Anniversaries can be inspiring, and film anniversaries can hold a special place in our cultural memory, offering an opportunity to reflect on the lasting impact of cinematic masterpieces.
"Fashions of 1934" directed by William Dieterle turns 90 this year, for example, and it may be worth rediscovering it for a series of reasons, most of them related to the fashion industry.
If you want to do further researches about the actual story behind it, remember that the witty screenplay by F. Hugh Herbert and Carl Erickson was based on the story "The Fashion Plate" by Harry Collins and Warren Duff.
The plot revolves around the vicissitudes of Sherwood Nash (William Powell), an unscrupulous and shady con artist who owns a Manhattan investment firm.
By pure chance, when it goes broke, Sherwood meets talented illustrator and fashion designer Lynn Mason (Bette Davis), and devises a plan to make money.
Hijacking consignments of garments arriving from Paris by boat, Sherwood and his accomplices take pictures of them and then sell the images to local companies that recreate and sell cheap and affordable knockoffs before they become available in exclusive American ateliers.
Discovered, Sherwood concocts another plan: being paid by the same American ateliers he has damaged with his previous scheme, to go to Paris and steal incognito directly from the source, selling the stolen images of the designs at a fraction of the price they would pay for the exclusive designs.
Obviously, before accepting his offer, all the designers state they don't want him to steal as that would be unethical.
Things don't go as expected and, discovered again, Sherwood & Co. move on, selling fashion illustrations of designs by Lynn with the forged signature of revered French designers, such as Baroque (Reginald Owen).
Sherwood doesn't lose his heart and hopes even when their bubble bursts (again…), but launches a new venture, a show with costumes by Baroque, and consequently opens up a new fashion house, Maison Elegance.
The film isn't extremely relevant for its designs, even though they were created by Orry-Kelly and some of them still look astonishing, especially his long evening dresses. Orry-Kelly's emphasis on the back in most of the designs included in this film is also striking.
The presence of Bette Davis doesn't make the film memorable as the actress ends up fading in the background, becoming almost invisible, which is bizarre considering that the intent of the film was actually promoting her image and presenting her like a glamorous platinum blonde (the bleached wigs she donned in the film ended up being the most referenced thing in the reviews of the time).
Even Bette Davis wasn't enthusiastic about this role, stating in interviews that they were trying to market her like an imitation of Greta Garbo (in a way Davis' own cute Scottie dog Tibby's cameo becomes almost more intriguing than her part, View this photo).
Fashion-wise there are actually some details that you may want to translate into contemporary designs, such as the oversized buttons and the ample sleeves of the top donned by Sherwood's secretary in the opening scenes.
Besides, Bette Davis wears some lovely hats throughout the film, while her dresses or fur collars are often characterised by a squarish shape. In one case the square detail almost frames her shoulders creating a sort of extension, an expanded silhouette, around her body.
Maybe through this geometrical shape Orry-Kelly was hinting at Lynn's precision in creating beautiful fashion designs or at the fact that, as an illustrator, we often see her sketching on paper, or moving around her studio, surrounded by fashion illustrations on reactangular paper.
Or the square silhouette may be a reference to the fact that Bette Davis' characters is more conservative than the others and, despite collaborating with Sherwood (and falling in love with him), Lynn would like him to give up his adventurously dangerous life.
While you can ponder more about the square silhouette, let's pass onto considering one of the last gowns we see Lynn wearing in the film, a black number with a row of buttons along the arms and on her back, that may provide us with some modern inspirations.
A few buttons are left open and the skin becomes an instrumental part of the design that is sensual yet preserves its elegance (take note fashion students, especially young ones who may not be familiar with this film or with the times it was shot – how can we turn skin into an instrumental part of a design in a stylish way?).
The wardrobe of fake aristocrat Grand Duchess Alix, supposedly a Russian refugee in Paris, and lover of Oscar Baroque, but actually Mabel McGuire from Hoboken (actress Verree Teasdale), an old acquaintance of Sherwood, also offers some intriguing fashion details.
At home she wears, for example, a sensual velvet gown with a humble belt around the waist, a feature that calls to mind a monastic tunic, but this dress also features grand billowing sleeves that add a touch of glamour to the ensemble. The duchess also wears lavish furs with her gowns, usually made with entire animals.
When Grand Duchess Alix sings "Spin a Little Web of Dreams" during Sherwood's show, she wears a flowing gown sprouting large and extravagant black ostrich feathers that make her look a bit like a vulture (her previous gown in the show sprouted instead an abundance of white ostrich feathers in a configuration that called to mind angel wings).
Her song introduces one of the grandest fashion moment in the film, the classic Busby Berkeley number, that is actually not desperately instrumental in the narrative.
After she starts singing, the camera moves onto a young woman working as a dressmaker and falling asleep among a pile of feathers.
Her dream leads to a lavish vision of blonde harpists playing human harps (a somewhat disturbing moment that enraged some viewers who felt this part of the film objectified women…).
Overhead choreographies and shots follow, with dancers hiding behind huge ostrich feather fans and creating geometrical kaleidoscope-like choreographies, culminating in a galley populated by chorines in feathered bikinis manning the oars and sailing on a sea of fabric.
This part is extremely kitsch, rather than fashionable, even though it is historically important: all the girls in these scenes are scantily dressed in their feathery bikinis, so there's plenty of flesh in this section and bellybuttons as well.
Yet, shortly after production was completed on this movie, The Hays Code and its censorship slammed down on Hollywood, and navels, especially female ones, disappeared from the big screen for decades (the code was applied from 1934 to 1968).
But, aside from fashion, there are some themes and issues in this rather short (duration: 1 hour and 17 minutes, roughly) romantic comedy that may be deemed very modern - from the themes of deceit, ambition, and the challenges faced by those in the competitive world of fashion, to issues about stealing designs, bootlegging and infringing copyrights.
Sherwood's first plan consists indeed in stealing original French couture designs (please note, all the designers and houses mentioned in the film are fictitious) and selling their photographs to manufacturers who can come up with cheaper knock-offs.
In a way that's the same process behind the vast fake fashion market we have in our times (except that nowadays you can just see a picture from a runway show online and try and reproduce a cheap version of that design, without having to steal the actual clothes first).
In the film a wealthy society lady pays $375 for a dress and is then appalled to see a young woman sent to her by an employment agency wearing the same dress, which she bought for $16.95.
This first plan pushes American designers and manufacturers, among them a man who sounds Italian and whose name is Caponelli (a parody of Schiaparelli's name?), to join forces against the "copying evil" undermining their businesses, something that makes us think about all the legal cases that end up in court when somebody is accused of having copied a fashion design.
The second attempt at stealing designs is accompanied by more technological prowess: Sherwood's accomplice Snap (Frank McHugh) is enlisted to accompany him and Lynn to a French atelier.
Lynn nods to him when she sees something striking, and Snap proceeds to take a picture with his camera ingeniously hidden in his cane. Nowadays things are easier, and most times ideas are stolen off the Internet.
When they get discovered, the skint trio has a revelatory moment: while walking around, they stumble into Parisian designer Baroque (the name says it all…) shopping for vintage books from a stall.
A chat with the book stall owner introduces them to a great fashion truism – fashion is a cycle, and what is passé now will return into fashion maybe in 50 or 100 years' time.
Sherwood and Lynn realize that Baroque buys vintage books with illustrations of historical costumes and gets his inspirations from them (quite a few contemporary fashion designers also resort to historical costumes for their collections, think about JW Anderson).
Sherwood has another eureka moment here - if Baroque can do it, so can they. Soon, moving from illustrations of monks and men in uniforms, Lynn creates a series of designs that Sherwood then sells as sketches of original French designers, signing each one with the name of an established designer, Baroque included.
The idea of taking inspiration from art and historical costumes will be the starting point also for the first Maison Elegance runway show.
The latter features a rotating carousel with a selection of paintings; as they are lifted, they reveal behind each of them a model in a design characterized by details or motifs directly inspired by that specific painting.
There is one last note that seems to be very modern: the man at the end of the film who offers Sherwood the opportunity to join his business – he has indeed created a cross between silkworms and glow warms to make luminous thread that could be employed for glowing women's evening dresses. Nowadays we actually have glowing dresses that can also change color, but they aren't made with luminous thread spun by special silkworms.
So, despite being 90 years old, some points in this film are still relevant and they may serve as the inspiration for a collection or for a new film about con artists creating illegal fakes, or borrowing and copying from other deigners and fashion houses.
Yet, in case somebody would like to shoot a new version of this film, they would have to remember that Sherwood is a charming con artist and seems only interested in robbing obnoxious characters linked to the fashion industry.
So carefully rewatch "Fashions of 1934" and ponder more about the main topics and issues behind it, while trying to think how some of the more intriguing details of the gowns included in the films may be reinvented.
Schiaparelli once noted "What Hollywood designs today, you will be wearing tomorrow". This is true even in 2024 - just just glance back at the Barbie mania that swept through 2023 - so, as we celebrate the cinematic anniversary of "Fashions of 1934," let it serve as guide to analyse the past of the fashion industry, make comparisons with the present, and consider how cinematic fashion may continue to shape runways and collections in the future.
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