Festive Season - Wizard of Oz and Gowns by Adrian, MGM's top fashion designer

Adrian Greenberg

Designing for the big screen

We're into the Christmas panto and musical season so here's a timely reminder of our podcast on the designer of Dorothy’s gingham dress and ruby slippers for?The Wizard of Oz.

He called himself Gilbert Adrian (his full name was Adrian Adolf Greenberg). As MGM’s chief costume designer from 1929-1943 he clocked up over 250 films, with 1200 costumes and 5000 wigs (and outfits for two poodles required for?Marie Antoinette).?His credit was simply ‘Gowns by Adrian.’

Of all the fashion designers of the 1930s, you could make a strong case for Adrian as the most influential of them all. More influential AT THE TIME than?Elsa Schiaparelli or Coco Chanel.

Adrian was designing for the camera at a time when cinematography was still a basic art. Detail worked well, especially in mid-close ups - shots of head and shoulders. But it had to be done with a broad brush if it was to read in grainy, soft-focus.

Better film stocks and the arrival of colour – even if it was often only for selected sequences – were less forgiving than the old black and white film of the 1920s, where a generous layer of makeup and something from the actress’s own wardrobe would often do.

So Adrian added frills and ruffs around shoulders and necklines. Hats also made a big impression and Adrian experimented with them too.

'Talkies' required actresses rather than models. And since camera lenses tend to broaden their subjects a little Adrian found ways to disguise ordinary looking legs and bottoms.

The 1920s boyish flapper was too unflattering a look for most of MGM’s stars and too monotonous for a studio turning out hundreds of features a year. What was required was something glamorous but clearly structured, and that Adrian was brilliantly able to do.

The delay between shooting and the film’s release was another problem. It meant it was impossible to keep up with the cat-walk fashions.

Everyone remembered the shock when hemlines had dropped suddenly in the Paris winter fashion salons of 1929. Hollywood studios had had to junk thousands of expensive reels of film they’d already shot.

So hemlines stayed where they were. Mid calf.?

Joan Crawford in 'Letty Lynton' - half a million copies of the dress were sold

Influence of the big screen on consumerism

An American study in 1928 showed that between 80 and 90% of all purchases were made by women. Studies at that time also showed that a majority of cinema goers were women and that, when the boyfriend came too, he’d usually been dragged to something she wanted to see. So the women’s market was massive business and the potential for shifting merchandise through what appeared on screen immense.

Studios actively negotiated concessions and placements with big names like Macy’s or mail order catalogues like Sears and Roebuck. You could go into a department store and find?Miss Hollywood?or?Studio Styles?and buy what you had seen on the screen LAST NIGHT. The slouch hat and trench coat Adrian gave Garbo in the 1928 film?Women of Affairs?made it straight into?Women’s Wear Daily.

When Garbo wore a beret for?The Kiss?in 1929, so did everyone else. When the next year she wore an Empress Eugenie hat in?Romance, so did everyone else. Even if, as Mata Hari, she put on a jeweled skullcap, or a veiled pillbox as Katrin Koerber Fane in?The Painted Veil, so did everyone else.

In 1932 Adrian designed a white organdy gown with ruffled sleeves and huge puffed shoulders for Joan Crawford in?Letty Lynton.?Copies immediately appeared in Macy’s, New York, where, it’s said, they shifted half a million of them. Adrian had not only created perhaps the most widely copied dress of the decade, but had persuaded women everywhere that they needed to have those big shoulders.

Just as important, if MGM’s clothing concessions were going to sell dresses to the ordinary girl in the high street, they had to cover up their ordinary figures too. So Adrian kept hemlines low and waists narrow in designs that every girl on the street could recognize and hope to possess.?

Adrian’s gowns reflected the personalities of the different filmstars. This too suited the mass market. Your mum had grown up buying clothes for different times of day – morning, afternoon, evening. By the 1930s a woman bought her clothes to express the way she felt about herself.

And through the power of Hollywood and its merchandising, Adrian's designs were much more widely copied than the more famous Parisian?couturiers.

Betty Boop before and after the enforcement of the Hays Motion Picture Production Code

The Hays Code and Hollywood

In 1922 a Presbyterian elder and former Postmaster, Will H. Hays was given the astonishing sum of $100 000 a year as Chairman of the new Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America and told to clean HOLLYWOOD up.

But nothing changed. So in the 1930s, under pressure from the Catholic Church, Hays’s Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors organisation was forced to accept a new ‘Production Code’.

It was a twelve-part list of commandments drawn up by a Jesuit and a lay Catholic. Even this was ignored?until... a tough Irish Catholic journalist called Joe Breen was put in charge of enforcement.

From 1 July 1934 no film could reach the screen without a license from Mr Breen’s office, which turned out to be no pushover at all. Even the cartoon girl Betty Boop was put into a long skirt.

The code is considered a bit of a joke – you could show a married couple in bed providing one of them had a foot on the floor, and adultery could not be presented ‘attractively!’?There was however some wriggle room since undressing ‘should be avoided’ but was allowable if it was ‘essential to the plot.’

Some of the commandments are?abhorrent, for example the ban on showing sex between people of different colour. It did however request nations and faiths be respected and banned cruelty to animals and children.

Whatever Adrian personally thought of the code it was a strong incentive to keep things decent. No wonder his designs became more unadventurous.?And as a result, so did everyone else's in the 1930s world of fashion. What his stars wore today on?the?big screen, everyone else wore?tomorrow on the high street.?

Red Slippers and Judy Garland as gay icons?

The legacy of Adrian's red slippers

The legendary film,?The Wizard of Oz?(1939) and the glorious, dazzling ruby slippers designed by Adrian to show off technicolour and worn by its heroine, Dorothy Gale, (played by Judy Garland), have long been symbols of hope – especially for the LGBT+ community.

Garland’s most performed song,?Over the Rainbow, is believed to be one of the sources of inspiration for the universal symbol of the LGBT+ movement - the rainbow flag - first adopted in the 1970s.

In 2000, Michael Joseph Gross, a contributor to Vanity Fair, wrote in?The Atlantic: 'Coming out in the past ten to fifteen years has been considerably eased by the mainstream culture's speedy incorporation of gay life. As a result, gay men in this generation are mostly indifferent to the faux tragedy and flamboyant exoticism of camp, and to old-time gay icons like Judy Garland.?Young gay men today just want to be regular guys -- with better-than-average bodies.'

He goes on to explain it was different in 1967 when?Judy Garland gave her final performance at New York's Palace Theatre where, according to?The?Times,?a 'disproportionate part of her nightly claque seems to be homosexual'.

Gross quotes a psychiatrist who offered this explanation:?"Judy was beaten up by life, embattled and ultimately had to become more masculine. She has the power that homosexuals would like to have, and they attempt to attain it by idolizing her."

Adrian is widely supposed to have been gay, and one wonders what he would have thought?of the iconic red slippers outlasting his own personal fame?

AFTER THE NEW YEAR WE RELEASE A NEW PODCAST SERIES ON THE 1916 BATTLE OF THE SOMME