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Forty-four minutes into The Women (1939), the star-studded cast — filmed in black and white — takes their seats to watch a live fashion show. The six-minute segment is the only part of the movie shown in Technicolor. We never learn which shade is Jungle Red nail polish, a significant plot point that helps break up a marriage, but we do see some well-dressed mini monkeys that interact with models in full color. The camera quickly zooms to show sports playsuits, bathing costumes, picnic attire, and eveningwear designed by Adrian. MGM gathered megastars Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, and Rosalind Russell in an anticipated adaptation of a hit Broadway play, and paused the ride to show some clothes in pricey Technicolor. What was the studio thinking?
Then there’s the fact that The Women takes place during the Great Depression, an economic collapse so profound that ancestors who lived through it carried habits for the rest of their lives that could only be explained by pointing to it (“Grandma cleans, sorts, and stores bread bags and their ties because she lived through the Great Depression, don’t judge.”). At a time when the national consciousness was filled with Forgotten Men brought low by the economy, why show opulent clothes on models and small monkeys?
People watching the The Women in 1939 were just as baffled by director George Cukor’s choice to stop the catty action to show some clothes on models. New York Times movie critic Frank S. Nugent called the fashion show sequence “the only mark against George Cukor's otherwise shrewd and sentient direction” in his review, asking “[w]hy not a diving exhibition or a number by the Rockettes?”
A hint as to the reason for the fashion show sequences comes from the Times review. Nugent calls the segment “lovely,” noting, “at least that's what most of the women around us seemed to think.” Popular magazines about films and Hollywood stars featured whole segments devoted to fashion each month, with clothes modeled by stars of all magnitudes — including Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford in the September 1939 issue of Photoplay to promote the release of The Women. It’s probably no shock to readers of Racked in 2017 that sometimes people like to keep up with fashion and beauty news while the world burns.
The mid-film fashion shows in movies such as The Women, Fashions of 1934 (1934), Vogues Of 1938 (1937), Mannequin (1937), and Stolen Holiday (1937) weren’t just general escapist fun: They were part of a vast marketing machine that stretched into middle America and capitalized on major changes in how clothes were made. Later films such as How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), Funny Face (1957), and A New Kind of Love (1963) featured fashion shows, but the fumbling way the sequences were inserted into early talking pictures and their contrast with the national economic devastation make mid-film fashion shows of the 1930s particularly interesting.
Film scholar Sarah E. Berry, Ph.D., author of Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood, explained via email to Racked that “the new affordability of fashionable clothes in the ’30s” — due to “larger-scale clothing production and marketing” — led to “a fascination with this theme in movies.” Berry found that “there are only a dozen or so popular films from ’30s with full fashion show scenes,” but others took place in department stores and “featured female fashion designers, illustrators, models, and salesgirls” who modeled informally in the office or a showroom during the film. Between full-scale fashion shows and fashion-oriented settings for the drama, there were plenty of chances to show off clothes.
In movies such as Fashions of 1934, there’s a recurring theme that fashion is an elite, sometimes ridiculous thing that comes from Paris and then is sold to American women at shockingly high prices. As the characters in Fashions rip off Parisian designs and then open their own fashion house to rival the grand couturier Baroque, moviegoers were getting more access to stylish clothing due to real-life changes in clothing manufacturing. This was part of “an overall shift in US ready-to-wear design from Paris to Hollywood trend-setting,” according to Berry.
Movies of the period reflected the shift. Early in Fashions, William Powell’s Sherwood Nash character asks a room full of dusty department store owners “Why spend those thousands and thousands of dollars when you can have the identical models,” meaning knock-offs created by scheming Americans, “delivered to you, direct from Paris, for a mere fraction of their present cost?” Films like Fashions talked endlessly about — and sometimes even satirized — stylish clothes emanating from Paris, while at the same time movie studios and stars were actually stealing the City of Lights’ style crown.
Part of the way filmgoers got access to fashionable clothes was via studio-authorized copies of garments seen onscreen. “Film-fashion tie-ins were huge in the ’30s,” according to Berry, with brand names like “Cinema Fashions,” “Studio Styles,” and “Hollywood Fashions” even “advertised as part of a film's overall promotion strategy.” Changes in how clothes were manufactured allowed studios to become players in the American ready-to-wear industry. According to Screen Style, fashion tie-ins began when department stores supplied popular stage productions with garments around the turn of the century, but the partnership soon flowed in the reverse direction: “[B]eginning in the '20s, women could sew movie knock-offs through tie-in sewing patterns, but by the '30s they could also buy costume knock-offs, and these were often featured in department stores and magazines.”
The power of the film industry to sell fashion was soon clear when women snatched up copies of Joan Crawford’s dress from Letty Lynton (1932). According to an exhibit called “Puttin’ on the Glitz: Hollywood’s Influence on Fashion” at the University of California, Irvine’s Langson Library in 2010-11, Macy’s sold 15,000 copies of the Letty Lynton dress within a few months of release while Butterick also sold dress patterns for making the gown. Copies of the dress even reached Scotland, where it was sold in an Aberdeen department store for what amounts to 200 pounds in today’s currency (roughly $266).
The Sears catalog featured “Autographed Fashion” and accessories worn on screen by stars such as Loretta Young, Ginger Rogers, and Ann Sothern. A silk crepe Loretta Young gown in 1935 cost $4.98 ($89.67 today), while an organdy gown cost only $2.95 ($53.11 today). Hollywood certainly didn’t destroy Paris as the fashion capital of the world, but it became a center of fashion for women who couldn’t drop the cost of a whole car on a evening gown — the majority of women, especially during the Great Depression.
At the same time that fashion shows were being jammed into movies — more or less creakily — Hollywood and its stars were partnering with the new mass clothing retailers. Together, they promoted clothing on a scale and level of sophistication that’s more in line with today’s Instagram fashion influencers than the seemingly unreachable catwalks of Paris that the movies emulated.
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