Masters Of Anonymity

The lists of celebrities who have worn their designs seem endless. They dress all shapes and sizes of men and women for elegant galas, gritty crime scenes and romantic hideaways. They’ve transformed our attitudes about blue jeans and tuxedos.

Now, think fast: Can you recall the name of a movie costume designer of the last 30 years?

In an age when images of untested starlets are splashed across magazine covers and fledgling fashion designers become famous after one good collection, most movie costume designers toil in obscurity, watching their power to galvanize fashion erode. They’ve been caught in a clash of cultures that pits them against budget-conscious producers, a fashion industry fixated on change and a fractured audience impatient for the next hot star’s hot look.

For the last 40 years, they’ve been slighted by their own industry: Oscars have gone only to those who craft fantasy or period costumes, not modern-day fashions. What’s more, fashion designers earn reams of worldwide publicity for dressing a star at the Academy Awards, while the crew members who made them look great on screen remain anonymous.

Who--or what--is to blame? No one can design or sew, the old-timers moan. Audiences can’t relate to a well-dressed world, producers sigh. Too many studios are in too big a hurry to make money, the costume designers lament. Almost everyone agrees that nothing’s been the same since Hollywood’s Golden Age, when the studios held a virtual monopoly over most aspects of movie making.

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UNTIL THE EARLY 1960S, STUDIOS OFTEN HIRED A SINGLE PERSON to create costumes for multiple movies, using the talents of a full-service workroom. Without those high-profile, well-supplied costume designers, says Bob Mackie, even the best silver-screen style can become evanescent. The work of designers such as Adrian and Irene and multiple Oscar-winner Edith Head were memorable because they “made Lana Turner look like Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth look like Rita Hayworth,” says Mackie, a 41-year costume design veteran. “There was a consistency that happened from film to film, and [Hayworth] had a look and people talked about it. She was the same gorgeous creature in a different part.”

But the power of the studios, as well as the moguls who ran them, began to dissipate about the same time that American society was rethinking the concept of “proper dressing.” Costume designers still aim to make actors look good, but they’ve had to adhere to a fashion philosophy that can be summed up in one word: realism. Costume designers are giving audiences a reflection of themselves and not a glossy improvement. Only a few films in the past 30 years have inspired a thoughtful imitation of a look, particularly as television and music videos stepped in to provide daily style lessons.

Movies such as “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Annie Hall” or the 1930s classic “It Happened One Night” prompted sales of gangster-chic, layered menswear for women and the tank-style undershirt. But most modern movies spark only a fleeting interest in an item or two--the sunglasses from “Men in Black” or the belle epoque jewelry from “Titanic” (a desire that has more to do with Kate Winslet’s appeal than with Deborah L. Scott, the costume designer who won an Oscar for her renditions of 1912 fashion).

“It’s easier to recapture a great moment with a prop than a whole wardrobe ensemble,” says “Titanic” producer Jon Landau.

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ALTHOUGH THE MOVIE INDUSTRY has been transformed in the last several decades, little has changed about the process of making costumes, according to Deborah Nadoolman, a Los Angeles costume designer whose doctoral research focuses on why costume design is so poorly represented in film history.

Costume designers still study a script to understand a character and then collaborate with the art director, cinematographer and the director. But today’s designers must operate in an environment that includes budget battles, audiences with short attention spans and product-placement deals with famous fashion designers.

Movie studios frequently attempt to engineer fashion trends and publicity through product placement. In MGM’s “Legally Blonde,” Reese Witherspoon’s Clinique lipstick, Bottega Veneta sunglasses and other accessories were provided by the manufacturers in product-placement agreements. In a standard deal, companies often donate products to earn an on-screen credit or the chance to trumpet their connection to Hollywood. Handbag designer Sarah Shaw papered store accessory departments with posters showing Witherspoon carrying Shaw’s dotted turquoise bag, which was purchased as part of the movie’s wardrobe.

While product tie-ins are carefully arranged as a collaboration between the director and the costume and fashion designers, they do have the potential to backfire, says Kathy Findling, MGM’s vice- president of production resources. Negotiations are sensitive because costume designers “don’t like to have credit given to any outside designer or label because it takes away from their work.”

Indeed, if a designer such as Giorgio Armani donates clothes to dress a portion of a cast, it’s likely that he’ll reap all of the publicity. Armani became well-known in 1980 when he outfitted Richard Gere in “American Gigolo,” but the name of the film’s costume designer eludes even film historians.

The designer outfits, of course, are free, which is appealing to movie execs who must juggle the cost of special effects, exotic locations, elaborate stunts and extravagantly paid actors. To say nothing of time, which costume designers say is shrinking.

“We have so little prep time now,” says costume designer Hope Hanafin, who finds high-end television movies on HBO and TNT an attractive option because they have generous budgets and top talent that’s often drawn from feature films. Her $125,000 budget for a recently completed TNT movie, “King of Texas,” was nearly five times larger than some independent film productions (“Hedwig and the Angry Inch” had a $25,000 costume budget). Projects of all types frequently have last-minute script, cast and costume changes, which force costume designers to simplify their logistics. Streamlined operations mean that designers often must outfit a movie through four or five costume houses instead of eight or 10.

When films must cut corners on costumes, says Antoinette Muto, co-owner of Muto-Little Inc., a Los Angeles costume house, they set precedents for successive costume budgets. Eventually “the budgets get increasingly smaller until they’re not realistic.

“Of all the things in a movie that [producers] can connect to or control, it’s the costume budget,” Muto adds. “But people don’t have a clue about the cost of creating a garment.”

To save time and money on contemporary movies, many costume designers resort to purchasing ready-made clothes from stores. The practice limits the choices available to costume designers, who may require colors or styles that aren’t in stock. It also engages them in a risky game with fickle, fashion-savvy audiences.

“It takes so long to get a movie made and released, that if you try to create an on-the-street look one year, and the movie comes out the next year, you’ll end up second-guessing everything,” says Bill Hargate, a longtime movie and TV costume designer who has run a costume shop in Hollywood for 15 years. “The fashion cycle spins so fast that you miss the trends.” Designers who try to make a star look trendy by outfitting her in one season’s looks--say bead-fringed capri pants or this spring’s asymmetric tops--risk looking out-of-date when the trend fades months later.

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NOT SURPRISINGLY, COSTUME designers fear that their jobs and the skills of their supporting seamstresses, tailors and costume shops will be cut or lost. At Western Costume in North Hollywood, president Eddie Marks says the 90-year-old company’s costume workroom supported 25 men’s tailors and about as many seamstresses when he arrived in 1988. “My men’s staff is now five,” about the same size as the women’s department. Though his employees can make complicated garments from scratch, they’re sometimes put to use altering off-the-rack clothes.

Tzetzi Ganev is a trained couturier who has headed Western Costume’s women’s department for nearly three decades. She has watched as the cost-cutting pressures of modern movies have slowly eliminated the need for talented pattern makers, embroiderers, cobblers and a host of craftsmen. The company long ago abandoned its apprentice program. After all, says Marks, when fashion designers donate their clothes for a single top star to wear, they can take away $80,000 to $100,000 of business from an enterprise like Western Costume. As more stores, such as Barneys New York, have added studio-services departments that sell or rent their stock, movie producers can easily procure serviceable designer clothes.

Costume designers also face challenges from their own colleagues, including fashion stylists (three of whom are profiled in the Metropolis section of the magazine). Although more costume designers are working (the costume guild has grown from 98 to 550 in the last 20 years), they’re spread thin doing multiple projects in movies, television and videos, which dilutes their influence. Two years ago, the Los Angeles guild abolished its entrance exam.

Some designers would be wise to take a lesson from their more famous predecessors. “Edith Head did umpteen pictures a year,” says Hargate. “Our people do two or three at the most.” Head was well- known for courting the press. Hargate saw her greet each tour bus at Universal Studios and sign autographs; Mackie watched her put a producer on hold while she was giving her enchilada recipe to Good Housekeeping. “She wasn’t the best designer in Hollywood,” says Mackie, “but she knew how to work it.”

Of course, if Head were alive and active today, her romanticized styles likely would look out of step. “If you go back to yesteryear,” says Landau, “those movies created a fantasy world, even in a reality-based movie. It was a heightened reality that we no longer deliver to our audiences.”

And for good reason. “How can you connect with a woman who is leading a middle-class life who looks fabulous? You don’t like her and you don’t really know why. You just have no empathy for her,” says Jean Rusone, a costume supervisor who administers movie-wardrobe departments on sets. Slowing demand for hand-crafted clothes and higher operating costs recently forced Rusone to close her North Hollywood Costume Collection after 16 years.

As long as audiences are more comfortable in jeans and T-shirts, the world has little hope that the handmade glamour of the Golden Age will ever reappear.

“If everyone dressed to the nines [in movies], we’d laugh at it,” says Mackie, who earned his fame in television comedies. “I think people in the industry are trying more to make the stars look like the audience. Then the audience looks like the stars. So people relate to them as being one of them.”

Which means all that anonymity isn’t likely to end any time soon.