For just as Lillian Hellman complained that the studios “clean up my plays and cut off their balls”, so the studios also sanitised any creativity from the couturiers. Peter Wollen, who curated the forthcoming “Fashion in Film” season at the National Film Theatre, points out that “Hollywood served as a transmission belt taking ideas from high fashion – usually a little late – then taking them downmarket until they were acceptable to a mass audience in mid-America.”None the less, the subsequent roll call of the walking wounded from Paris to Hollywood is still impressive. Watching her, I knew she was evaluating the gowns in the shop window – a sure way of knowing just how those dresses would photograph.”If films created the American fashion industry, though, Hollywood’s treatment of couturiers has been less benign. The couple were peering intently at a display of frocks in the window of a fashionable shop. But what caught my eye was not the star herself but the fact that she was using a cameraman’s blue viewing glass. Leading Hollywood cameraman Joseph Walker remembered this early film-fashion consciousness in a tale from the heyday of the City of Lights. “One Sunday, walking down Hollywood Boulevard I spotted [the press baron] William Randolph Hearst, with [his lover, the actress] Marion Davies.
The result: Macy’s sold half a million copies of Adrian’s dress. (Surprisingly, the only vestige that remains from this sort of high-impact, watertight merchandising is Spike’s Joint, the clothes store in Brooklyn owned by Spike Lee.)We know that, way before Batman jackets, right from the beginning, the stars themselves were aware of this commercial link. Macy’s then contracted out the manufacture of the dress so that it was ready in time for the film’s release. MGM, in turn, sent Macy’s photographs of Joan and that dress emblazoned with the movie’s title, the names of the other stars and the studio logo, as well as details of all the theatres where Letty Lynton was to appear. This is how one of thousands of merchandising strategies unfolded: in 1931, MGM sent Macy’s, the New York department store, some stills of Joan Crawford wearing Adrian’s dress for Letty Lynton, a whole year before the cameras were due to roll.
And Hollywood effected that change.Nowadays critics have a tendency to complain about product-placement in films. The truth is that today’s cinematic commercialism is but a pallid imitation of the product tie-ins to performing stars prevalent during Hollywood’s golden era. It may have been producing the goods, but its wage-poor workers could not afford to buy them. The country therefore needed to turn those workers into consumers. The roots of America’s fashion industry initially lay in the early studios’ use of locally copied couture to add glamour to an emerging star system. But what was once a nickel-and-dime sideline for a Hollywood shirt-manufacturer would burgeon into one of the great success stories of 20th-century capitalism For, up to the 1920s, America was in deep recession.
