The Great Horned Owl

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M O V I E C O S T U M E S A T T H E V I R G I N I A M U S E U M O F F I N E A R T S

N O V E M B E R 2 , 2 0 1 3 – F E B R U A R Y 1 7 , 2 0 1 4

Barbra Streisand from “Funny Girl”, 1968 ©Columbia/The Kobal Collection.

Hollywood to VirginiaComes

100 iconic costumes from 100 years of film

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Christopher Reeve from “Superman” ©Warner Bros/DC Comics/The Kobal Collection.

BY JOHN BOLEN

Did you stare in the mir-ror with a neck full of plastic pearls after Break-fast at Tiffany’s, or flinch when you saw a line of crows on a telephone

wire after The Birds? Few artistic mediums are able to quake our individual subcon-scious so subtly yet at the same time influ-ence and control fashion trends and pop culture as definitively as cinema. Film can simultaneously suspend our disbelief and appeal to our desires and fears, and in the characters we often see ourselves. Harrison Ford explains, “The role of an actor is to serve as a mirror. My job is not to show you that the character and I have something in common. My job is to show you that you and the character have something in common.” Arguably the most accessible and influential art form of the twentieth century, film has a mesmerizing quality that transports the audience away from the present, makes actors into characters, and turns a world of fantasy into a brief reality. But as we

lose ourselves in the magic of the screen we often also lose sight of the intricate and thoughtful processes that go into the experience.

Starting November 2nd, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Rich-mond will be presenting Hollywood Cos-tume, an exhibit showcasing over one hun-dred of the most iconic costumes across a century of filmmaking. Organized by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, the exhibit aims to explore the evolution of film by taking visitors on a powerful emotional journey through a rich chro-nology of the industry. “Costumes are one of the few tangible remnants we have of these ephemeral productions” says Su-zanne Hall, the museum’s Chief Commu-nications officer, “and as an art museum it is totally appropriate that we should present these remnants of our material culture that have created timeless char-acters, pop culture icons, and countless fashion trends.” The museum’s goal is to take the viewer back to the theatre where they first experienced the film, or in some cases, the mirror where they first became the character.

The VMFA will be the first United States venue, furthering its reputation as one of the premier art museums in the world. “This museum is making history,” Hall continues, speaking not only of the Hollywood Costume exhibit, but also of sev-eral recent blockbuster shows that have made Richmond one of the leading art cities in the nation.

The wildly successful Picasso: Master-pieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris exhibit gave Richmond international ac-claim as being one of only seven cities in the world to host the monumental ex-hibit. The exhibition brought 30 million dollars to the state of Virginia and proved to be a landmark celebration of the mu-seum’s 75th anniversary. New York Times art critic Ken Johnson wrote, “That viewer-friendly show captured (Picasso’s) infec-tious fluidity over eight decades like no Picasso exhibition I had ever seen.”

It seems as if the museum plans to recreate that success and professional-ism with the installment of Hollywood Cos-tume. But this is a different art form altogether. Instead of persuading an audience to connect with the artist’s

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Robert De Niro from “Taxi Driver”, 1976 ©Columbia/The Kobal Collection.

own individual idea of a truth or reality, a costume designer must convince the audi-ence that they are now a part of a different, collective reality. A costume designer has to create a character that is both unique and believable. They must assure the audience that the character had a life before the start of the action in a way that does not put emphasis on their outfits. An Armani suit may say a great deal about a character, but a baggy Armani suit says a great deal more. Famed designer Edith Head said it best, “What a costume designer does is a cross between magic and camouflage. We create the illusion of changing the ac-tors into what they are not.” Hollywood Costume aims to represent this medium as an important art form by revealing the complexities and significance behind the most iconic costume designs of the twen-tieth century. “We are a comprehensive art museum” says Hall, “five hundred years of art and culture across time, but we also understand the importance of the present moment.”

Part of what makes costume collecting so fascinating is that it’s a fairly new field of collecting. Before a massive MGM auction in the 1970s where over 350,000 costumes and props went into the hands of private collectors, most legendary costumes were either discarded or altered for new roles. “The costumes from the 70s auction com-pletely packed seven soundstages” says exhibitions designer Doug Fisher, “and after that this area of collecting quickly became a national and international phe-nomenon, making it a difficult task to get all of these costumes together again in the same room.” (Fisher majored in Costume Design, worked and for the Ava Gardner Museum before coming to the VMFA.) It seems though that getting all these cos-tumes in the same room again is exactly what the Virginia Museum has done. The costumes in the exhibit range from Mar-ilyn Monroe’s legendary white dress in Seven Year Itch to Christopher Reeve’s Su-perman; Elizabeth Taylor’s sultry getup in Cleopatra to Russell Crowe’s armor in Gladi-ator. From Catwoman to Taxi Driver, Charlie Chaplin to The Birds to Titanic, every genre is represented, from 1912 to 2012.

Planning to use all three downstairs rooms of the museum (over 15,000 square feet) for the exhibit, Fisher wants the ex-perience to feel like a behind the set tour. “As a prologue to the show we are going to deconstruct a couple of sets of costume, including Brokeback Mountain and The Last Emperor, and explain why the designers made the decisions they did.” He notes that in Brokeback Mountain Jake Gyllen-haal wore Levi’s while Heath Ledger wore Wranglers because they were two different

Marlene Dietrich from “Morocco”, 1930 ©Paramount/The Kobal Collection/E.R. Richee.

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types of cowboys and their clothes needed to represent that.

“We move from the prologue to a black and white gallery with Rudolf Val-entino’s iconic ensemble from Blood and Sand. From the days when actors chose their own costumes and sometimes even wore their own clothes. This should be a fun throwback to the days when acting was similar to Vaudeville.” Later, as stu-dios developed, they began to hire armies of sewers, blacksmiths, and cobblers that helped create a level of craft equal to a couture house. “This is when designers like Travis Banton and Adrian brought their craft to a new level,” says Fisher.

The Victoria and Albert Museum or-chestrated the show in October of last year. The VMFA intends to keep pace with the expertise of the London museum while also crafting it’s own interpretation of the exhibit, making it both more acces-sible and more interactive. “Spiderman was twelve feet in the air at the V&A,” says Fisher, “you could hardly see his eyes. We plan on taking him down and put-ting a light underneath him, so it shines through his eyes as he crawls down the

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Kate Winslet from “Titanic”,1997 ©20th Century Fox/Paramount/The Kobal

Collection.

Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal from “Brokeback Mountain”, 2005 ©Focus Features/The Kobal Collection.

Meryl Streep from “Iron Lady”, 2011 ©Film 4/The Kobal Collection.

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wall.” The show will also include sections of dialogue between actors, directors, and designers including Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro, Alfred Hitchcock and Edith Head, and Mike Nichols and Ann Roth. “One of the most important distinc-tions between the two shows is that we ob-viously plan to showcase the art of costume design, but we also want to give the viewer a tangible association with these cultural icons,” says Hall.

A generation is defined by what the people in that generation find important, but for people that were not a part of that generation we often rely on art to define it for us. Just as Cleopatra gave visual rep-resentation to ancient Egypt in 1934, Ma-rie Antoinette shed light on 16th century Europe in 1938. Gone with the Wind let us see the American South during the Civil War, and Saving Private Ryan gave more re-cent generations a taste of the brutality of

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Audrey Hepburn from “My Fair Lady”, 1964 ©Warner Bros/The Kobal Collection.

Russell Crowe from “Gladiator”, 2000 ©Dreamworks/Universal/The Kobal Collection/Jaap Buitendijk.

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Glenn Close from “102 Dalmations,” 2000©Walt Disney/The Kobal Collection.

World War II. But often film goes one step further, and instead of depicting the style of a past generation, shapes the appear-ance of the current one. All one must do is look to the influx of thick socks and baggy sweatshirts after Flashdance, or tight polyes-ter suits after Saturday Night Fever. In 1957 Bridgette Bardot almost single–handedly popularized the bikini swimsuit in And God Created Woman. With the installment of the Hollywood Costume exhibit at the Virginia Museum in Richmond, viewers will be able to track film’s influence on the last century, and by recognizing the intrica-cies and insight that goes into the magic of cinema, further understand themselves as an audience.

Complementing Hollywood Costume, Made in Hollywood showcases more than 90 original vintage prints by the most important photographers working in Hollywood from 1920–1960. Selected from the Kobal Foundation collection in Eng-land the exhibition features prints of some of the greatest stars during the golden age of the film industry, including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Humphrey Bo-gart, Gloria Swanson, and Clark Gable. The museum also plans to host a movie marathon and a competition for younger museumgoers called Teenstylin’ where high schoolers will be able to plan and create their own Hollywood costume. Opening the same weekend as Hollywood Costume, the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville showcases first-run features and timeless classics over a four-day period. The second installment of the Hollywood Comes To Virginia will be featured in the next edi-tion of albemarle Magazine. a

Tippi Hedren from “The Birds”, 1963 ©Universal/The Kobal Collection.