Turner Classic Movies: Follow the Thread (2022)

The Met's Andrew Bolton and Sylvia Yount present the great exhibition In America: An Anthology of Fashion. Exploring the role of dress in shaping American identity produced in collaboration with nine notable American film directors.

Both fashion designers and costume designers are artists. Both are responsible for creating original clothing, use a variety of fabrics and need to understand color and texture. And both ultimately need to make original work with a sense of style and purpose, considering both form and function. But there are essential differences too: fashion designers make clothes for the general public, while costume designers make them for specific characters; fashion designers make clothes for here and now, while costume designers have to worry about when and where the story takes place. Their goals and responsibilities are distinct. But there are times they’ve had to work together to make a film. Their collaborations haven’t always been easy or friendly, but the output was often stunning.

Film character transformations can be seen in a number of ways on the big screen, including through the clothing and costumes they wear. For some, this is a subtle progression in wardrobe that reflects a slowly evolving character arc, oftentimes resulting in a newfound confidence. For others, it's a quicker, memorable, and sometimes magical change as the ugly duckling transforms into a beautiful swan. In this episode of Follow the Thread, fashion and costume experts discuss how transformative clothing in film plays a part in the storytelling process.

During the height of Hollywood’s Golden Age, studios employed costume designers who created looks for the best-known stars of their day: Travis Banton for Marlene Dietrich; Edith Head for Barbara Stanwyck; Adrian for Joan Crawford. But in the 1950s into the 1960s, a new trend began: stars wanted their wardrobes made by established fashion designers. Dietrich and Dior. Hepburn and Givenchy. Deneuve and YSL. Take a look at some of the collaborations that left a mark on both the silver screen and the runway.

Women in film have been pushing gender boundaries with their outfits since the silent era, often breaking antiquated fashion rules. The pantsuit was introduced in the 1920s but wasn’t popularized until Marlene Dietrich wore one in her 1930 film Morocco. Greta Garbo sported a military-style trench coat in the 1928 film A Woman of Affairs, a look that endures to this day. These women set the stage for stars like Katharine Hepburn and Diane Keaton, who translated their personal styles onto the big screen and into our culture. These cinematic trailblazers continue to redefine and question the fashion rules.

Visionary designer Jeremy Scott stages spectacular fashion shows for his collections, fusing elements of pop culture, the avant-garde, and even classic film to lens his sublime take on contemporary fashion. In 2021 and 2022, Scott paid homage to The Women (1939) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), borrowing and updating moments from these iconic films to craft show-stopping stories around his clothing designs.

In films at least, low morals are often combined with high fashion. Some of the most stylish films of all time are centered around crime, often with the criminals themselves as the most fashion-forward characters. The gangster films of the 1930s were incredibly popular and featured main characters who wanted to show off their power and wealth with the clothes that they wore. The trend continues to this day, as filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Brian DePalma like to highlight a more glamorous side to the world of crime.

The interplay between fashion and costume design is complicated and can cut in both directions. Fashion trends certainly influence costumes, as filmmakers try to authentically capture an era or a subculture. But sometimes the clothes in a film are so visionary that they capture the public’s imagination and begin to push the fashion world in new directions.