Copying each other has become a favourite sport for many fashion designers. Yet stealing, borrowing, adapting and re-creating fashion designs is nothing new, in fact it has been going for decades.
On Thursday's post we mentioned for example a gown featured in the movie "Letty Lynton" (1932; directed by Clarence Brown and based on the eponymous novel by Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes) that spawned many copies.
Designed by Adrian, the white cotton organdy gown with exaggerated ruffled sleeves puffed at the shoulder and featuring ruffled hems worn by Joan Crawford in the romantic cruise-ship scene of the film, was widely copied as it seemed to embody a dream life desired by many American girls. Adrian designed it as reaction to streamlined styles of the 1920s and as a way to emphasise the romantic theme.
There are further information about this gown in different books about Hollywood glamour: according to the legend it sold over 500,000 ready-to-wear replicas nationwide (but numbers remain unverified; the dress was probably very popular, but it is unlikely that the ready-to-wear industry actually produced a run of 500,000 dresses of this type, so this is probably just a myth…) with Macy's department store in New York alone selling over 50,000 copies of a $10 version of the dress (well, in this case there was an agreement between MGM, Macy's Cinema Fashions shop and Bernard Waldman's Modern Merchandising Bureau, a firm that purchased the reproduction fees of dresses donned by stars in the movies and put up them for sale in Cinema Fashions shops); Sears also offered a cheaper version in their 1933 catalogue. More knock-offs and dress patterns followed between 1932 and 1935, and the trend was exported as far as Scotland.
A 1933 Christmas catalogue for John Falconer, an Aberdeen department store selling fashionable womenswear, included indeed a version of the dress in crepe with a fine net overlay and a satin sash bow at the back (it was dubbed the "Dance Frock" on this catalogue).
The gown spawned a trend for richer evening dresses and costume designer Edith Head called the design "the single most important influence on fashion in film history". This was indeed the first time that a movie set a trend for fashion and echoes of this gown arrived to our days (Chanel did a pink version of the Letty Lynton gown for its S/S 17 Haute Couture collection…). The most interesting thing about this gown, though, is that, since the film was pulled from distribution soon after its release because of a plagiarism case, its memory and fame were mainly kept alive by pictures of Joan Crawford in this ruffled fantasy dress (and by pictures of its copies…).