Where the Wedding Bells Keep Ringing

Hollywood loves a wedding. The cake, the flowers and, mostly, the gowns have been reason to celebrate love on screen ever since the beginning of cinema.

A new book, “Hollywood Gets Married” (Clarkson Potter Publishers, 2002), by costume and couture collector Sandy Schreier, gives a behind-the-seams peek at how Hollywood has glamorized weddings, on and off the screen, and helped set bridal trends for millions.

From the movie industry’s infancy in the early 20th century, filmmakers have included wedding scenes, and not just because they thought audiences were suckers for romance, according to Schreier, who was visiting from Detroit this week for, as it happens, a friend’s wedding.

Whether it was a gangster film, an epic set in a desert or even a cowboy flick, couples were always getting hitched, usually in a gown that seemed out of context for the movie’s setting.

“Something was fishy,” said Schreier, a onetime model who shared her lifelong interest in cinema costumes in her first book, “Hollywood Dressed and Undressed” (Rizzoli International Publications, 1998). She learned that many early studio heads came from garment manufacturing backgrounds, including glove merchant Samuel Goldwyn, furrier Adolph Zukor and button dealer Louis B. Mayer.

“When they first started, they decided that they were going to make costumes the most important thing because they didn’t know how to make movies,” she said over lox and bagels at Nate’n Al’s in Beverly Hills. Eventually they realized that showing “the most beautiful clothes that you ever saw” would be a good audience draw. But clothing that met that standard--French couture--was expensive.

“That’s when they built their own warehouses with every specialty--milliners, embroiderers, glove makers--to make the special clothes,” said Schreier, who wore a Junya Watanabe denim skirt.

Her research revealed that executives kept their studio clothing factories busy and were “making money on the side by making and selling wedding gowns to department stores,” said Schreier.

“I think Hollywood helped establish what wedding gowns came to look like,” she said, noting that moviemakers wrapped into one glamorous satin and lace package every little girl’s dream of becoming a movie star, fairy princess or bride. The book includes the author’s own 1950s wedding portrait, in which she was also a princess bride.

Hollywood’s version has stood the test of time, through the streamlined bias cuts of the ‘30s to the padded shoulders of the wartime ‘40s, the exuberant poufs of ‘50s cocktail dresses and today’s bare dresses.

Though the paperback is a fun read, it’s light on the kind of facts and studied observations that would more insightfully document Hollywood’s influence on popular culture. Schreier’s command of her subject comes across more clearly in conversation than in the light-on-type book, a common failing in many of today’s flashy fashion tomes.

The picture-laden, 176-page book is filled with stills and chatty captions that chronicle the fun and dishy details of the film, the gowns and, often, the number of times each actress walked down the aisle. The author gathered some of her best scoop directly from costume designers such as Edith Head and Theadora Van Runkle, whom she interviewed years ago as part of a classic movie TV series she co-hosted.

“All the classic costume designers were [retired] and feeling unwanted and unloved,” said Schreier, who is a major contributor to the new exhibit on costume designer Adrian that will open this month at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. “They had nothing to do but sit and talk to me.”

But don’t ask Schreier to discuss wedding scandals or private details of the stars. “To me,” she said, “movies and movie stars are sacred. And I want to keep it that way. Fun and fantasy.”