Between the mid-to-late ‘60s and the ‘70s, a few Hollywood costume designers wrote how-to guides to style, among them also Bob Mackie and Edith Head.
Nominated to 35 Academy Awards and the recipient of eight Oscars for The Heiress, Samson and Delilah, All About Eve, A Place in the Sun, Roman Holiday, Sabrina, The Facts of Life and The Sting, Head (1897-1981) published in 1967 a slim guide with American Hollywood columnist and biographer Joe Hyams.
The book, entitled How to Dress for Success has recently been re-released in the States by Abrams Books.
The guide is divided in thirteen short chapters: while some of them like the chapters about how to dress to get a man (and keep him...) or how to dress your family for success, may bring a smile to the readers’ face since some theories will seem a bit passé, most of Head’s suggestions and advice provided in her witty and humorous style are still very valuable.
Head encourages her readers to honesty analyse their figures, draw colour maps and come up with wardrobe charts based on genuine personal needs rather than on “wish-fulfilment buying”.
She very aptly refers to garments as “costumes” (a reference to her work, but also to the fact that we all disguise ourselves and our identity when we decide what to wear), highlights the importance of a wardrobe fit to our individual lives and encourages readers to buy things they need and are going to wear, avoiding short-lived fads, stating “an overstuffed closet is often as bare as a skeleton when it comes to wearable apparel.”
Readers interested in costume design will find particularly interesting those bits of the book in which Head shares her cinematographic knowledge.
Throughout her career Head dressed indeed hundreds or stars, among them also Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren and Audrey Hepburn.
Leafing through the book we get the confirmation that no actress is physically flawless (though they have all learnt to accentuate the positive and camouflage the negative…); we discover how to create authenticity in theatrical costuming and achieve character metamorphoses on the big screen through costume design (re-watch for example J. Lee Thompson’s What a Way to Go after reading the book and you will understand even better this point), how cinema influences fashion trends and how specific stars organise their own wardrobes.
Head, who reveals she had in her designing room hundreds of white cotton and fabric torsos, replicas of the figures of famous movie stars whose wardrobes she created (as there is no such thing as a standard size woman…), also shares a basic but vitally important lesson in costume design: checking how the costume looks in action.
As an example she recounts the story of a fitting for Bette Davis during which the star leaped across the room, threw herself across a divan them rolled off limp on the floor.
“For a moment I thought I had stabbed her in a vital spot with a pin,” Head writes, continuing, “She picked herself up, laughing and said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not losing my mind. That’s part of the action in the scene I’m playing in this dress. I wanted to make sure I could work in it without feeling inhibited.'”
Will this manual, that also features Head’s original black-and-white drawings, guarantee your instant rise to success in love, business and society or in looking younger, prettier and slimmer. Maybe yes, but if it doesn’t work in making you achieve complete success, well, you will still pick some invaluable advice from it, such as remembering that excellent posture and thinking tall like Gloria Swanson is even better than owning a designer wardrobe.
Head states in the book that if she were President she would pass a law that stated that every female in the United States would have to learn simple basic sewing, “enough at least to change a hemline”.
Yet there should actually be a law that makes How to Dress for Success a compulsory reading for all those fashionistas clogging up the Internet with endless images of their even more endless and useless collections of shoes and bags or of their overstuffed closets.
No-nonsense Edith Head would have definitely disapproved of them and while her sartorial wisdom may not be enough to re-educate obsessed fashionistas to planned shopping, it could still help reforming them or convince them that clothes and accessories are not everything in life.
After all, in the final chapter of the manual, Head warns readers that all the clothes in the world will never bring you success if your mind is not set for it or worse if your mind is nothing but a "grab bag of raggle-taggle odds and ends of non-descript patches and pieces."
Head suggested therefore to organise both one's wardrobe and one's mind to achieve complete success.
Yet, maybe, to make a real statement - as Vivienne Westwood also claimed in a recent interview with The Guardian (see embedded video at the end of this post) - we should also get into the habit of walking around carrying a book under our arm rather than a clutch bag. And we would even make a better statement if we would actually read that book first...
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the clothes reminds me of the movie, catch me if you can
Posted by: John Kim | April 26, 2011 at 06:56 PM
Thanks for the tips! Dress is not only the thing that matters if your going to talk about elegance and success. Your makeup and style must match up together very well.
Posted by: carlo lusso | June 30, 2011 at 07:48 AM