Dressing the Part: Hollywood Costumes on Display

Only in Hollywood could a prehistoric cavewoman sport a 1960s miniskirt, would Cleopatra don gold lame or an Art Deco headdress, or could a biblical high priestess from 70 BC dress like a scantily clad sex goddess of the 1950s.

Anachronisms such as these fascinate Edward Maeder, who has assembled an exhibition at the County Museum of Art showing how Hollywood costume designers have stitched contemporary fashion trends and tastes into ostensibly accurate re-creations of historical “period” film costumes.

“Hollywood and History: Costume Design in Film,” Sunday through March 6, features about 250 sketches and photographs and 50 film costumes from the 1920s to the 1980s representing interpretations of dress from “Caveman” to “Star Trek.” (The show opens simultaneously with the museum’s “Masters of Starlight: Photographers in Hollywood” exhibit. See story on Page 1.)

“Take Claudette Colbert’s dress in ‘Cleopatra,’ ” said Maeder, recently referring to the shiny sheath in the show. “In 1934, when the movie was made, bias-cut and gold lame was in. That’s not exactly Egyptian.”

Norma Shearer’s stunning silver gown from “Marie Antoinette” (1938), designed by Adrian, supports Maeder’s thesis, too.

The costume’s boxlike skirt, though somewhat exaggerated at six feet across, captures the physical scope of clothing worn during that queen’s era. But its 1930s-style bodice bares its wearer’s shoulders--a site unseen in fashionable society of 18th-Century France.

“We’re all victims of the time in which we live, and we see history through our own rose-colored glasses,” said Maeder, the museum’s curator of costumes and textiles.

There have been “absolutely authentic” designers, Maeder explained. “But no matter how accurate you are, you can’t get away from contemporary influences. The costumes look exactly right to us at the time they’re made. It’s only maybe 20 years after the fact that you can look back and say, ‘Oh, that’s so 1950s,’ or ‘It’s so 1962.’ . . . I guarantee you, in 20 years, we’ll look back on ‘Room With a View’ (which won an Oscar for best costume design this year) and say ‘Oh my god! How 1980s!’ ”

Contemporary fashion influences, while affecting everything from skirt length to lipstick, most consistently crept into costumers’ designs for one certain physical feature, Maeder said.

“The single area (of anachronism) that runs throughout Hollywood costume history is placement of the bosom, and its relative prominence,” which has changed through time, he said.

In the 16th Century, for example, “breasts would have been flattened with an iron corset. But that would not have been attractive in 1956,” the year Lana Turner played Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of King Henri II, in the movie “Diane.” Two shapely mannequins in the show wear Renaissance gowns from the film that would have hardly “flattened” Turner’s figure.

“Designers usually wanted to be (historically) accurate and in many cases they thought they were,” Maeder stressed. “And though there are always compromises, in most cases those compromises are unconscious.”

Designers did commit intentional indiscretions, but generally for reasons beyond their control, Maeder explained. Limited budgets most often caused the inaccuracies, but so could “the taste of a director, or a director’s wife, or a director’s wife’s cousin,” Maeder added.

“The star system, where Miss So and So hates green, or would never show her neck, or doesn’t like a particular hair style, was another factor,” the curator said. “In fact, that’s why Walter Plunkett (known for fanatic attention to detail and authenticity) went into period clothes, so he could say ‘You must wear it, it’s authentic.’ He had the battle lines drawn.”