scp 3 (1) pp.

91–96 Intellect Limited 2018

Studies in Costume & Performance

Volume 3 Number 1
© 2018 Intellect Ltd Document. English language. doi: 10.1386/scp.3.1.91_1

DEBORAH NADOOLMAN LANDIS

Copley Center of Costume Design, University of California Los
Angeles (UCLA)

Character and costume in

cinema: The Hollywood
Costume exhibition

Introduction KEYWORDS
During a masterclass held in 2012, and in reference to her extensive publish- cinema
ing on film costume design,1 Deborah Nadoolman Landis invited the audi- fashion
ence to also write on the subject, noting ‘I ask my colleagues if I am to be the costume
only one to fill the shelf with books on costume design and film’. Landis was character
the curator of the V&A exhibition, Hollywood Costume,2 the most comprehen- design
sive exhibition of its kind in decades. The exhibition analysed the extensive performance
and detailed process employed to create a character through costume. Landis’
paper, on 22 April 2012, launched a series of talks titled Marking the Paradigm 1. Relevant to this
discussion are
Shift in Design for Performance Through Costume organized by Donatella Screencraft: Costume
Barbieri for the Research Hub in Design for Performance at London College of Design (2003), Dressed:
Fashion, University of the Arts London. The above quote and those that follow A Century of Hollywood
Costume Design (2007),
are edited with Landis from a transcript of the event. Hollywood Costume
(2012), Filmcraft:
Costume Design (2012),
Landis on recycling costumes Hollywood Sketchbook:
A Century of Costume
There is a tradition in the theatre and in the movies to re-use costumes. Illustration (2012), and
Costume designers are the original recyclers and up cyclers; nothing is wasted. the texts Costume
After a film has completed shooting (wrapped) all garments are cleaned Designers, Costumers
and Fashion Designers
and placed into the costume stock of a studio or costume rental company.

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Deborah Nadoolman Landis

(2006) and A President’s Costumes will be rented, used and re-used, re-trimmed, re-cut, re-dyed and
Letter: Character
Building (2005), which
recreated for new roles. These clothes are studio assets that must ‘pay for their
are both published in room and board’. With few cinema costume archives and museum collections
the Costume Designers it is almost impossible to find important costumes except for the few that were
Guild’s magazine, The
Costume Designer, sold, stolen or auctioned and sold to private collectors.
founded by Landis.

2. The Hollywood
Costume exhibition
On why Landis chose to create and to curate the Hollywood
was on display at Costume exhibition
the Victoria and
Albert Museum from When I became President of the Costume Designers Guild in Los Angeles my
20 October 2012–27 intention was to correct the imbalance and disparity of pay between produc-
January 2013.
tion designers and costume designers. However, very quickly it became appar-
3. The Iron Lady (2011), ent that union contracts were (and are) burdened with contractual precedent.
directed by Phyllida
Lloyd.
The difference in salary was rooted in perfidious gender bias: costume design
is women’s work and worth less. As president, I endured two series of contract
4. The exhibition The
Golden Age of Couture:
negotiations. The studio representatives had little respect and knowledge of
Paris and London costume design. Attitudes persisted that anyone in a skirt could fill this role.
1947–1957 was on A seismic shift and reframing of the field was required. And, if progress could
display at the V&A
South Kensington from not be achieved for my colleagues and for myself, conditions must improve for
22 September 2007 to 6 the next generation of costume designers. I became a costume design activist.
January 2008. If the union contract was immutable, the perception of costume design could
be changed with a strategic and a methodical effort. Educating the audience and
the industry seemed like the smart move to raise the profile of costume designers.
There are many directors and producers who understand our role to be ‘clothes
providers’. The relationship between performance and costume design is no secret
to actors. When Meryl Streep became Margaret Thatcher,3 costume designer
Consolata Boyle assisted that transformation. When Streep won the Academy
Award for Best Actress, Consolata Boyle shared that triumph. The actor is in the
centre of the frame and the work of the costume designer is in the centre of the
frame too. Performance and costume are twinned. That is a powerful message.
Nothing was going to change for costume designers without an inter-
vention; without a disruption to the paradigm that was keeping us down.
While president of the Guild in 2005 I founded The Costume Designer maga-
zine and established an international mailing list. In Los Angeles, I began
to lecture at the American Film Institute and the USC School of Cinematic
Arts to the next generation of producers and directors. Not surprisingly, there
were no costume design classes at any university film department. Between
2003–2012 I authored six cinema costume volumes. In 2007, the Victoria &
Albert Museum in London received my proposal for an encyclopaedic cinema
costume exhibition.
I discussed the exhibition proposal with the brilliant costume designer
James Acheson. He warned, ‘Bad idea. Dead frocks on dummies. This is not
the Golden Age of Couture’.4 Our clothes are created to be seen projected flat in
two dimensions, not in person. These are theatrical garments, perhaps imper-
fectly manufactured and perhaps exaggerated for effect. Costumes are always
designed to be seen within a narrative and visual context. An exhibition rips
them from that artificially constructed frame. The imperative for this exhibition
was to provide a narrative scaffold (a new story) and a physical space (with
the right lighting) for each costume to play a new role in a new production.
Just as for a film, a musical score was written specially for the exhibition. This
provided the emotional current that accompanied the visitor on their cine-
matic journey though the galleries.

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 Character and costume in cinema

Hollywood Costume was unique because it offered the V&A visitor with a
practitioner-centric point of view. Each label presented a first-person quote,
revealing an insight into the costume designer’s creative process. Costume
design was showcased as a vibrant, modern and kinetic art form. The exhi-
bition made clear that movies are about people and that it is the costume
designer in collaboration with the actor who creates the character. This exhi-
bition was not about the clothes; it was emphatically about the creation of
the personality that inhabits each costume. As the director Tim Burton said,
‘What’s great about [the costume] is it’s the visual representation of the inter-
nal side of people’ (Burton 2005: 32).

On the three acts: ‘Deconstruction, dialogue and the finale’

The Hollywood Costume exhibition followed a thematic structure that mirrored
costume design practice. Starting with the script, on animated screens the text
on each page was highlighted for the visitor to find the clues to each character.
Designers first must be readers and analysers of the story. Opposite this plinth
was a stand of video monitors with an exercise in identity and dress; a diverse
group of V&A visitors was interviewed and filmed. Each visitor was asked to
deconstruct their own clothes giving a biography of each garment that they
were wearing. This intimate conversation about the visitors’ own history was a
key element in the first act of the exhibition. Costume designers must discover
who the characters are before they can create their clothes. The second plinth
included modern costumes from the Bourne Ultimatum (2007), Argo (2012) and
The Big Lebowski (1998), created by designers Shay Cunliffe, Jacqueline West
and Mary Zophres.
Costume design is often understood as a practice limited to period and
fantasy films. But all films are ‘costume films’. Each one of us is wearing an
amalgam of our own story. In a contemporary film the work of a costume
designer is hidden in plain sight. First and foremost, costume designers are
tasked with creating real people. On her research for Brokeback Mountain
(2005), Marit Allen wrote,

Everything worn by cowboys and ranchers has a meaning and a cultural

reference. It would be very easy for an outsider unfamiliar with the
code to make a mistake. For instance cowboys wear Wrangler jeans
(they’re much tighter) and ranchers wear looser Levi’s. Even the shape
and heel height on a cowboy boot tells a tale. So does the height, color
and brim and shape of a hat, which also varies from state to state. For
instance, Jack’s broader Texas hat is different from the one Ennis wears
in Wyoming. And all of this is unspoken but rigorously observed.

The second Hollywood Costume gallery ‘Dialogue’ focused on creative

collaborations between directors, costume designers and actors. Directors
Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Mike Nichols and Tim Burton were paired
with their costume designers Edith Head, Sandy Powell, Ann Roth and
Colleen Atwood at a long dining table  that doubled as a projection surface.
The collaborators were each interviewed on camera about one of their films
and one character’s costume. Vertical monitors of the interviewees were
placed into the back of dining chairs facing each other across the table with
the original costume mounted nearby. These interviews were augmented
by projection mapping on the table  that included the screenplay, costume

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Deborah Nadoolman Landis

5. Dorothy’s aunt in The design illustrations, period and contemporary research and mood boards,
Wizard of Oz.
fitting photos of the actors and a film clip from each movie. This section was
followed by vast chronologically indexed plinths of costumes on custom-made
mannequins, which provided a historical Hollywood timeline from silent
film through the technological innovation of Avatar (2009). The final plinth
featured Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro on video monitors, seated on either
side of a projection table and surrounded by five of their costumes on manne-
quins. They candidly discussed how they each use costume to affect the trans-
formation from themselves into someone new. In comparing how each of her
new characters must dress like themselves to how we feel in our own clothes,
Streep said, ‘Because you just don’t feel right in the wrong thing’ (2012).

On finding Dorothy’s gingham pinafore from The Wizard of Oz (1939)

In 2011, I was sitting in my office in the V&A Research Department working
on the forthcoming exhibition when one morning Keith Lodwick, my V&A
assistant curator, received a mysterious phone call. ‘My employer owns the
blue gingham pinafore from the Wizard of Oz would “the curator” be inter-
ested in having it for the Hollywood Costume exhibition?’. Yes, we were inter-
ested! The caller asked, ‘Would the curator be available to meet next Tuesday
at 10:00 at the Temple Street Tube Station?’. And then, ‘Will you please bring
your passports and ID?’.
With Sam Gatley, our V&A conservator, we took the tube to Temple Street.
Two women were standing at the top of the stairs. ‘We’re waiting too, we’re
private textile conservators’. ‘Do you know whom we’re meeting?’. ‘No’. Shortly,
a young woman arrived, introduced herself and then, ‘Hello, do you have your
ID? Yes? Please follow me’. In single file, we followed her to a private bank on
Fleet Street. We presented our credentials and identification to a gentleman
wearing a cutaway coat and striped trousers. He escorted us for the long walk to
the back of the bank. On the book-lined walls were leather-bound ledgers: 1945,
1910, 1890, 1850, 1835, 1789, 1760. At last we arrived at a steel safe door marked
‘Chubb’. We entered what appeared to be a conference room and waited.
Two uniformed security guards arrived carrying a long blue box tied with a
string. They placed it on the table. We removed the top of the box and there ‘she’
was. One look inside and I burst into tears. I gasped, ‘Adrian was a genius!’. The
pinafore was very soft and limp. The colour was surprisingly muted (not faded).
Unmistakably crafted by Auntie Em5 herself with knotty uneven stitchery and
wiggly seams. This was a home-made garment sewn on an early treadle machine.
My guess is that Dorothy’s forever dress was constructed of the cheapest of 1939
cotton gingham fabric. It may have cost a nickel (5 cents) a yard from a General
Store in a Kansas town. It was perfection. In 1939, known as ‘Hollywood’s Greatest
Year’, Adrian also designed the luxurious gowns for The Women (1939). Lined
with silk, French seamed, embroidered and beaded these couture clothes cost a
fortune and were made in the workroom of MGM studios. Adrian’s brilliance:
gorgeously attiring The Women (1939) and inhabiting Auntie Em to produce the
right clothes for The Wizard of Oz (1939); he served MGM’s stars, their directors
and their audience; and he helped make these beloved films iconic.

On costume design
Through no fault of its own fashion undermines the sovereignty of costume
design. To the average person a costume designer must have ‘something’ in
common with fashion, we design clothes. ‘Fashion in film’, handsomely

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 Character and costume in cinema

alliterative, has been employed often to describe costume design. Sadly, this
denomination hurts the field. Fashion is monetized in a way that costume
design cannot be. Fashion is an art and an entrepreneurial pursuit. A fashion
designer’s job is to build their label, brand and license for profit or at least
to stay in business. Costume designers have no label and they are work-for-
hire. They are paid weekly until their last day on the production. They have no
profit participation from the clothes that they design. Also they do not share
in the financial success of the film. Modern motion picture marketing has only
just found the costume designer as an asset to promote its product. Recently,
increased press coverage on costume design and designers has raised the
profile and the prestige of the field, but disappointingly wages have flattened.
Costume designers own nothing.
The costumes are rarely the star of a movie. As the centrepiece of a film
they win awards by catching the audience’s attention. However, the best
costume design may be invisible when the audience is truly invested in the
story and its outcome. Filmmakers want the audience to believe and the
costume’s role is to disappear. The word ‘character’ does not fully express our
task. We ask the audience to believe that (like us) the people in the story have
had a life before the film begins and will continue their lives after the story
ends. Costume designers know that their work is ‘Not about the clothes’. We
aspire to create personalities; we design from the inside out. The clothes must
not sabotage a dramatic scene or get in the way of the screenplay. Our role
must be defined and reframed if costume designers wish to increase our value
as professionals and as artists.

On ‘costume’ as a diminished word

In 2005, I visited Mary Lee Bandy, the late curator of film at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York, to talk about the possibilities of a costume exhi-
bition. I began with the ‘craft’ of costume design. Bandy shouted, ‘Stop, stop,
stop!’. She said, ‘If you want to talk about craft, the American Craft, Museum
is across the street. This is the Museum of Modern Art. I’m interested in the
art of costume design’. Mortified that I had denigrated my own profession,
I recovered my composure and explained that there was little understand-
ing about the costume designers’ contribution to cinema; actualizing the real
people in each story. Bandy said, ‘Costume. That’s such a bad name for what
you do. It’s a terrible name, don’t you have another?’. And, a decade later I am
still trying to find the right one.
In 2006, while researching cinema costume illustrations I had the great
fortune to meet the late David Copley; one of the world’s greatest collectors
of costume designs. And with his generosity, in 2009, I became the David C.
Copley Chair and Director of the David C. Copley Center for Costume Design
at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Copley’s costume sketches
now reside at UCLA Library’s Special Collections. From my post at UCLA I
teach future directors, screenwriters, producers and scholars the rich legacy
and contribution of costume design to cinema storytelling. This position has
given me the longed-for platform to accomplish this goal.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Quotes were transcribed and edited by Donatella Barbieri with Emily Collett
and Jennifer Munday.

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Deborah Nadoolman Landis

REFERENCES
Allen, Marit (2006), ‘“Brokeback” clothing speaks louder than words’, Los
Angeles Times, 4 January, http://screenertv.com/news-features/brokeback-
cloth/. Accessed 19 February 2018.
Burton, Tim (2005), Tim Burton: Interviews (ed. Kristian Fraga), Jackson, MS:
University Press of Mississippi.
Nadoolman Landis, Deborah (2003), Screencraft: Costume Design, Hove:
RotoVision.
——— (2004), 50 Designers, 50 Costumes: Concept to Character, Beverly Hills,
CA: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
——— (2006), ‘President’s letter’, Costume Designer, Winter 2006.
——— (2007), Dressed: A Century of Hollywood Costume Design, New York:
Harper Collins.
——— (2012a), Hollywood Costume, London: V&A Publishing.
——— (2012b), Hollywood Sketchbook: A Century of Costume Illustration,
New York: Harper Collins.
——— (2012c), Filmcraft: Costume Design, Lewis East Sussex: Ilex Press.
Streep, Meryl (2012), in person interview by Deborah Nadoolman Landis,
New York, 20 July 2012.

SUGGESTED CITATION
Nadoolman Landis, D. (2018), ‘Character and costume in cinema: The
Hollywood Costume exhibition’, Studies in Costume & Performance, 3:1,
pp. 91–96, doi: 10.1386/scp.3.1.91_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Professor Deborah Nadoolman Landis, Ph.D., is an internationally recognized
costume designer of many iconic films, including Animal House (1978), The
Blues Brothers (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Michael Jackson’s Thriller
(1983), Trading Places (1983) and Coming to America (1988) for which she was
nominated for an Academy Award. Landis is the author of such books as
Dressed: A Century of Hollywood Costume Design (2007), Hollywood Sketchbook:
A Century of Costume Illustration (2012) and Hollywood Costume (2012), the
award-winning catalogue of the Victoria & Albert Museum exhibition, which
opened in 2012. Deborah Nadoolman Landis is the editor and chief of the
Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Film and Television Costume Design to be published
in 2020. As a practitioner, past-president of the Costume Designers Guild,
Local 892, in Los Angeles, Governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts &
Sciences, and as director of the David C. Copley Center for Costume Design
at UCLA, Landis is a tireless advocate for motion picture and television
costuming.
E-mail: landis@tft.ucla.edu

Deborah Nadoolman Landis has asserted her right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in
the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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