The ‘50s styles make the woman
There is a scene in the film “Mona Lisa Smile” in which Julia Stiles, playing a Wellesley College student in the mid-1950s, is dressed in a pale yellow pencil skirt and a short, shaped jacket. It is a suit that today would look perfectly at home at a smart luncheon for the social set, and in fact it looks a lot like a suit featured in the fall Carolina Herrera collection. But instead of sitting for a tasteful meal, Stiles’ character is having a casual conversation in a dormitory room with friends.
In another scene, Julia Roberts, playing a Wellesley art history professor named Katherine Watson, wears a plaid dress with a full skirt and a turquoise belt that has the look of a souvenir she might have purchased while on vacation.
The ensemble strikes the same mood as the dresses in the spring 2004 Prada collection, with their full skirts and prints inspired by postcards from Venice.
And when the film’s characters attend a spring dance, they all are wearing full-skirted party frocks that quickly call to mind the tulle ballerina dresses offered by designer Behnaz Sarafpour this fall.
It is not unusual for fashion and film to overlap, but it is not often that a period movie reflects the current design sensibility in such close detail.
“Mona Lisa Smile” is a fashion show of a film, filled with the 1950s style that contemporary designers have embraced in their advancement of femininity, familiarity and a sexually muted prettiness.
The film tells the story of Watson’s arrival at Wellesley in the fall of 1953. The young professor is intent on encouraging the country’s brightest women to take advantage of postwar opportunities to be something other than wives and mothers.
None of the clothes in “Mona Lisa Smile” came from runways in New York or Europe. The movie’s costume designer, Michael Dennison, found most of them through vendors who sell unworn “old clothes” from stores like JCPenney or in the attic of an elderly clotheshorse. “The contemporary lines,” he says, “were slightly too contemporary.” His pencil skirts needed to be all wool, without any of the ease that spandex offers. His blouses required that special sheen that only the rayons and Dacrons of the era could provide. A handful of costumes were made up according to his own specifications.
The clothes often announce the characters’ circumstances more succinctly and eloquently than the dialogue. Clip-on earrings, pin-curled hair, red lipstick and prim hats speak of class and womanly aspirations, as well as the day’s governing principle of conformity. There isn’t the slightest hint of impetuousness in their attire. These fashion choices are not rash, and there are no subtle hints at rebellion. Each ensemble is polished and dutifully accessorized, most often with a simple strand of pearls. There is a conspicuous sameness to the neat pleated skirts and belted waists. And in each buttoned-up blouse and tucked-in shirt, there is propriety and control.
Contemporary fashion has been able to mimic the colors and the cuts of this era, even some of the accessories. But the culture has long since shed the body language of demureness and rectitude. On the runway, the models are amused by the clothes. In “Mona Lisa Smile,” the women often seem trapped by theirs.
Dennison began preparation for “Mona Lisa Smile” more than a year ago by researching the styles of the 1950s. Slowly, he narrowed the focus of his inquiries to the specifics of Wellesley fashion during that time. From yearbooks and alumnae, he learned that Wellesley women had their own idiosyncratic mode of dress.
“I read it in a yearbook: A Wellesley girl had a tendency to take in her skirt so that it was more penciled and the blouse was looser,” Dennison says by phone from his home in Taos, N.M. “She was always a Wellesley girl. That was paramount in the dress code.”
In the same way that the young women’s education was focused on tradition, so was their sense of fashion. “At this point, daughters looked like their mothers. The emulation of mother was a goal,” Dennison says. “They were being groomed to be perfect wives and perfect socialites.”
There are scenes in which mother and daughter stand side by side and the only difference is that the daughter wears white day gloves while her mother’s are dark. (The mother’s mink stole looks quite a bit like those currently for sale at Barneys New York.) Even today, in the rarified world of socialites, daughters -- after a brief period of rebellion -- emulate their mothers, seeking out their own versions of Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta or Carolina Herrera luncheon suits and cocktail dresses. In that regard, not much has changed.
Part of what makes the women of “Mona Lisa Smile” stand out from the models on the runway is the effect of the period lingerie. On screen, everyone has an hourglass shape and a sturdy bosom. There are no tomboy figures, no suggestive cleavage.
“We used real foundation garments, full-on body shapers. Women then had to have defined bust, waist and hips,” Dennison says. He told the actresses that “without the foundation garments, the clothes are not going to fit.”
He also had to prepare them for the news that their size 2 and 4 figures would not fit into the size 2s of the 1950s. “You get these size 2 clothes and the waist is 22 inches, and you get a girl off the street who says ‘I’m a 2’ but she has a 25-inch waist,” Dennison says. “Sizing is a sliding scale and everything slid up.”
Many of the students in the film come from well-to-do families, and the clothes reflect that. They have a lushness similar to today’s runway offerings, which are aimed at those in the wealthiest demographic. The characters in the film -- who take etiquette classes along with biology -- wear the frocks with charm-school posture and studied manners. Their contemporary counterparts, however, wear them with liberated sang-froid.
