BLACK & WHITE MOVIE COSTUMES IN COLOR -Part 1

It's hard to imagine the classic costumes of black and white movies in color, but unless they were designed to be in black or white, they all began their lives as color designs, and were made with colorful fabrics. Colorizing B&W movies is a technique best left in the past, but seeing the few scarce images of those wonderful costumes in their original color is revelatory. The blogger CaftanWoman gave me the idea to cover the real color of costumes shown in B&W films, so this is the first post in a planned occasional series showing those beautiful costumes in color. Since even color films from the 1950s and 1960s were mostly publicized with black and white stills, finding good quality images of the costumes in color is not easy. The number of posts in this series will therefore depend on the availability and supply of such images.

Norma Shearer as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, 1936. Her costume was designed by Adrian.

It is often assumed that the costumes from early black and white movies were designed to be either black or white or gray. While some costumes were indeed designed to be in black or white, most costumes were designed to be in the rich colors that those costumes would look most appropriate in. And why would this be so since these colors never showed on the screen? Just as a well-designed period costume helps the actor feel natural in a role from a historic period, so does color make a costume seem more real. And color is also used for its psychological properties in conveying mood or character, which all the actors in the scene react to. It would be just as unnatural for a costume designer to avoid all color in their designs and it would be for all the actors to dress all in gray or black. Hence, early costumes were vividly colored. In practice, some colors were used because they actually gave off a better look of black, such as purple in the Masked Ball costume of Kay Johnson in Madame Satan. And brown was used for the red ball gown worn by Bette Davis in Jezebel, as another example.

Katharine Hepburn in the B&W film Mary of Scotland, 1936.

For viewers of the beautifully costumed Mary of Scotland, starring Katharine Hepburn, it can be a shock to see what some of the costumes actually looked like in color. One of the many outstanding costumes from the film is shown above in black and white.But even after 75 years, the bright red velvet gown decorated with gold thistles shown below is a wonder. It had been part of the Debbie Reynolds collection but was auctioned off and is headed for Asia.

Photo by Christian Esquevin

Costume designer Walter Plunkett designed Hepburn's costumes for Mary of Scotland  and many other films for her at RKO. The photo below shows them re-united at MGM for the filming of the B&W Sea of Grass, in 1947. Katharine relaxes on a leaning board between takes. Leaning boards were used so that costumes would not be wrinkled, or sometimes even because they were too tight.

Below is the same coat in burgundy velvet and feather trim and muff. It too was in the Debbie Reynolds auction.

Paradoxically, one of the classic film costume designers best known for his striking black and white  designs, Adrian, became the leading colorist among fashion designers in the 1940s. This is just one of Adrian's paradoxes, which he seemed to thrive on in his design work. One need only think of the early films of Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and Norma Shearer to see his bold use of black and white, often together, in his beautiful gowns. After he left films and opened his own fashion line in 1942, he was virtually the lone designer to feature bold colors like magenta and purples among a sea of gray, hunter green, khaki, and brown fashions during World War II. The photo below shows Rosalind Russell in They Met in Bombay, in which she co-starred with Clark Gable in 1941. Her costumes were designed by Adrian.

Though a bit washed out, the color image below shows the same costume, a beautiful use of color on a cream-colored Adrian suit.

There is a bit of irony in naming a movie The Bride Wore Red, for a film shot in black and white. For this film too, the color of the gown was not only a significant part of the characterization and plot, but the costumes themselves were a crucial element in characterization. The film still worked effectively in black and white, but the stunning red bugle-beaded gown shown below as worn by Joan Crawford and designed by Adrian must have turned heads even on the MGM studio lot.

Joan is shown with her co-stars Franchot Tone and Robert Young. This image was colored rather than photographed in color. It gives an idea of what the gown looked like. Unfortunately, the hand-painted red color covered the rhinestone belt of her cape. Compare it with the B&W photo above. A better view of the gown is shown in this link to the Museum at FIT, where it has fortunately been preserved for many years.

Ginger Rogers' beautiful beaded gown above looks like it could have been made of silver-colored glass beads that many of the classic glamour gowns were made of. In this case her gown designed by Bernard Newman for Follow the Fleet in 1935 was actually a light green. 

There is no doubt that there is drama and beauty in both black and white film and still photography. Seeing some of these costumes in color only adds to our appreciation of the skill and artistry of the designers and artisans that produced them. The documentation of that process was sketchy, and now as the actual costumes fade and are scattered to the winds, our records appear even more fragile. Regardless, I hope you have enjoyed this topsyturvy peek of the real color of black and white.