the lead. The trimmed bolero jacket softens the look of the costume and is appropriate for the character Eleanor Parker plays as the wife of Kirk Douglas.

This costume sketch is from an unknown Paramount film that Edith Head designed, circa 1942. She designed costumes for some 12 movies that year, and for some 16 movies in 1941. 

The age of the the costume designers like Adrian, Irene, Travis Banton, Orry-Kelly, Howard Greer, Helen Rose, Jean-Louis, and Travilla is gone. Movies are not expected to create fashion the way they were in the 1930s through the 1950s. These costume designers switched easily into starting their own lines because of their fashion talents and also because of their name recognition. Edith Head has nonetheless become the most famous of them all. And her style sublimation has become the norm in modern film costume design. Many great costume designers are at work today in the film and television industry. To pick out only one as an example, Ann Roth's work stretches from Midnight Cowboy  to Julie & Julia.

Edith Head's fame has sometimes been clouded by her willingness to claim credit for the work of other designers that worked with her. In this regard Miss Head was part of the process of awarding film credits based on a contractual basis typical of the old studio system. Her  insecurities made for the rest. Regardless of what could have been done differently, her own work stands for itself.