As a follow up to yesterday's architectural post, let's focus today on a brief comparison between a building and a dress, moving from one theme - cinema.
In the late '30s architect and developer William Beresford Inglis, of Weddell & Inglis, set out to introduce the "colours and lines of cinema" to Glasgow's hotel building. The result was the eight storey Beresford Hotel in Sauchiehall Street.
The building was characterised by symmetrical Art Deco lines, two semicircular towers that extended on either side of the main entrance from the first floor to the tenth and striking colours with red central lines and an exterior covered in black and mustard yellow earthenware and porcelain tiles. The hotel, considered as the first skyscraper in town, was built to accomodate in a luxurious environment the visitors expected for the Empire Exhibition of 1938.
Its architect tried to integrate into the façade of the building the main theme of the Empire Exhibition - Art Deco - a style that was adopted also for the centrepiece of the event, The Tower of the Empire, designed by Thomas S. Tait.
Requisitioned during the Second World War and turned into a favourite rendezvous for American servicemen during the Second World War (the nearby Charing Cross was for a time the epicentre of the American troops activities), the building functioned as a hotel until 1952.
In later years the hotel was first turned into office accomodation for the Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) and then sold in the '60s to the University of Strathclyde that turned it into Baird Hall (the most abhorred student halls in town with the greatest location...). The building was sold again in 2002 and turned into 112 residential flats. It remains one of the most important examples of Art Deco/Streamline Moderne architecture in Glasgow.
The current colour scheme and the silhouette of the building call to mind Gilbert Adrian's oatmeal, black and russet wool day dress (on the right side of the following picture) that some critics say was part of the "Shades of Picasso" collection (1944-5; the dress reappeared in a Kerry Taylor Auctions a while back - View this photo).
Trained at the New York School for Fine and Applied Arts (now Parsons School of Design), Gilbert Adrian created the costumes for many musicals and shows.
After he transferred to the school's Paris campus, Adrian was hired by Irving Berlin and designed the costumes for The Music Box Revue. He worked on the costumes for 11 films by Cecil B. DeMille, becoming chief costume designer at MGM.
Adrian created garments for over 200 films in his career: his gowns for Norma Shearer, Jeanette MacDonald, Jean Harlow, Katharine Hepburn remain legendary, while his outfits for Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford had a great impact on women's fashion. A ruffled organdy gown designed for Crawford in Letty Lynton was widely copied by the fashion industry, while his wide-shouldered designs for the actress launched a fashion trend.
Art Deco didn't just leave a stamp on the silhouette of Adrian's costumes: this style was very much fascinated with the female figure and its popularity coincided with the rise of the New Woman in American society. The simple yet striking wool day dress (View this photo to see another shot of this garment) compared to the Beresford Hotel in this post, was designed with a modern and strong woman in mind.
The muted and well-balanced palette and the short cape around the shoulders gave it a glamorous architectural sobriety that Adrian loved, while hinting in a more fluid way at the "triangle silhouette" (broad shoulders, slim hips and skirt 15 inches from the floor) that the costume designer loved as he considered it as the most flattering shape to a woman's figure (see also the final image in this post for the "triangle silhouette"). "A good dress," he once stated in an interview on Life magazine, "has a sense of classical rightness that makes it wearable until it falls apart."
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