Hollywood Glamour Goes Global
Scarlett O'Hara's iconic green dress made from a pair of curtains in "Gone With the Wind." (Photo courtesy of gwtwscrapbook.blogspot.com)
Now more than ever, Hollywood stars are setting fashion standards across the globe with what they wear off-screen, when not long ago they were better known for the elaborate costumes they wore onscreen.
London’s Victoria Albert Museum will celebrate this tradition next fall in a new exhibition, “Hollywood Costumes: 100 Years of the Good, the Bad the Beautiful.”
Curated by Academy Award-nominated costume designer and Chair of UCLA's Copley Center for the Study of Costume Design Deborah Nadoolman Landis (known for creating Indiana Jones' iconic costume), the exhibit will feature roughly 100 costumes from some of Hollywood’s most distinguished costume designers and films from 1912 to 2012.
“The Victoria Albert is one of the greatest design museums in the world,” said Landis, who considers the museum to be “a spiritual home,” in part, because she received her PhD in the history of design from its academic partner, the Royal College of Art in London.
This will be the largest Hollywood costume design exhibition ever mounted, Landis said. Some of the costumes to be included are Scarlett O’Hara’s green velvet dress, which hasn’t been exhibited for 75 years; Dorothy’s blue-and-white gingham pinafore from the “Wizard of Oz"; Hedy Lamarr’s “Samson and Delilah” dress, which came from Debbie Reynold’s recently auctioned landmark costume collection; and costume pieces from “Indiana Jones,” “Darth Vader,” “Harry Potter,” “Black Swan,” and Charlie Chaplin’s “The Tramp.” All of the costumes have been loaned from private collectors and international film archives, including the Cinémathèque Française and Deutsche Kinemathek.
Due to the fragility of the costumes, the exhibit can only travel to three locations, Landis said. The exhibition will run from October 2012 through January 2013 at the Victoria Albert Museum before moving to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, and then on to a third yet-to-be-decided location.
