by abi

How Hitchcock’s women cast a spell on fashion season after season

11 years ago | Posted in: Fashion, NISA, UK, World | 1754 Views

Alfred Hitchcock loved blondes, but he famously dismissed Marilyn Monroe as too “obvious”. So, it’s a little surprising that Scarlett Johansson – Monroe’s modern-day equivalent, complete with curves and pillow lips – is starring in next month’s Hitchcock, the biopic that recounts the making of Psycho. She plays Janet Leigh, a woman definitely more in Hitchcock‘s favoured buttoned-up mould. But while the casting may seem a stretch, one thing is certain – the film will encourage yet another tryst between fashion and the director’s heroines.

Hitchcock heroines have become a style trope – classics rolled out as a reference on the catwalk every so often, just like Edie Sedgwick, Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour or Kurt Cobain. Alexander McQueen famously presented a Hitchcock collection for autumn/winter 2005 and, with its angora sweaters, put-together hair and sharp skirt suits, it became one of his most popular. This season, Miuccia Prada at Miu Miu dabbled with over-the-knee pencil skirts, car coats, gloves and ladylike bags straight out of one of the director’s later films, Marnie.

Hitchcock inspired fashionHitchcockian: Miu Miu S/S2013, Alexander McQueen A/W 2005 and Marios Schwab A/W 2012 Photograph: Gamma-Rapho/Getty, AFP/Getty, Antonio de Moraes Barros Filho/Wireimage

In a sense, however, this season’s take is almost irrelevant. The Hitchcock heroine – whether she’s Kim Novak dressed in grey in Vertigo, a full-skirted Grace Kelly in Rear Window or Tippi Hedren in her eau-de-nil suit in The Birds – exists outside fashion. Even people who don’t care about clothes can name her ingredients. As faithfully recreated in Hitchcock, they are pencil skirts, set hair, proper eyebrows and suits that fill the screen.

Rear Window

Grace Kelly plays a chic socialite in Rear Window. Photograph: BFI

“Hitchcock had great style. My job was to get the people watching to go back to that era,” says Julie Weiss, costume designer for the Hitchcock biopic. “The actors are playing characters that belong to everyone.”

For designer Marios Schwab, who was inspired specifically by Novak and a glittering Marlene Dietrich in 1950’s Stage Fright for hisautumn/winter collection, the Hitchcock heroine is someone he’ll always return to. “Hitchcock has been there since I started looking at the femme fatale,” he says. “These are women you see and fall in love with but you don’t know who they are.”

Marlene Dietrich in Stage Fright

‘Glittering’: Marlene Dietrich in Stage Fright. Photograph: Cinetext/Warner Bros/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Despite fashion’s longterm love affair with Hitchcock’s films, the V&A’s Hollywood Costume curator Deborah Landis says fashion was the last thing on his mind, or that of costume collaborator Edith Head. A straight-talking American costume designer, Landis dismisses the idea of the Hitchcock heroine as a fashion icon. “Head always said Hitchcock never wanted any ‘eyecatchers’, as he called them,” she says. “He uses fashion as a tool. The Birds is a chase movie where Tippi gets more and more distressed. You couldn’t have a colour that was eyecatching. She had to fill the frame and nothing could distract from that.” Hence that eau-di-nil shade that Schwab admires so much.

Tippi Hedren in The Birds.

Filling the frame’: Tippi Hedren in The Birds. Photograph: Courtesy Everett Collection/Rex Features

Still, while Hitchcock dismissed the whims of fashion, he understood the power of clothes. They are central to many of his classics. The grey suit that Novak wears in Vertigo becomes an object of obsession for James Stewart’s character, the yellow doctor’s bag that Hedren holds in Marnie has more screen time in the first five minutes than she does, and Norman Bates is iconically sinister wearing his mother’s dress in Psycho. It’s this connection between clothes and characters – so assured in the hands of Hitchcock and Head – that sparks fashion’s imagination. While there is wistful admiration now for “done” glamour in a world where women no longer need to wear gloves every time they leave the house, we’re also drawn in by the nothing-is-quite-as-it-seems suspense that they portray.

“It’s not about the actual clothes for me, or a retro feel,” says Schwab. “It’s the aura and the cinematography.” Francesca Burns, Vogue’s fashion editor, agrees. She says she appreciates the “perfect balance of savvy, allure, vulnerability and prowess” despite not being very nostalgic.

The Girl

Sienna Miller as Tippi Hedren in The Girl. Photograph: David Bloomer/BBC/Wall to Wall

As the costume designer on The Girl, Diana Cilliers had the daunting task of recreating outfits such as that famous suit from The Birds. The BBC/HBO drama (broadcast over Christmas) told the sometimes distressing story of Hedren and Hitchcock, and Cilliers moulded a Hitchcock heroine wardrobe for Sienna Miller to wear. “There were certain items that we just copied – such as the Birds suit and the yellow Marnie bag,” says Cilliers, “but otherwise we looked at clean lines, colours. Nothing too fussy.” Cilliers thinks the look has stood the test of time precisely because it’s clutter-free. “It was always about shape, and the female form,” she says. “Those things are timeless.”

Vertigo

Kim Novak, coolly elegant wearing a grey suit in Vertigo. Photograph: Paramount/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

For Landis, however, it always returns to the character. “It’s about creating an authentic individual,” she says. “Movies only influence fashion if they’re a success – the public has to be seduced.”

ref: guardian.uk

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