Marie Antoinette (2006)

Costumes by: Milena Canonero

Directed by: Sofia Coppola

This movie may be for you if: your favorite wing of the museum is French decorative arts, you love shoes, and you prefer your period pieces served with a little anachronism.

Where to watch: Hulu, HBO Max, Disney+

You’re probably in one of two camps.

When most people hear the name Marie Antoinette, they think of the divisive 18th Century Queen. But for a much smaller group of (mostly Millennial) cult classic film fans and Sofia Coppola heads, the name Marie Antoinette transports you to Versailles circa 2006. The legendary historical figure looks like a young Kirsten Dunst, the Baroque palace halls echo with the sounds of New Order, and the Queen, of course, has periwinkle Converse.

Coming off the success of The Virgin Suicides (1999) and Lost in Translation (2003), writer and director Sofia Coppola used her third feature film to continue exploring themes of isolation and disillusionment, but this time through the lens of history. Based on the 2001 biography Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser, Coppola’s take on the most infamous Queen of France would eventually be hailed by many as one of the best examples of anachronistic historical drama in film. She described it as “a pop approach, but still grounded in the real period.”

Though the movie was initially released to mixed reviews and only modest box office success (especially compared to its whopping $40 million budget), Marie Antoinette took home the Best Costume Design Oscar, and would only become more beloved and revered with each passing year.

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Creating the decadent fashion world of Marie Antoinette was just as elaborate as the award winning wardrobe would suggest. Costume designer Milena Canonero and six assistant designers created the film’s gowns, headpieces, suits, and more at a workshop they set up in Rome. Coppola said fittings could last hours for characters that only appeared briefly in the background, with every detail considered, down to the socks.

Last year, now twenty years since the film’s release, Coppola and Canonero sat down in conversation for Cartier’s Masterclass at the Venice Film Festival to reminisce on their decades long creative relationship.

The two first met on the set of the elder Coppola’s 1984 musical The Cotton Club, where an 11-year-old Sofia found herself enamored by Canonero and the magic of her on-set atelier. Coppola felt that Canonero was an “obvious choice” for Marie Antoinette - and not just because the designer had already taken home one of her (then only) two Best Costume Design Oscars for 18th Century costuming in Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 historical drama Barry Lyndon.

“[Canonero’s] approach is always really unique, and she brought so much style to the film… I wanted to make this period film feel alive and fresh and not like an academic historical piece,” Coppola said. “I knew that Milena would help me make what I had in mind and bring a fresh eye to this time.”

As much as I love vintage, my expertise doesn’t go back much further than the 20th Century. But lucky for me (and you!), I knew exactly who to talk to.

For movie #19 of the 100 Fashion Films Project, I’m joined by historical dressmaker and amateur historian Blossom Darling to discuss the confectionary rock-and-Rococco world of Marie Antoinette. When Darling isn’t sharing a behind-the-scenes look at how she makes her own period accurate antique wardrobe pieces, she’s educating her audience about the history of menstruation, sharing sewing tips, and debunking corset myths. She’s become a respected voice in the increasingly popular topic of historical costuming in film, consistently offering incredibly well-researched takes on the often controversial period styling of media like Bridgerton, Sinners, and Wuthering Heights.

As a historical costumer, what are your thoughts on the accuracy of Milena Canonero’s costume design for the film?

“I think overall, the costumes lend themselves not only to be objectively accurate, but also invoke the energy of the time - with careful interpretation,” said Darling. “[It helps you] feel the opulence and extravagance of the era in a way that might not otherwise be understood through perfect accuracy.”

“I think this film also does an excellent job showing the major transition in Antoinette’s styles over the decades,” she continued. “These weren’t just incredibly important changes in fashion at that time as a whole, but also to [Marie Antoinette’s] journey both individually and as a queen.”

“If I was giving this film a rating out of 10, I would give it an 8.”

During last year’s Venice Film Festival conversation, Coppola and Canonero explained how the color palette of Marie Antoinette’s costume design was inspired by both contemporary fashion and a soon-to-be iconic French pastry.

“Sofia came to visit, and arrived with an enormous box of macarons,” Canonero recalled. “Everybody knows them now, but in those days they were quite new, especially in Italy. In a very gentle way, she did not say that it was going to be the palette, but rather, I really like these colors.”

They also mentioned a Marc Jacobs collection inspired by shades of macarons, though I couldn’t find any direct reference to the exact season. Based on a look through the archives I think it may have been Spring 2004 RTW, described by Vogue Runway as “a sweet confection of a collection, full of pretty clothes and gentle colors.”

“I principally focus on those colors throughout the whole range of the movie until the end, because in the macaron, you go from very pale pastel to dark chocolate to noir, black,” Canonero continued. “So I had the whole palette in front of me, and it was a good idea.”

Famed French luxury confectionery Ladurée provided pastries for the set, with their macarons appearing in a scene between Marie Antoinette and Ambassador Mercy. The patisserie released a limited edition “Marie Antoinette” Collection following the film’s release.

Manolo Blahnik also famously designed 25 pairs of custom shoes for the movie, described by the designer as “some kind of cross between academic and a little bit of fantasy.” His quote feels like a perfect way to describe so many of the choices made for this film. I asked Darling what makes Marie Antoinette such a great example of taking creative liberties in historical storytelling.

“I often say that costume designers in period films need to know the rules before they choose to break them,” she said. “I think that it’s very evident through the inaccuracies that Canonero chose. She knew what her rules were, and that’s what makes her choices so excellent.”

“I think a huge theme of this film is Antoinette’s youthful carelessness. We see this through parties, through her spending, through her wardrobe, and even the way she chooses to speak. I think adding in [that] pair of Chuck Taylors, giving her softer, more fun hair than maybe would have been worn at the time, or putting in a big tulle party gown - [it] gives the audience a greater sense of the incredible opulence in the 18th century,” explained Darling.

“It’s all a great big, insanely expensive party. A party royalty was having while their people starved.”

That royal extravance appeared not only in shoes and silk and endless platters of jewel-like food, but in unprecedented access to the actual Palace of Versailles (thank you Sofia for using your nepo baby powers for good). The story offered a compassionate portrayal of the impossible contradictions of life as young royalty, something the late Antoinette was previously not given by the general public. Coppola used glittering showcases of ridiculous wealth and excess as a foil for tender moments - even the richest Queens in history can’t escape the realities of being a teenage girl.

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Marie Antoinette’s unexpected soundtrack was panned by many critics at the time of release, but the jarring contrast of The Cure and Aphex Twin have become one of film’s most beloved elements following decades. The movie’s surprising music choices also informed the overall aesthetic, with inspiration taken from the outlandish style and thrust-in-the-spotlight stories of young artists. In this behind-the-scenes clip, Coppola shows off a black-and-white computer print out of Adam Ant as a reference.

“A lot of bands in the early ‘80s had this kind of romantic idea of the 18th century,” Coppola explained. “I was a teenager in the ‘80s, so I was thinking of them as teenagers, and relating them to my teenage time.”

“I’d always loved the tradition of period movies like Amadeus and I was trying to do that in a kind of a youthful, irreverent way,” Coppola said in another 2013 interview, reflecting on her past work. “My whole relationship to that period was through the New Romantics when I was a kid, so I created a New Romantic video version of the period.”

A fan favorite scene is a music-video-esque montage of excess, set to the Bow Wow Wow’s I Want Candy. The camera cuts from lavishly detailed textiles to overflowing champagne coupes to Antoinette’s collection of candy-colored Manolos. A little white dog sits on an expensive looking pastel blue couch, licking a miniature cake.

“I was thinking about bored women at Barneys, and how they always perked up in the shoe section,” Coppola said.

The film’s extensive and detailed footwear was produced by Pompei, an Italian manufacturer that specializes in pieces for film and stage. In fall of 2025, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum presented Marie Antoinette Style in partnership with Manolo Blahnik, celebrating the famed shoe designer’s decades long fascination with the French queen. Blahnik released a limited-edition capsule collection of shoes inspired by both the new exhibit and his past work on Coppola’s film.

Though the real life Marie Antoinette was derided for reportedly ordering two pairs of shoes a week, the Queen was arguably better known for her towering hairstyles. Legendary french hair stylist Odile Gilbert designed the film’s wigs and hair pieces, made by Rocchetti & Rocchetti. Though Gilbert wasn’t tasked with exact recreations of 18th-century poufs, the movie’s hairstyles needed to reflect that essential element of Marie Antoinette’s fashion legacy. The queen (and her hairstylist, Léonard) popularized increasingly dramatic styles, up to three feet tall and adorned with fine jewels, symbolic charms, and figurines.

“Marie-Antoinette’s hairstyles functioned as a corporeal element in the establishment of her French identity,” wrote Desmond Hosford, author of The Queen’s Hair: Marie-Antoinette, Politics, and DNA. “[It] served a performative role within the context of French queenship, and continued to operate as a site of dynastic agency even after her death.”

According to jewelry historian , the 2006 Marie Antoinette wardrobe also featured over $4 of vintage accessories on loan from Fred Leighton. Genuine 18th and 19th Century rings, necklaces, earrings, and brooches studded in diamonds and pink topaz offered were perhaps some of the most historically accurate details in the Marie Antoinette wardrobe. The Queen was well known (and reviled) for her extensive jewelry collection, with many of her original pieces included at the recently concluded Marie Antoinette Style exhibit.

The aesthetics of this film are deeply beloved by audiences. In what ways do you think the costumes and design choices for this movie have been influential?

“It’s been hugely inspirational for a great deal of historical costumers who choose to get into 18th century costuming because of the film’s incredible wardrobe,” shared Darling.

“I also feel like I have seen just about a thousand Tumblr posts and Tiktok videos mixing together clips of Marie (with her children, playing in the grass with her lambs, or her lounging listlessly in her little boat) with other very aesthetically inspiring clips from [movies like] Tuck Everlasting or Pride and Prejudice.”

“I do enjoy the irony of clips of Antoinette at Hameau de la Reine being used as like, pastoral aesthetic inspiration,” she noted. “Antoinette [herself had that whole village made] to live out her own little cottagecore fantasy - it’s not actually pastoral, it’s the same fantasy [that modern] cottagecore is. The idea of simplicity instead of the actual experience of it, if that makes sense.”

In 2018, the Museo del Tessuto di Prato displayed an exhibition dedicated to Canonero’s award-winning Marie Antoinette designs, described by the museum as what “critics consider the costumes to be the best cinematographic reinterpretation of eighteenth-century apparel ever created.” Over twenty garments, primarily worn by the film’s main characters, were on view alongside a Historical Textile Room with original pieces from the 18th Century.

While the French Queen’s legacy would have certainly remained an enduring fascination regardless of the 2006 film, Coppola’s interpretation has become inextricably linked with the contemporary vision of Antoinette’s memory. While the movie certainly can’t claim ownership of the Marie Antoinette aesthetic, it is hard not to feel some sense of homage when designers showcase pink powdered wigs with jeans, or when Rococo styling is juxtaposed with contemporary footwear.

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And Marie Antoinette shifted the culture beyond Caronero’s masterful costume design. Coppola’s cheeky references and then-shocking soundtrack paved the way for a new kind of historical fiction, setting trends in filmmaking, fashion, music, and even food. The mid 2000’s were suddenly awash in macarons, a dessert most Americans were hard pressed to find anywhere (let alone ever even heard of) just a few years earlier. Blair Waldorf name drops Ladurée in multiple episodes of Gossip Girl, Slate reported nine different publications declaring macarons “the new cupcake” in 2010, and Ladurée debuted their first American location in 2011.

Favorite (or least favorite) outfit or garment from the movie? Any particular pieces, sets, or scenes you’d like to mention?

“My Pinterest boards are absolutely littered with all of the scenes where Antoinette is floating around gracefully, lying about in the grass and whispering to her babies in flowy white dresses,” said Darling.

“Oh, and her pink hair in those later scenes! Iconic!”

“I live for the contrast of her leaning against the most opulent wallpaper you can imagine, in an enormous room of priceless furniture, while she cries over her and the king’s inability to bear a child. Not to say that her suffering in that moment is not real and very serious, it’s just such a simple way to show just how complicated she was.”

“I also will gladly watch the entire film through just to see her bow to the protesters at the end of the film. It’s such a powerful moment!”

“Honestly, I think the [behind-the-scenes] photos of Kirsten Dunst and her cast mates listening to music on a Macbook and smoking cigarettes, all while dressed in perfect 18th century court ware, may be just as iconic as the whole rest of the film. I absolutely think of those photos as an aesthetic in and of themselves!”

I’ll leave you with this very silly clip from the Marie Antoinette DVD extras.

And to think - kids these days will never know the disorienting euphoria of waking up in the middle of the night on your friend’s floor while a DVD home screen song plays on an endless loop.

Overall as a Fashion Film: 9/10

Fashion: 9/10

Influence: 9/10

Movie: 9/10

A huge thank you to Blossom Darling for your contributions to this piece! It was such a pleasure to talk to you about this movie - I loved hearing your perspectives. For more of Darling’s work, you can follow her on Instagram and TikTok.

Sources & Additional Reading:

Sofia Coppola’s ’Marie Antoinette’ Costumes Were Inspired by an “Enormous Box of Macarons” by Chris Gardner for The Hollywood Reporter, 2025

Revisiting the Romantic, Decadent Costumes of Sofia Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’ by Julia Teti for WWD, 2024

Sofia Coppola: Film By Film by Phil De Semlyen for Empire, 2013

The Political Power of Marie Antoinette’s Hair by Erin Blakemore for JSTOR Daily, 2016

A Look Back at the Jewelry in ‘Marie Antoinette’ by Marion Fasel for The Adventurine, 2025

Notes on Marie Antoinette, or: the MTV Sensibilities of Sofia Coppola by Sydney Urbanek for Bright Wall/Dark Room

Eat the Rich: Close-Up on Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” by Meredyth Cole for MUBI, 2018

Marie Antoinette Gets Her Manolos—Again by Alison S. Cohn for W Magazine, 2025

Marie Antoinette. The Oscar-Winning Costumes Of A Queen. Museo del Tessuto, 2018

Marie Antoinette’s diamond bracelets sold in Geneva auction for Jeweller Magazine, 2021

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Welcome to Fashionable Films with Fashionable People!

This new series is part of the 100 Fashion Films Project universe, where I invite the most inspiring people I know to share the ways fashion in film impacts their life and art.

Today we’re sharing our popcorn with photographer Bảo Ngô.

How would you describe your personal style?

Equal parts utilitarian and antique girly. I love workwear, military surplus, vintage uniforms of all kinds, but also frills, embroidery, and lace. I’m from Texas and take a lot of inspiration from vintage cowgirls, while not dressing exactly like one. I wear a lot of long and loose-fitted garments, prairie skirts, stitched boots, silk scarves. My favorite decade is the 1930’s, but that’s not always practical for wearing every day, so I wear a lot of 70’s stuff too.

What are your Top 5 Fashion Films?

1. The Red Shoes (1948)

2. Vertigo (1958)

3. The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)

4. Nashville (1975)

5. Paris, Texas (1984)

One for each decade :')

If you could teleport the wardrobe for any one movie directly into your own closet, which one would it be?

Nashville (1975)

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What's your first fashion film memory? Was there a specific early childhood movie that strongly impacted your style?

When I was a child, I was obsessed with Sailor Moon. I watched the show on cable television, but I had the three original movies on VHS and couldn’t get enough of those. I drew early inspiration from the Sailor Scouts’ everyday wear, like the sailor jackets, pleated skirts, baggy sweaters. That’s how I dressed as a kid, and still sometimes do today.

And obviously I love some of the transformation looks too, even though those didn’t impact my style early on. The dress that Usagi wears when she transforms into Princess Serenity in Sailor Moon R, and when Luna transforms into Princess Kaguya in Sailor Moon S are iconic. Apparently Serenity’s dress is inspired by the “Palladium” Dress from Dior’s SS92 collection.

Any other musings you'd like to add about fashion in film, costume design, and style?

I love fashion! And films!! And I love that different films use fashion differently. Sometimes it's theatrical, sometimes it's ordinary, sometimes dramatic, sometimes subtle and it always brings a character's inner feelings into the exterior world where we can see it. Costumes indicate transformation and emotion. They are essential to the storytelling process.

Thank you so much to Bảo for chatting with me, and for sharing a few of your stunning self-portraits!

Bảo’s love for film is really apparent in her work, which always has a deeply immersive quality. I was first drawn to her photography because of our shared love for Americana and retro aesthetics, and have grown to deeply admire her ability to create entire worlds in a single frame.

You can see more of Bảo’s work on her website, and follow her on Instagram and TikTok. She’s based in NYC but often shoots in LA, with frequent cross-country travel everywhere in between. Bảo took the portraits for my website, and I can’t recommend her enough.

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In case you missed it…

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Blow-Up (1966)

Costumes by: Jocelyn Rickards

Directed by: Michelangelo Antonioni

This movie may be for you if: you relate to the urge to randomly buy an old propellor, your dream shopping day would be Carnaby Street in the 1960’s, and you just can’t resist a sleazy photographer.

Where to watch: Someone uploaded the entire Criterion Collection cut to YouTube here! Just to note - the audio does briefly cut out for a couple of minutes, and the subtitles are only available in Spanish and Portuguese.

An incredibly chic 1960’s London photo studio! Models in mod! A murder! Mimes playing tennis! What’s not to love?

For me, it turns out, kind of a lot.

Blow-Up was one of my most highly anticipated movies when I first started putting together the 100 Fashion Films Project several years ago. The 60’s is debatably my favorite decade for fashion, and the stills of Blow-Up I had seen floating around online for years looked like a they were pulled straight from the estate sales of my dreams. A I have a lot of dreams about estate sales. Unfortunately, I finished the two hour film
(twice now) kind of bored, sartorially uninspired, and so over David Hemming’s Thomas.

Here’s the thing: the clothes are good! Like, really good.

So why don’t I love the fashion of Blow-Up?

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Love Story (1970)

Costumes by: Pearl Somner Debuskey and Alice Manougian Martin

Directed by: Arthur Hiller

This movie may be for you if: you’re more interested in a sporty look than actually playing a sport, you fantasize about being upper middle class, and you’ve ever been called a “preppy.”

Where to watch: Pluto TV

Earlier this week, American heritage label J. Press debuted at NYFW with a bright orange, re-issued copy of Take Ivy on each seat. If you’re immersed in the world of Ivy style, it makes a lot of sense that a brand founded at Yale in 1902 would present guests with a Japanese photography book from the mid 60’s. If you’ve worn a collegiate-style sweater once or twice but are otherwise uninitiated, there’s no better place to dive in than with Articles of Interest’s 2022 series, American Ivy.

I listen to a lot of podcasts. My Spotify wrapped is an annual lineup of relatively uncool musical artists that I will never share publicly, followed by big floating numbers that show off the truly staggering number of minutes that I spend listening to podcasts (also not to be shared publicly). All of that is to say that out of everything I’ve ever listened to, Season 3 of Articles of Interest remains an all-time favorite.

In American Ivy, host Avery Trufelman deftly guides listeners from elite East Coast campuses to WWII-era Japan to Ralph Lauren’s 1950’s Bronx childhood. It’s a story of class, culture, and democracy, as worn and made and adopted by Black activists and Jewish immigrants and Japanese fashion buyers and, of course, by Ivy League college students.

In Trufelman’s own words, ivy style is, “perhaps, the most incredible fashion arc of the 20th century.”

A few pieces of key media made repeat appearances throughout American Ivy. Though Take Ivy now holds cult classic status, the book was only first translated to English in 2010. In the decades before, American audiences were getting their lessons in elite student dressing from other sources: most notably the semi-satirical 1980 Official Preppy Handbook. Though “preppy” was widely understood enough to be lampooned in the Handbook by the fall of 1980, a hit 1970 romance film was an essential catalyst to the rise of prep ten years earlier.

And I couldn’t think of anyone I wanted to talk to more about Love Story than Avery Trufelman herself. Luckily for me, she said yes: call me!

“It’s the movie that coined the word ‘preppy,’” Trufelman told me. “It’s hugely important.”

I’m always so hesitant to officially declare anything as the first. It feels scary! “Was Love Story really the first time it appeared in any popular media?” I asked, just to confirm.

“Yeah, it is,” Trufelman says, continuing on to mirror my incredulity. “I was like really? Is this true? But Dr. Lorynn Divita, a professor [of apparel design and merchandising] at Baylor, was the one who told me this. She’s the author of multiple books on trends and trend forecasting, and I absolutely trust her as a source.”

In American Ivy: Chapter 5, Trufelman expands on the background of ‘preppy’ before it went mainstream. “Real prepsters, as in people who went to preparatory high school, they called themselves ‘preppy’ for a long time - at least since the 1930’s,” she explained. “But only real preppies knew what preppiness was because that world was just so elite. Like, how could anyone outside of this world even know that there are these fancy high schools that are usually boarding schools that look like tiny colleges?”

Later in the episode, Trufelman speaks to the editor and co-author of The Official Preppy Handbook, Lisa Birnbach. Despite having gone to prep school and graduating from Brown, Birnbach herself first heard the word ‘preppy’ in Love Story. Even immersed in the world of Ivy, she didn’t have the word to describe the style of her peers until it was speared at Ryan O’Neal on screen.

“Preppy culture was something that glued my friends and me together,” said Birnbach. “We all thought it was funny.”

The costume design for Love Story was created by Pearl Somner and Alice Manougian Martin. The movie tells the tale of a tragic romance between college students Oliver and Jenny, played by Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw. Oliver Barrett IV is a Harvard hockey player, while the working class Jenny Cavilleri studies classical music at nearby Radcliffe College, a women’s liberal arts school that would be fully incorporated into Harvard by 1999. Jenny calls Oliver “preppy” what feels like a hundred times throughout the movie, in what starts as an insult but devolves into an endearing nickname. Despite her endless snarky digs at his silver spoon style, Jenny’s fashion is just as influential as his in the American prep cannon.

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Love Story is set in the film’s “current day” of 1970-ish, against the idyllic East Coast backdrops of Cambridge, New York City, and the Old Westbury Gardens mansion on Long Island. While the cheesy dialogue and painfully dated relationship expectations really haven’t aged well, I kept thinking about how timeless the fashion felt. How classic. Jenny and Oliver stroll manicured campus lawns in camel coats, Aran knit sweaters, shiny leather shoes, tartan skirts, and beautiful wool scarves.

The movie’s looks are a country-club buffet of neutral colors and crisp tailoring and traditional prints, with Jenny frequently incorporating red in a way that feel so classically moneyed. But when I mention the “timeless” feeling of Love Story’s fashion, Trufelman reminds me that the original audience would have felt differently.

“Ivy style kind of became solidified into “classics” fairly recently,” Trufelman noted. “It was in the 80’s that it became sort of “what you wear.” We look at those clothes now, and you’re like yeah, that’s what you wear when you’re visiting grandma, or on a job interview, or a date night. Like you want to look nice? You wear Ivy.”

But for the early 70’s viewers first seeing Love Story, the costume design didn’t feature looks that feel safe and ubiquitous in the same way they do now. Trufelman explained that Jenny and Oliver’s outfits would have been widely perceived as college clothes, more campus-coded looks specifically worn by young people.

“This is a look that developed over time, very slowly,” she said. “I think in the 70’s it was still finding its identity. Now we totally take it for granted.”

Love Story was a huge hit. It’s one of the highest grossing films of all time, nominated for seven Academy Awards and two Grammys for the theme song. The screenplay was adapted into a novel as part of the movie’s marketing campaign, released prior to the film and becoming a NYT best-seller. “Preppy” wasn’t the only trend it started, either: MacGraw’s character is credited with launching the name Jenny to the number one spot for American girls, where it stayed for 14 years. The actress’s own knit hat that she wore on set one day spurned years of copycat styles that remained popular throughout the 1970’s.

But before listening to Articles of Interest, I had never even heard of Love Story. And neither had Trufelman.

“Can I tell you…” she admitted when we first started our conversation. “I don’t really like that movie.”

I immediately started laughing, because I also think the movie kind of sucks. MacGraw and O’Neal are beautiful and charming, yet the film itself isn’t particularly compelling, and the relationship depicted definitely isn’t 2026 #couplegoals. So why were audiences so obsessed in the 70’s?

“It’s not just a romance fantasy, it’s a class fantasy,” said Trufelman.

“Another book [Love Story] was in is Class by Paul Fussell,” she said, immediately scanning her bookshelf to pull out her copy. “It’s a really interesting book because it’s like, I would say half satirical, but not really. It’s a book about how class works in America. He says that there are nine classes, but upper middle - that’s what everyone wants to be.”

Trufelman locates Fussell’s 1983 book on her shelves and begins reading aloud. “It’s in large part the class depicted in Lisa Birnbach and other’s Official Preppy Handbook, that significantly popular artifact of the 1980’s. And it is the class celebrated also in the 1970 Ivy idyllic film Love Story. The vast popularity of these two products suggests the appeal of the upper middle style to all Americans who don’t possess it. Indeed, most people of the middle classes and below would rather be in the upper middle class than even the upper, or top out of sight… Being in the upper middle class is a familiar, incredible fantasy.”

Despite there being higher echelons of wealth, Fussell argues that most people don’t actually aspire to the tippy-top. The ultra-wealthy are perceived as the enemy, whose strata includes uncomfortable and unknowable etiquette, while the upper middle class offers the ease of money without all of the social trappings and cultural baggage.

“With the upper middle class, it’s all leaning towards frivolities like golf and tennis and yachting,” Trufelman continues, still quoting Fussell. “Who wouldn’t want to be in a class so free, secure, and amusing?”

“I think it was a much more class-coded look then than it is now,” said Trufelman of the fashion of Love Story. “Now, of course, the legacy of [Ivy] is extremely white collar, but I think it’s been toyed with so many times that it could mean a lot of different things [today].”

I think of the short sleeve polo shirt, which Trufelman also delves into in Chapter 5. The knit shirt has long been an iconic beacon of preppy culture, as easily paired with chino shorts by suburban dads as it is diamond-studded jewelry by chart-topping musicians. Though the polo shirt was first designed by French tennis player Jean René Lacoste in the 1920’s for tennis (not polo), it wasn’t available in America until Ralph Lauren made his own version in the early 70’s (then dubbed the polo), a few years after the enormous success of Love Story. For audiences seeing Jenny and Oliver in theaters, the popped-collar, brightly colored, polo-wearing prep didn’t even exist yet.

“Love Story was part of this wave of nostalgia in the 70s, sort of pining for a simpler time,” Trufelman elaborated. “There were these movies that basically sidestepped the counterculture - they just pretended hippies didn’t exist. Or they took place in the 50’s, like American Graffiti (1973) or Grease (1978). At the end of The Exorcist (1973) she emerges looking like Jackie Kennedy, and that’s how you know she’s like, at peace.”

The Ivy League world of Love Story wasn’t just a world of privilege and leisure, but also a smooth, gleaming fiction devoid of war protesters, DIY patchwork, political pins, and tie-dye. Sure, the story is sad. But before tragedy strikes, a perfectly sunkissed Oliver recites Whitman and Jenny plays piano with a bow in her hair.

“There are all of these movies [at that time] that are like, ah wouldn’t it be nice if we could just go back to a simpler time, when none of this happened?” said Trufelman. “It kind of primed everyone for the big preppy revival in the 80’s, when everyone was disillusioned by the revolution.”

Despite being widely skipped over by most moviegoing generations following the Baby Boomers, Love Story was never forgotten by fashion designers, costumers, and historians of prep. The film’s iconic ivy wardrobe has been a longtime favorite inspiration for American labels like Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Michael Kors, and Marc Jacobs.

In a 2021 interview with Vogue, Legally Blonde (2001) costume designer Sophie De Rakoff said “her inspirations for Elle came from the archives: Ali MacGraw in Love Story (1970) and the women in His Girl Friday (1940).”

In Taylor Swift’s filmmaking debut, All Too Well: The Short Film (2021), the singer-songwriter cited Love Story as a source of inspiration. During our conversation, Trufelman also mentioned Gossip Girl. Though costume designer Eric Daman never explicitly references Love Story in any press or interviews, Blair Waldorf’s old-money Upper East Side style often seems to take notes from MacGraw’s Jenny.

One of the reasons I was so excited to talk to Trufelman about the cultural impact of this film is because there’s little information about how the costume design actually came together. The style of Love Story is still written about in publications like Vogue and Town & Country decades later, but I couldn’t find a single primary source from the costume designers themselves. No interviews, no sketches, no behind-the-scenes photos of Pearl Somner Debuskey and Alice Manougian Martin on set. It’s unclear what their personal connections were to the Ivy League world they so accurately captured. Despite leaving behind such an important legacy in American fashion, the designers only have one other film credit each.

Debuskey spent the rest of her career in the theater, creating costumes for Broadway and off-Broadway productions from East Germany to Beijing. Self-described as a “red diaper baby,” Debuskey spent her life involved in left wing political activism, and is remembered for artistic ventures including cloisonne jewelry and a book of rubbings from tombstones in Prague’s Old Jewish Cemetery. She lived to 94 years old.

Martin seems to have left the entertainment industry after Love Story. I couldn’t find any additional information about her life and career.

I asked Trufelman if she has any personal favorite outfits from Love Story. She paused, hmm-ing thoughtfully.

“I mean… It’s the whole preppy thing, right? It’s not the clothes themselves, it’s how they wear it,” she said. “Everything’s a little disheveled, it’s not perfect. Like their collars are turned up. It’s kind of great.”

“Oh, her red rights! I love the red tights.”

Overall as a Fashion Film: 9/10

Fashion: 8/10

Influence: 10/10

Movie: 6/10

A huge, huge, thank you to Avery Trufelman of for taking the time to talk to me. Our interview and a (third) re-listen of American Ivy really brought this piece to life!

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Sources & Additional Reading (and Listening):

Articles of Interest by Avery Trufelman, available wherever you listen to podcasts!

Take Ivy by Teruyoshi Hayashida, Shosuke Ishizu, Toshiyuki Kurosu, and Hajime Hasegawa, 1965

Black Ivy: A Revolt in Style by Jason Jules and Graham Marsh, 2021

Pop That Collar—Revisiting ‘The Official Preppy Handbook’ by Jessica Mischner for Garden & Gun, 2015

Dress the Part: Why We’ve Fallen for the Preppy Seventies Style of Ali MacGraw in Love Story by Alexandra Macon for Vogue, 2014

Love Story, Ali MacGraw, Ryan O’Neal and the Ivy League Look by Alison Jane Reid for The Luminaries Magazine, 2021

Elle Woods Has Shaped Fashion for 20 Years by Aamina Khan for Vogue, 2021

Costume Designer Pearl Somner Debuskey Dies at 94 by Robert Viagas for Playbill, 2018

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Fashions of 1934

Costumes by: Orry-Kelly

Directed by: William Dieterle, with a musical number by Busby Berkeley

This movie may be for you if: you daydream about feathers, you can’t resist a con man, and your idea of good time involves a backless 1930’s gown.

Where to watch: Currently only available to rent (YouTube, Apple TV, Prime Video)

I’ve found that the 100 Fashion Films Project has illuminated two often divergent categories of “fashion films”: there are fashion films that feature iconic and influential costume design with little mention of fashion in their stories, and there are fashion films that are literally about fashion. Though Fashions of 1934 was never a hit, it is one of the earliest examples of the latter. The movie showcased the inner workings of fashion as an industry, giving audiences some of the first silver screen examples of fashion illustration, salons, buyers, and models in a fictional setting.

Film wasn’t a brand new medium for fashion in the 1930’s, but most earlier examples were short features akin to modern day fashion shows. Fifty Years of Paris Fashions 1859-1909 (1910), widely considered the first fashion film, was made up of a series of silent tableaux featuring examples of high fashion across various periods. The format was a success with female audiences, prompting newsreel services to produce similar shorts to showcase the latest designs from Paris and London. In 1913, famed couturier Paul Poiret enchanted worldwide fashion lovers with a look at his designs modeled in the garden of his Paris couture house. A New York Times journalist described the mesmerizing presentation as “goddesses from the machine.”

1925 saw the release of the silent romantic comedy The Dressmaker From Paris. Based on a synopsis in a film magazine review it was likely the first fictional fashion film, more in line with the big screen entertainment we think of as a “movie” today. However, the film was since lost, and there are no prints known to exist in any archive. Based on the (self-imposed) perimeters I assigned The 100 Fashion Films Project, Fashions of 1934 is the earliest viewable example I could find of the capital F Fashion Film.

The costume design for Fashions of 1934 was done by Orry George Kelly, credited throughout his illustrious film career as Orry-Kelly. The designer first moved to New York City to pursue an acting career, but was quickly forced to explore his other artistic talents to make ends meet. Kelly painted murals and sold block printed designs on shawls and ties before landing himself a costume design job for a theater.

Kelly moved to LA around the same time as his former roommate and struggling vaudeville actor Archie Leach. Upon arriving in Hollywood, Leach would quickly get his big break with a contract at Paramount under a new name: Cary Grant.

It’s believed that Kelly and Grant were in a tumultuous romantic relationship for many years, alluded to by Kelly himself in his 2015 book Women I’ve Undressed. Though their relationship would fracture over the decades, they provided each other essential support during their early days in Hollywood. Grant’s agent was the one who took Kelly and his design portfolio to Warner Brother’s in 1932, leading to a life-changing offer as the studio’s chief costume designer. Upon his hiring, Warner Brother’s encouraged him to hyphenate his name to make it sound “more exotic.”

Kelly lived as a quietly but openly gay man in an extremely homophobic industry and society, all while contributing to the costume design of over 300 films during his time in Hollywood. Prior to designer Catherine Martin’s fourth Academy Award in 2014, Orry-Kelly was the most prolific Australian Oscar winner in history. He took home the Best Costume Design Academy Award for An American in Paris (1951), Les Girls (1957), and Some Like It Hot (1959).

Fashions of 1934 was released just months before the rigorous enforcements of the Hays Code, in which the newly burgeoning American film industry was met with content restrictions. Though the code was technically adopted in 1930, it wouldn’t be widely abided until the summer of 1934, with American films released between 1929 and early 1934 to become known as “Pre-Code.” Fashions of 1934 included cheeky innuendo, scantily clad women, and some very questionable ass slapping, all of which was soon to essentially disappear from Hollywood until the late 1960’s.

William Powell starred alongside Bette Davis, who insisted on being dressed by Orry-Kelly for almost all of her films. Despite her love for Kelly’s work, Davis disliked her character design for this particular picture - and for good reason.

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The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Costumes by: Adrian

Directed by: Victor Fleming

This movie may be for you if: you prefer life in technicolor, you have very vivid dreams, and you understand the power of a great pair of shoes.

Where to watch: HBO Max

To call The Wizard of Oz iconic is an understatement.

The Library of Congress deemed it the most widely seen film in history, while a 2018 study by the University of Turin used data to crown it the most influential film of all time. Based on Frank L. Baum’s 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the cultural impact of the Oz story is hard to overstate. However, the 1939 film is also famous for a remarkably dangerous and abusive production. There’s plenty of lore about the making of this movie - some wild stories are true, others just rumor. The 100 Fashion Films Project is about movie fashion, and entire books have already been written about the rest, so I’ll be focusing on the costume design.

The Wizard of Oz was produced by MGM Studios. In this era of Hollywood, costume designers were signed exclusively to specific movie studios, typically working on dozens of movies a year. Adrian Greenberg, known widely as Adrian and credited as “Gowns by Adrian,” was MGM’s lead costume designer from the late 1920’s until 1941. The Wizard of Oz would become the project Adrian is best known for, but he worked on hundreds of other highly influential films throughout his career.

During his life, Adrian was most famous for his evening gowns, setting trends through the glamorous silver screen looks of stars like Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, and Joan Crawford. Adrian was never nominated for an Academy Award, almost certainly because his career predated the creation of the costume category.

According to some sources, Adrian had his childhood copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz sent to him when he started work on the film. As the story goes, a young Adrian had sketched designs in the margins, returning to his own youthful illustrations as inspiration for his movie designs.

Amongst the numerous issues with filming, The Wizard of Oz went through multiple directors, and with each new director came a new set of instructions for character design. The first director, Richard Thorpe, had 16-year-old star Judy Garland in a long blonde wig and glamorous makeup. Photos from test shoots give us a look at some of the alternate possibilities of the Dorothy Gale the world could have had instead.

A few details were present through multiple different iterations of Dorothy’s look - multiple early designs had puff sleeves, gingham, and hair bows, all incorporated into the winning outfit. When audiences finally meet Dorothy, her red curled braids cascade over a crème organdy blouse and gingham pinafore. Her woven basket serves as a dog carrier and purse, a look brought back twenty years later by Jane Birkin.

Next month, Heritage Auctions is selling an Oz memorabilia collection that includes an original blouse worn by Garland on screen. The auction listing for the top gives us a rare look at high quality photos of the blouse without the dress covering it, and includes a detailed description of its construction and history.

While Dorothy’s sweet but simple farm girl look is still just as charming 85 years later, the reality of what many of the other actors really wore was not nearly as pleasant.

Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion wore a suit made of real lion skin and fur, with facial appliances glued directly to his skin. Not only was his suit extremely heavy, clocking in at 60 pounds, but early Technicolor techniques required lighting so bright that the film set was often over 100 degrees. Lahr wrapped each take drenched in sweat, and the lion suit was reported to have smelled like it.

At least two original Cowardly Lion suits have been authenticated. One version was commissioned for a painstaking restoration by Cara Varnell, a textile conversation expert at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. $22,000 of human hair was used to recreate the worn-out mane, with over 21 artisans working for two years on the project. The revitalised suit was sold at auction in 2014 for over $3 million, making it the most expensive Hollywood costume ever worn by a male performer.

The “metal” suit worn by Jack Haley as the Tin Man was made of stiff fabric covered in leather. His robotic movements didn’t require much acting, as the suit was reportedly actually difficult to move in - sitting down was impossible. The “oil” applied to his joints in the movie was made of chocolate syrup.

Many of The Wizard of Oz characters required extensive makeup and masks. The aluminum powder first used to give the Tin Man metallic silver skin caused a toxic reaction after just ten days on set. The original actor, Buddy Ebsen, was hospitalized in critical condition. He was quickly and quietly replaced by Jack Haley, who wasn’t given details on Ebsen’s departure. The makeup was changed from a powder to a paste, with a layer of clown greasepaint as a base, and Haley reportedly “only” suffered an eye infection from the somewhat improved mixture.

Makeup artist Jack Dawson pioneered a technique using foam latex to create the masks worn by the Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion. According to Aljean Harmetz 1989 book The Making of The Wizard of Oz, it took a full hour to slowly peel the glued-on mask from the Scarecrow’s face. The masks were disposed of each day, with over 100 Scarecrow masks being used over the course of filming. Actor Ray Bolger was left with permanent scars around his mouth and chin from the role.

Meanwhile, actress Margaret Hamilton was covered in copper-based paint for her signature witchy green hue. Filming fantasy in 1939 meant the use of often hazardous practical effects, including real fire for the Wicked Witch’s smokey exits. According to Oz expert John Fricke, an accident on set led to the gauze from her hat and straw of her broom to catch fire. Hamilton was pulled from the flames, and the crew immediately began the excruciating removal of the green paint so the copper didn’t seep into her skin through her wounds.

Hamilton was hospitalized with third degree burns to her hands and face, and apparently retained a green tint for months after filming.

The Wicked Witch of Baum’s original novel wasn’t green. There isn’t any evidence of exactly why the movie makers chose her tint, but most Oz historians agree it was likely for several reasons: green skin would make the witch appear fantastical but “ugly,” and that it would be visually striking in Technicolor. There doesn’t seem to be any popular depiction of green witches prior to Hamilton’s cackling villain, indicating that The Wizard of Oz was the origin for one of the most ubiquitous characters in contemporary culture.

The Witch’s wardrobe and accessories, however, were rooted in existing folklore. Witches had been associated with brooms for centuries, and various theories (many positing religious prejudice) explain why witches had been depicted in tall black hats for years before Oz.

The Heritage Auctions memorabilia sale next month also includes a screen-worn wool witch hat, especially rare because it is only one of two known hats that still retain an original chin strap for “flying.” Bids start at $100,000, but are expected to exceed the $2.93 million hammer price of the other similar hat sold last winter.

During the Hollywood era of the studio system, it was common practice for movie costumes to be stored by the studios and re-used. MGM brought the Wicked Witch’s outfit back out right away for a 1939 Halloween-themed promotional shoot with Judy Garland and an unnamed, shadowy witch beside her. In 1941, the dress was worn by Rose Langdon for the 3-D movie Third Dimensional Murder. Though the hat was eventually recovered, the rest of the costume has since disappeared.

Billie Burke as Glinda the Good Witch wore an original Adrian design, but her gown was one that had already been seen on screen. The designer had previously created a giant chiffon dress for star Jeanette MacDonald to wear in 1936 musical drama San Francisco. Though the original dress was notably altered to become Glinda’s confectionary pink tulle, the overall look retains much of the original design.

The studio costume system meant money and resources could be saved by revisiting existing pieces, but it also meant that preservation was far from priority. Costumes that are considered iconic today were changed entirely to become new looks or fit to different actors, while other items were damaged, or somehow didn’t make their way back to storage.

The fate of Glinda’s gown remains unknown, and no versions of her crown have ever been accounted for. One version of Glinda’s wand has been displayed in multiple museum collections before selling for $400,000 at auction; the rhinestone prop was verified to have appeared in test shoots, but was not the same wand that was shown on screen.

Many of the Wizard of Oz items in circulation today came from a legendary MGM Studios auction in 1970. The studio had just been sold, and the new president decided to auction off hundreds of items as a cost-cutting measure. Decades of movie costumes and props were sold off, with many of the existing Wizard of Oz items being traced back to this auction. Debbie Reynolds, Kent Warner, and Michael Shaw are known as the foremost collectors of Oz memorabilia.

Some of my favorite costumes in Oz come from the whimsical fashion of Munchkinland. Over 100 costumes were created for the dozens of Munchkins, with each look photographed and cataloged to ensure the costumes and makeup remained consistent between days of filming. For some reason IMDB claims the Munchkin costumes were made “entirely of felt” - it appears plenty of felt was definitely used, but there are numerous surviving costumes that clearly include plenty of other fabrics.

A particularly charming motif in numerous Munchkin looks is Adrian’s use of flowers. Many of the costumes include flowers sprouting from the actor’s toes and heads, including darling felt flower pot hats. It was hard to find good photos of the flower shoes, but they were one of my favorite overlooked details from the movie.

Of course when it comes to the shoes of Oz, nobody else is thinking much about Munchkin footwear. Dorothy’s ruby slippers are undoubtedly the most famous movie shoes of all time, if not the crowning jewel of the most famous costume ever made.

Real Oz fans know that the shoes in Baum’s original story were actually silver, but the studio opted for an eye-catching red. Screenwriter Noel Langley is credited for the idea, suggesting that red would be more memorable use of Technicolor, and provide better contrast against the yellow brick road. Despite having seen this movie dozens of times, I somehow didn’t remember until my recent re-watch that Dorothy wore blue socks!

Multiple pairs of shoes were created for filming, all in sizes 5-6, though the exact number of shoes made remains debated. All of the surviving pairs were made of white silk pumps from the Innes Shoe Company - dying and decorating pre-made shoes was standard practice. Shoemaker Joe Napoli of the Western Costume Company was responsible for the construction of the ruby slippers. Four verified pairs exist today, each with their own names and backstories: “The People’s Pair” “The Contest Pair” “The Witch’s Pair” and “The Traveling Pair.”

There’s also one surviving pair in an alternate style, referred to as “The Arabian Test Pair.” This markedly different style gives us a glimpse into the design process for the famous shoes. After the “Arabian” shoe was nixed, the pump style design was presented and almost approved. The glass beads originally used to simulate rubies made the shoes too heavy, so they were swapped for lightweight sequins in the final design. Just weeks before filming, Adrian added Art Deco-inspired bows with glass jewels, rhinestones, and beads.

Just last year, Heritage Auctions sold “The Traveling Pair,” best known for being stolen in 2005, then recovered by the FBI in 2018. They were estimated to sell for $3-5 million. The number climbed far above that within minutes, hitting a record-breaking $32.5 million. As of 2024, Dorothy’s ruby slippers are the most valuable shoes of all time, and the most valuable piece of Hollywood memorabilia and costume design.

The new hit musical movie series Wicked opted for Baum’s original silver. Though the crystal shoes in the new movies are eye-catching in their own right, the color may not have been entirely by choice. Warner Bros owns the copyright for The Wizard of Oz, which includes the ruby slippers, and recreating them too closely for Wicked could have landed Universal in legal trouble. The contemporary silver shoes, designed by Wicked costume designer Paul Tazewell, feature a tornado-like spiral motif hand-jeweled with 1,165 Preciosa crystals.

The Wizard of Oz has been impacting fashion since its release. Oz-inspired styles have been seen everywhere from department stores to sewing patterns to high fashion, with interpolations of the original costumes appearing in referential projects like The Wiz, Once Upon a Time, and of course, Wicked. Everyone from home sewists to celebrated designers have been recreating the film’s many looks for decades for art, fashion, and of course, as a timeless and eternally popular Halloween costume.

For Vogue’s December 2005 Issue, creative director Grace Coddington and photographer Annie Leibovitz conceptualized actress Keira Knightley as Dorothy, decked out in designer. Her journey through a high-fashion Oz featured famous contemporary artists as her fantasy companions.

The influence of Oz can also be seen across dozens of runway shows and designer collections, most notably Moschino Fall 2000 RTW, Heatherette’s Fall 2007 “Over the Rainbow” collection, Virgil Abloh’s Louis Vuitton debut for Spring/Summer 2019, Bobby Abley Spring 2020 RTW, and a 2024 Wizard of Oz capsule collection for Marc Jacobs.

The Wizard of Oz is especially beloved by the queer community, inspired by its colorful, campy aesthetics, and interpreted by many to include queer subtext and themes. “Friend of Dorothy” has been used as a coded way to describe gay men, particularly in the 20th century. The phrase even appeared in movie #14 of the 100 Fashion Films Project, Clueless, when Murray describes Cher’s crush Christian as a “a disco-dancing, Oscar Wilde-reading, Streisand ticket-holding friend of Dorothy.”

In Robert K. Elder’s book The Film That Changed My Life, John Waters turned to Oz. “The Wizard of Oz opened me up because it was one of the first movies I ever saw. It opened me up to villainy, to screenwriting, to costumes,” said Waters.

When I was 8 years old, my family moved from California to Kansas. We packed up my parent’s Montero and drove for days, my brother and I watching a VHS copy of The Wizard of Oz over and over in the back seat. Though suburban Kansas City ended up being nothing like Dorothy’s 1930’s farmhouse, the movie provided a love for color and whimsy that I’ve carried with me ever since.

The Wizard of Oz is one of the few films in this project that had a pretty indisputable ranking before I even started my official research. Not only have I seen the movie dozens of times, but it was pretty easy to assume that anything new I learned would only further reveal this film’s rightful status as a Hollywood masterpiece. The Wizard of Oz is one of the most impactful fashion films of all time, with characters and costumes that seem to only become more relevant and beloved almost 100 years later.

Overall as a Fashion Film: 10/10

Fashion: 10/10

Influence: 10/10

Movie: 10/10

Sources & Additional Reading:

The Wizard of Oz Is Officially the Most Influential Film of All Time by Yohana Desta for Vanity Fair, 2018

The Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch Actress Suffered Unforgettable Pain After Being Burned on Set (Exclusive) by Eric Andersson for People, 2024

Costume Designer Adrian: The Frock Flicks Guide by Trystan L. Bass for Frock Flicks, 2018

MGM Auction, 1970 for Gorillas Don’t Blog in 2015

CD Magazine, Summer 2025

A Brief History of ‘The Wizard of Oz’s’ Ruby Slippers and How They Turned Silver for ‘Wicked’ by Hannah Malach for WWD, 2024

The Ruby Slippers Project

‘Ruby slippers’ used in 1939’s ‘Wizard of Oz’ go on auction for NPR, 2024

Ruby slippers worn in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ are auctioned for a record $28 million by The Associated Press for NPR, 2024

You Can Buy the Wicked Witch’s Hat That Actress Margaret Hamilton Wore in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ by Ella Feldman for Smithsonian Magazine, 2025

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Clueless (1995)

Costumes by: Mona May

Directed by: Amy Heckerling

This movie may be for you if: you were ever accused of treating your school hallways as a runway, you really love plaid, and you’d negotiate with an armed robber to protect a designer dress.

Where to watch: Netflix, Paramount+

The costume designer for Clueless was legendary 90’s tastemaker Mona May. To celebrate the film’s 30th anniversary, Mona worked with fashion writer Monica Corcoran Harel to write a new book, The Fashion of Clueless. In a recent interview, Mona told me all about the book, reminisced on her many other influential movie wardrobes (Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, Enchanted, Never Been Kissed), and of course, we talked about vintage. You can read my full interview with Mona here: Mona May is Like, a Totally Important Designer!

I saved even more from our conversation to include here in my official costume breakdown for The 100 Fashion Films Project. Mona walked me through the process of creating some of the movie’s most iconic looks, and spoke on the enduring legacy of the film’s costume design. I even asked which celebrity Clueless homage is her favorite, and her answer surprised me!

Writer and director Amy Heckerling had recognition from the surprise success that was Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), but nobody was particularly eager to fund another teen movie, let alone her bubbly retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma. The young cast of Clueless was mostly unknown at the time, and the project was Mona May’s first big studio film.

When they finally got the green light, Mona was given a budget of only $200,000 to create the wardrobe for an entire school’s worth of characters. Cher (Alicia Silverstone) alone had over 60 different outfits. Every character and clique needed a distinct style, and everyone had to look like they could afford to live (and shop) in Beverly Hills.

The 1990’s marked the beginning of a new relationship between fashion designers and Hollywood. Giorgio Armani was pioneering the concept of celebrity styling, and despite over 70 years of product placement, TV and movies rarely featured loans or “pulls” from fashion houses like we often see today. Mona knew that Cher needed something impressive for the now famous robbery scene in Clueless, and there was only one thing she could do: call Azzedine Alaïa himself. Not only did the then-unknown costume designer want to borrow a dress, but she wanted to tailor it to Silverstone. Then, the actress would lay on the ground in an LA parking lot.

Thankfully for fashion history, Alaïa said yes, and Amy wrote in the now famous lines after the dress was confirmed.

The Tunisian couturier wasn’t the only designer that received a call from Mona. She managed to borrow additional designs from Anna Sui, Calvin Klein, Jill Stuart, and Dolce & Gabbana.

Mona’s creativity and resourcefulness couldn’t end there. The remaining costumes of Clueless had to be part of her budget, so they came from just about every place you could get clothes: malls, thrift stores, and LA rave outfitters on Melrose Avenue. Others were handmade by Mona herself, or embellished to complete the look. The movie’s most memorable look of all came from one fateful trip to a department store.

Mona described the process of deciding on a plaid suit as a sort of “yes, and” between her and Heckerling. They decided that the perfect first day of school look, and our introduction to Cher, would be a balance of classic and edgy. The idea started with a Catholic school uniform, bounced back and forth between their opposing concepts as each layer was added. The white t-shirt beneath it all was like “the base of life, in a way,” as described by Mona. Cher was wealthy and poised, but still a teenager, and a plaid skirt suit seemed like it could somehow be all of that at once.

Mona first picked up a blue plaid, envisioning a beautiful contrast with Silverstone’s blonde hair. Next she picked up red, which Heckerling would later declare “too Christmas,” but would appear on Cher later in the movie.

“Out of the corner of my eye I saw the yellow. I think I was at Saks Fifth Avenue,” Mona recalled. “It was expensive, I didn’t have a lot money. But I grabbed it.”

An enduring media mishap has lead to the yellow skirt suit being widely credited as Dolce & Gabbana, but the set is now officially confirmed as Jean Paul Gaultier. The plaid suit was released as part of the final collection for JPG’s Junior line for the F/W 1994 season.

“It was like a ray of sunshine, the energy of the yellow,” Mona remembers of the fitting. “And I think that’s part of how it’s etched in our subconscious too, because it was really perfect in that moment.”

It was already a stretch to keep one designer suit for Cher, so buying a matching set for Dionne (Stacey Dash) just wasn’t in the budget. Mona instead used the yellow plaid as a pattern and made a contrasting copycat, adding personal touches like a vinyl collar to match Dionne’s vintage purse and hat.

Mona May loves hats. The only thing she kept from the Clueless set was a hat, and many of film’s most memorable looks wouldn’t have been complete without their hats. New York based milliner Kokin was responsible for many of the custom designs that appeared on film, including the “Dr. Seuss” hat serves up a hell of a first impression of Dionne.

The sartorial success of Clueless was largely due to its inventiveness. “There was nothing on the ground to relate to,” Mona said of popular fashion during filming. “When we went to high schools, everybody was wearing grunge. I had to invent this whole world. My guideline was runways, but you can’t just take runway clothes and put them on 16-year-old girls and make them seem like real, authentic high school girls.”

To maintain a youthful innocence, Mona quickly decided none of her teenage characters would wear stilettos. Cher’s whirlwind of outfits were only paired with block-heeled Mary Janes (and occasionally sneakers) to keep any of the fashion from looking too mature.

When I asked Mona for her own top five favorite fashion films, almost everything that made the cut was released between 1961-1969. Her affinity for 60’s style is clear in Cher’s wardrobe, especially in her bow-tied empire dresses and headbands.

The aesthetics of the fictional Bronson Alcott High School played a major role in shifting styles through the end of the 90’s. The first half of the decade was marked by overwhelmingly casual dressing, heavily featuring moody color palettes and more androgynous silhouettes.

In the early 90’s, plaid was inextricable from grunge and the punk stylings of designers like Vivienne Westwood. Trends like goth, facial piercings, and torn clothing were emerging from underground scenes at raves and skateparks and into mainstream culture. Popular feminine fashion of the early 90’s was minimalist and muted, favoring simple shapes like slip dresses and cardigans and in clear opposition to the neon spandex and sculpted powersuits of the 80’s.

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As I wait for Mona to answer my video call, I find myself wondering what kind of hat she’ll be wearing. Then I think, maybe she won’t be wearing a hat at all…

As if!

Moments later, she appears on screen in a two toned fedora. Mona May always wears a hat. Both of us have a naked dress form just over one shoulder, their matching canvas bodies an instant connection between us. As it turns out, I actually have a lot in common with one of the most iconic costume designers in Hollywood. We’re both missionaries of tailoring, deep appreciators of 60’s fashion, devoted collectors, and, most importantly: we both love clothes. Mona is passionate and talkative, laughing often and waving her hands as she speaks. At one point in our conversation, she loses her train of thought. “Wait… what was I talking about?” she asks me. “Shit.”

An hour flies by as we talk about her work, obviously starting with Clueless but getting sidetracked by The Haunted Mansion and Stuart Little 2 and Never Been Kissed. The impact of her costume design can’t be overstated. This year marks 30 years since the release of Clueless, and not a single one of those has gone by without a brand new group of people reaching for Cher’s yellow plaid. Mona’s new book, The Fashion of Clueless, celebrates the colorful legacy of what just may be one of the most influential fashion films of all time.

The Fashion of Clueless

This interview has been edited for brevity.

Mona: It was really fun to have someone on Clueless who really let me be the wild card, to bring all these fun things to the table. [Director Amy Heckerling] never shut me down, she was like great! what else you got there?

Alex: I feel like you can really see that in the way everything turned out. You can sense that you put so much of yourself into it, that you were able to have that creative freedom.

That’s how the whole movie was, it was really amazing. It was 1995, I was very young. Most of the cast was very young. We were kind of all newbies. It was Paul Rudd’s first movie!

He’s such a baby in it!

He was such a baby in it. We were just so excited, having this amazing director at the helm, who wrote a fabulous script, who was so creative. I think for all of us, [Heckerling] allowed us to grow into the artists that we are now, in a way.

It was very lucky that one of the first movies for me, my first big studio film, was Clueless. It kind of shaped me as a designer. I think that when you really look at my work over the last 30 years, there is a lot of color, there is a lot of this joie de vivre, this whimsy. I think that [Heckerling] opened me up to it. She kind of gave me permission. My friends laugh, you know, they say the genie came out of the bottle!

Looking back on the legacy of Clueless 30 years later, do you have memories of feeling like wow, we’re working on something really special here?

I think we knew we were working on something special because we had such an amazing time. We hoped. But no one can foresee anything, I mean - we couldn’t even imagine that something could live for 30 years. Women who were teenagers seeing the movie then are mothers now, and their children are seeing the film. That to me is amazing, that it’s so generational, that there is a whole new fanbase for the film.

I actually just showed my sister Clueless for the first time! She’s 11 years younger than me, she’s 23. It was so fun watching her react to it. She absolutely loved it, and thought that the costumes were really incredible.

See, I love that. I love that! And I think the movie is really about friendship, it’s nostalgic in a way for when things were so much simpler. What I love about this movie is that they are not mean. Cher always means well, even though it doesn’t always come out right. [laughs] She’s a good girl, they all are.

And Tai’s story, I mean, Brittany Murphy was just a brilliant actress. Her story of finding herself was beautiful, from being the mini-me of Cher to really becoming authentic to herself. I love those stories. I’m really lucky to work on many of those movies - Never Been Kissed was like that. Drew Barrymore’s character really kind of starts out in one way, and in the end when she’s waiting to get her kiss, in her pink chiffon dress, she’s completely different.

I think that’s the best part of my job as a costume designer - to really tell the story through costumes. When you’re looking at a character, and they come out on the screen, within ten seconds you know who they are because of what they’re wearing. Are they happy? Are they sad? Where did they come from? Are they rich? Are they poor?

And every day we represent ourselves with our own clothes. Our moods, our sexiness, or whatever it is, each day we tell a story about ourselves and who we are.

That’s so true. I always get so frustrated when people are dismissive of fashion. Even if you say you don’t care about what you wear, like - you could wear a white t-shirt every day, but that’s still so intentional. It says so much about you.

Exactly. And when you’re saying you don’t care, that says something too. It’s fascinating, really. Clothing is just so amazing, color is so amazing. I mean like the yellow suit in Clueless, it’s not just a yellow suit.

Oh no, definitely not. You’ve claimed ownership, almost, of yellow plaid!

[Mona laughs]

Everyone thinks of you, and the movie, when they see it.

Right. And then it’s like, why yellow plaid? It wasn’t like I just arbitrarily decided okay, I’m gonna put yellow plaid right here.

There was nothing on the ground to relate to. When we went to high schools, everybody was wearing grunge. I had to invent this whole world. My guideline was runways, but you can’t just take runway clothes and put them on 16-year-olds and make them seem like real, authentic high school girls.

So we had the fitting, here comes Alicia in her sweatpants with the dogs in tow, she’s already an activist and saving the world. She really didn’t care about the clothes. In the fittings she had to learn how to really dress as Cher, and be Cher. The costumes really inform the actor, and that’s what’s so fun in the fittings.

When she tried the yellow, it was unbelievable. She became Cher. The scene took place in the quad, outside, a lot of people crossing, so we needed something that would pop. And [in the yellow suit] she truly became the queen bee. It was like a ray of sunshine, the energy of the yellow.

I mean, you can’t imagine that scene now with anything else. That’s the only thing she could have been wearing.

Right?

In my research, I noticed that the yellow plaid suit has been attributed to two different designers.

Yes! There was some confusion that it was Dolce. It’s Jean Paul Gaultier Junior.

You have to remember - it was 30 years ago. The costume is gone. There was no cell phone, there was no computer. We were tracking things with a Polaroid, hand written notes. So like, who freakin remembers? Somebody probably said it in an interview, not knowing, and then you know how it gets spun and reprinted.

It’s crazy to think about it that we did all of that without computers, analog. The revolutionary thing was the closet! Amy knew someone rich that, at the time, had computerized their wine collection. She came to set and was like we have to do this, Mona, we have to photograph all of the clothes, we have to get a computer specialist to get this all done - and it happened!

You’ve mentioned that Alicia was kind of oblivious about fashion when you shot the movie. You’ve stayed friends, and she’s told you that she regrets not keeping anything from the film. Did you keep anything from the set?

[laughs] I have one thing. I have the hat, the big black hat! It was actually not even in the movie, but it was in the photoshoot with David Lachapelle. It’s the same designer, Kokin, who did the “Dr. Seuss” hat for Dionne.

Melrose was huge at the time - it was all of the rave stores, and thrift stores were booming at the time in the 90’s in Los Angeles. It was just a lot of vibrancy and fashion and street stuff, and for me, creating this completely new different world. I wasn’t walking up to the store and buying an outfit somebody already put together. I was buying pieces for something that nobody else had put together.

I had to go high fashion, mall, Contempo Casuals. Dionne had a lot of thrift store stuff like 1950’s purses, old leopard vintage jackets, with vinyl skirts that were like rave skirts. At the time, nobody dressed high and low. I mean think about things like the white t-shirt Cher is wearing to the gym, with a black tank top, you can buy that look together now as one piece. Nobody was doing that before. There are so many crazy cool things that I got to invent that are now staples in our fashion repertoire.

You’ve had such success doing an amazing range of genres and characters, and you’re really able to bring every single one of them to life in their own ways. But you also have these little hidden signatures throughout your work. Like, of course, you love feathers. Me too! I’m a big feather girl. I had feathers on my wedding dress.

Yay! [laughs]

Every time I see feathers on screen, I get so excited. You love hats, and Clueless obviously has some really amazing hats. I would love to hear more about how you’re able to honor your own tastes while still staying true to the storytelling and the characters.

I think that when you take a script, it kind of has to filter through your creative brain, your heart. So I think that it’s really important as an artist to really recognize what that is, what is your journey? Where did you come from? How did that influence you? Where did you live? What are your interests?

I kind of like the timelessness of fashion, I like the staples. I like the A-line skirts, the cap sleeves, the empire waist, the peacoats, the berets, I like things that are classic in a way. Not boring, but classic. The story is my blueprint, always, I have to take these characters and look at them deeply. I think Clueless is really beloved because the girls are so different. They’re authentic, you can emulate them, you want to be them because they’re real. I think this is really kind of the best essence of a well crafted character, that you can kind of understand who they are, and believe in them.

I think one of the best visuals you get of that in the movie is when they’re in gym class. You have them all lined up in a row like that, in this very minimal palette, and yet every single girl has brought her own very distinct style to it.

I mean, look at Amber! [laughs]

She has some of my favorite costumes in the movie, I have to say.

She was just so much fun, Elisa Donovan, she’s just a great human being. We really loved each other and trusted each other, she was like I’m game for anything. I love Pippi Longstocking, that’s like my favorite character, so I was like we have to do something! So we talked with the hair people, putting the little pipe cleaners in her hair, with the kind of a Missoni-esque outfit.

When you work with these actors, Drew Barrymore is like that too, and they’re just game to have fun. Mira Sorvino in Romy and Michele too, we just went crazy with those costumes. It’s so much fun for a costume designer to just go nuts! Let’s do it, let’s have this room filled with clothes, and try them all on, and create these amazing characters that people will love and want to emulate. 28 years later, for Romy and Michelle, 30 years later for Clueless, and people still dress like that for Halloween.

I’d love to hear more about your personal relationship with vintage. Do you wear a lot of vintage? Do you find that you pull a lot of vintage for costuming?

I would love to use more vintage [for film]. It’s very difficult to use in movies because we have to bring a lot of clothing into fittings, you have to try it and make sure it fits. Usually you can’t return vintage, so we actually use costume houses as “vintage stores.”

I personally love vintage, I have some really great pieces. I love the vintage color combinations, vintage fabrics, things that really were made to last. It’s different now, everything has more polyester, you really have to pay your price to get something really well made. I’m glad that you’re a vintage dealer, because it’s preserving history. [Otherwise] some of those pieces may be gone forever.

I’m a consultant on the Romy and Michele Broadway [musical], and the producer reached out to me and was like do they have the costumes still? I would love to showcase it, maybe in the lobby of the theater. But it was over 20 years ago, it probably disintegrated! Maybe it was given to the Disney costume house, and some people rented it, I don’t know. Fabric doesn’t last forever, it’s organic matter, usually.

Especially older pieces, from when there were way less synthetic fibers. And you’ve got actors that are sweating in it, moving around.

And there’s moths, too!

Oh god, the moths! My worst enemy. Don’t get me started.

It’s very, very interesting, to preserve the past. I’m glad that it can live on screen. Sophia Loren, the LBD in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Scarlett O’Hara, Marilyn Monroe in her white dress. Those kind of memorable, beautiful clothes, we can still revisit them [through movies], and hopefully they will teach us something.

Like you said, most of those dresses are gone, who knows what happened to them. But they live forever on the screen, and we get to experience them again and again because people like you were able to capture them.

I’m so happy. It’s a great legacy, it’s a great medium. And now with the book, hopefully that will be another thing people can enjoy the movie with.

Was there anything that didn’t quite make it into the book that you were really hoping to share with people?

I can always write more, as a costume designer you want to write more about the process. This is more of a coffee table book, it’s more pictures. It talks a little bit about the process, but it’s visual. It’s about interviewing the actors, speaking to them about how my process with them was, creating the characters. Very much behind the scenes - Paramount even found continuity photos, Polaroids, from 30 years ago. I can’t believe they survived!

I have one last question for you! I’ve been watching all of these incredible movies while working on the 100 Fashion Films Project. Obviously Clueless is a big one, whenever I talk to people about my project, it’s always one of the first movies mentioned. So I would love to know - what are your top five favorite fashion films?

Definitely Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And My Fair Lady, I love the hats. Sweet Charity is super fun, with Shirley MacLaine in the dancing costumes - I remember seeing the movie as a child, and it made me go wow! It really made an impression on me when I was younger. Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which is also very artsy, really interesting French film.

That’s four, you’ve got one more.

There’s so many!

You could also include one of your own, if you want!

Enchanted. I’m so proud of that film. I just love the way the story unfolds. This is like a dream job - you’re sitting and drawing all of the character costumes and making everything, from the dresses to the boots to the tiaras. When I saw the movie on screen, I cried. I didn’t even know it was in me, all of this design, and this beauty.

What’s great about filmmaking is that it’s truly a collaborative process, being together with other creatives. Exchanging ideas, flowing, having the director’s vision, but then implementing yours, but then working with the actors, and the lighting, and sets. It’s very fun. I hope we don’t lose that, because things are changing, with the business, with AI. I really hope that we can keep that process, because that, to me, is what’s so beautiful.

It’s kind of agony sometimes. It’s like oh my god, is this the right pink? Is this the right moment for this dress? For example, when Cher is in her little driving [test] outfit. I don’t really use much grey in the movie, or black. There was no brown, of course. It was such a significant moment for her to be kind of confused and sad, the outfit was so perfect. You knew by the outfit that she was lost, that she’s not herself, not completely.

Totally, you can feel it while she’s getting dressed in that scene. In the beginning, she has her computer program, like you said, there’s that sense of control. Then fast forward to the driving test, and the clothes are everywhere, and she’s like “where’s my white collarless shirt from Fred Segal?!”

[Mona laughs]

It drives home the point of how important clothing and dressing is. It really shapes her character, how impacted she is by this feeling of I can’t find the top I want to wear. We’ve all been there, with the pile on the floor!

It’s so true, it’s so relatable. I think that’s why the movie is so loved, a lot of it is so relatable. We love the characters - I love the characters. And I think we can all continue loving the characters through the book.

The Fashion of Clueless by Mona May (with Monica Corcoran Harel) is available now!

As always, I highly recommend supporting your local independent bookstore. If you’re purchasing a copy online, I recommend Bookshop.org.

You can keep up with Mona on Instagram, catch one of her book signings or events, and learn more about her work on her website.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

Costumes by: Eiko Ishioka

Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola

This movie may be for you if: your wardrobe is infinitely more impressive than your home decor, you like your fantasy fantastical, and you really just love horny vampires.

Where to watch: Netflix, YouTube TV

The costuming for Bram Stoker’s Dracula was done by Japanese art director and designer Eiko Ishioka, earning the film the 1993 Oscar for Best Costume Design. Ishioka was only the fourth Asian nominee to win the award (women of color make up less than 2% of those to even be nominated), and is the first Asian costume designer to be featured on the 100 Fashion Films Project.

Ishioka’s brief acceptance speech concluded with a thank you to former MGM art director Cedric Gibbons for his design of the Oscar statuette in 1928, which she described as “the most beautiful designed man in this planet.” Dracula also took home wins for Best Makeup and Best Sound Editing.

When Dracula director Francis Ford Coppola was given a much smaller budget than he hoped for the film, he declared that the costumes would be the set.

“I was going to lead with the costumes, I was gonna put most of my money in the costumes,” said Coppola in the documentary about the film’s costume design, The Costumes are the Sets. “And I was gonna diminish the sets, I was going to have the set be more highly imaginative use of space and shadow… and let the costume be the jewel of the set.”

Ishioka had been an incredibly successful art director and designer for decades before expanding her career into costume design. Her bold and provocative concepts made her a force in advertising and Japanese media, challenging the country’s conservative ideals and shifting the way brands appealed to female consumers.

In 1979, Ishioka was hired to design the Japanese movie posters for Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. The director was already familiar with her work from Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) - it was Ishioka’s film debut as the production designer, and Coppola was one of the executive producers.

He would later describe her as “a weirdo outsider with no roots in the business.” Coppola took a risk and trusted her to be a driving force in the making of Dracula, seeing Ishioka’s lack of experience in costume design and movie making as a strength instead of a weakness.

Ishioka was given much more creative freedom and had more aesthetic influence than is often typical for someone in a costume designer role. Recalling the process, Ishioka said, “He hired me as a costume designer, but his feeling was like ‘Eiko, create entire visual concept.’”

She seamlessly directed her creative vision to fashion, strongly influencing the direction of the film’s characters. She described her Dracula, one of the most iconic on-screen portrayals of the character (by Gary Oldman) as “male and female, old and young, ugly and handsome, animal and human.”

Hair and makeup designer Michèle Burke said she also drew inspiration from Ishioka’s designs. The film’s Oscar-winning cosmetics combined Ishioka’s Japanese influences with angelic and biblical imagery from Burke’s Catholic upbringing. The movie features an array of extensive wigs, acting as a sculptural extension of the body that completed Ishioka’s aesthetic vision.

Most of Bram Stoker’s Dracula is set in the late Victorian period, taking place between England and Transylvania. Coppola wanted his retelling of the classic tale to subvert expected tropes. He insisted on a version of Dracula that wasn’t the formally outfitted figure that the public had grown accustomed to since Bela Lugosi’s Dracula in 1931.

“Dracula has a very Christian style,” described Ishioka. “And a long, long, long film history. Francis wanted to completely throw away this Christian look to create our own vision.”

To break from the buttoned-up vampires of Hollywood past, Coppola’s 1992 vision relied on dramatic and purposefully inaccurate period costuming, with strong influences from Ishioka’s Japanese culture.

Coppola asked Ishioka for “weird,” later saying in an interview: “‘Weird’ became a code word for ‘Let’s not do formula.’ Give me something that either comes from the research, or that comes from your own nightmares.”

The first step in creating a new Dracula was simple: more costumes. The old Dracula had one look, a single outfit that he had seemingly worn for hundreds of years. The new Dracula was a shapeshifter, and his many personas requiring what Ishioka described as “endless transformation.”

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Beetlejuice (1988)

Costumes by: Aggie Guerard Rodgers

Directed by: Tim Burton

This movie may be for you if: your goth phase never really ended, you like to style your clothes the “wrong” way, and you’ve ever spent time considering what outfit your ghost would wear.

Where to watch: HBO Max

Costume designer Aggie Guerard Rodgers is best known her work on Return of the Jedi (1983), but I’d argue that her costumes for Beetlejuice had an even bigger impact on fashion and pop culture. The movie was Rodger’s second time working with Tim Burton, following her collaboration with the director on his 1985 debut film Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.

While doing my research for this piece, I kept coming across references to a 2015 interview with Rodgers for Elle Magazine. The article seems to have been replaced, as all of the existing links to the interview instead bring you to a different Elle piece from 2024. I’ve pieced together what I can from the interview through secondary sources, though I’m really annoyed that (despite hours of hunting) I couldn’t actually find the original story.

Though I generally refrain from relying too heavily on indirect sources, I wasn’t able to find any other interviews with Rodgers about her work on this project, and the commentary referenced was consistent across multiple sources.

Beetlejuice opens with Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis), the quintessential 1980’s couple. Their clothes are unremarkably on-trend, sweet and modest, their normie attire acting as a foil for the unfolding supernatural shenanigans. Rodgers modeled Barbara’s look around the Laura Ashley style, with floral prairie dresses custom made for Davis’ six foot frame.

Beetlejuice often floods the screen in color, casting rich blue and vivid green against a repeated graphic black-and-white motif. Adam wears the most unassuming version of it as a homey buffalo plaid, subtly matching Betelgeuse (and The Sandworm) in jarring stripes. Most scenes include a discordant splash of red, sometimes as subtle as a swipe of vermillion lipstick.

Beetlejuice earned artists Ve Neill, Steve La Porte, and Robert Short the 61st Academy Award for Best Makeup. Over $1 million of the movie’s total $15 million budget was spent on the film’s striking visual effects - despite the hefty bill, the effects were purposely staged to mimic the style of the cheap B movies Burton loved as a child.

Some of the most memorable use of makeup and effects appear in the afterlife, where we meet spirits like a suicidal beauty queen and a magician’s assistant (after a trick gone horribly wrong). The Maitland’s case worker, Juno (Sylvia Sidney), exhales her ghostly cigarette smoke out of a wound across her neck. The afterlife of Beetlejuice presents purgatory as bureaucracy, where spirits linger around a waiting room in the outfits they were wearing when they died.

Beetlejuice’s namesake sleazeball, brought to life by Michael Keaton, only clocks around 17 minutes of actual screen time. Despite his relatively brief appearances, every minute is fully utilized. Keaton recalls his time as Betelgeuse as one of his favorite roles, including his input for the character’s iconic final look. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Keaton said “I went to the makeup artist, Ve Neill, and said, ‘I want mold on my face. My hair has to look like I stuck my finger in an electric socket.’ She came up with the eyes, Tim had the idea of the striped suit, and I said, ‘These are his teeth. This is his skin.’”

The unexpected star of Beetlejuice was a relatively unknown actress, 15-year-old Winona Ryder. Her portrayal of the “strange and unusual” Lydia Deetz would catapult her to instant fame, leading to a career full of similarly dark parts in movies like Heathers (1989) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). British Vogue referred to Ryder as “Fashion’s Original Goth Girl” in a 2023 piece, and though fashion historians (and goths!) would strongly dispute that title, Lydia Deetz can be credited with bringing goth style to a wider audience.

Lydia felt distinctive but genuine, her charm likely due to Ryder’s own input on her teenage character. Her mournful black clothing and spiky hair were inspired by the earlier goth stylings of artists like Siouxsie Sioux and The Cure, but with a youthful levity that has since garnered a cult reverence. Rodgers brought Ryder along to shop at American Rag in LA, working together to bring Lydia to life. “Winona looked at one rack; I looked at another, and then I would say, ‘Here, try this on. Try that on,’” she told Elle.

“In the final scene of the film, Winona decided to wear her school outfit with that petticoat on underneath all by herself,” Rodgers said. “That was her idea. I think she probably even brought that in herself.”

Despite going out of her way to wear all black, Lydia is best remembered by many for the bright red dress for her reluctant wedding. Rodgers pitched the idea to Burton as a dress to match Barbara’s poofy white gown, with all of the lace and tulle, but custom made in red. Rodgers found Barbara’s “outrageous and stupid” dress at Brenda’s Bridal in Downtown LA, and told Elle that its custom red counterpart was actually a quinceañera dress.

While Betelgeuse and Lydia might be the fan favorites, I think the true fashion icon of the film is actually Catherine O’Hara as Delia Deetz.

Delia is an art world clout chaser, preoccupied with aesthetics to the point of obsession. She’s consistently in character, fully dressed and accessorized regardless of how mundane the task.

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La Piscine (1969)

Costumes by: André Courrèges

Directed by: Jacques Deray

This movie be for you if: you love a man in short shorts, you thrive on sexual tension, and believe a chic mini dress is appropriate funeral attire.

Where to watch: currently included in subscriptions for the Criterion Collection and HBO Max. Available for rent on various other platforms.

If I were to pick a piece of media that I think best captures the feeling of the end of summer, it would be Jacques Deray’s 1969 thriller La Piscine. The story begins by the film’s namesake pool, sun-drenched and rippling, presenting a tense heat chilled by the ever-present sense that the warmth may fade at any moment. The characters move through various states of undress as their relationships unfold, using exposed - or unexposed - skin as a central metaphor for vulnerability and intimacy.

The costume designer for La Piscine was famed French fashion designer André Courrèges. Courrèges launched his namesake fashion house in 1961 after a decade under Balenciaga, and had risen to the status of fashion revolutionary by the mid 1960’s. By the time filming for La Piscine began, Courrèges was a household name in France.

Many of Courrèges’ signature styles appear throughout La Piscine, including designs like mini skirts, stark white dresses, women’s trousers, and semi-fitted dresses.

Though British designer Mary Quant is widely credited with inventing the mini skirt (in mass-market fashion), shorter hemlines were a 1960’s trademark also pioneered by André Courrèges. The famous Moon Girl collection, released by Courrèges in the spring of 1964, garnered international acclaim for his groundbreaking Space Age style and its inclusion of very short hems. Not only did his models sport an array of above-the-knee looks, but many of the legs beneath were entirely free of tights or nylons.

La Piscine’s wardrobe palette consists primarily of neutrals like white, black, blue, and brown, with occasional splashes of warm colors and bold prints in line with popular 1960’s design.

The movie stars Romy Schneider (Marianne) and Alain Delon (Jean-Paul), supported by Maurice Ronet (Harry) and Jane Birkin (Penelope). The women’s poolside attire features a timeless collection of black and white bikinis and one pieces in sensual cuts with interesting hardware details.

Though there are plenty of voyeuristic shots of Schneider and Birkin, the film offers just as much focus on Delon’s body. Jean-Paul spends the first half of the movie walking around in not much more than his very short, colorful shorts and a bright green towel. Harry, by contrast, is relaxed but not so uncovered. Both men expose bare chests in deeply unbuttoned shirts, but Ronet sports a striped terry cloth robe when they lounge poolside.

Alain Delon had been firmly planted in stardom for years before La Piscine, regarded as one of Europe’s best leading men and beloved as an international sex symbol. The actor was no stranger to style, seemingly wearing several of his own pieces during filming.

Delon was photographed with Brigette Bardot in August of 1968, on a boat in Saint-Tropez, the same month that filming for La Piscine began on the Côte d’Azur. Delon wore the same colorful shorts that appear in the film, indicating that they were likely brought on set from his personal wardrobe.

Delon also wore his personal Vuarnet Legend 06 sunglasses in the opening scene. The introduction is loaded with symbolism, continually served in the form of a seriously incredible line up of 60’s sunglasses. Every pair is a hit, and there are a lot more of them than you typically see in one movie.

A Reddit user also ID’d Delon’s blocky square frames, a personal favorite, as the Sophia Sport by Pierre Marly. There are quite a few vintage pairs of Marlys available online, but at a hefty price!

La Piscine was only the second major acting role for then 22-year-old Jane Birkin, who plays the 18-year-old Penelope. Birkin had previously appeared in very minor parts in movies like The Idol (1966) Blow Up (1966), only appearing as characters titled “A Blonde” and “The Blonde” respectively. Her first major acting role was as Penny Lane in 1968’s Wonderwall, released only months prior to filming for La Piscine.

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Do The Right Thing (1989)

Costumes by: Ruth E. Carter

Directed by: Spike Lee

This movie may be for you if: you know how to properly open an NYC fire hydrant, you’ve ever waited in line for sneakers, and Elvis never meant shit to you.

Where to watch: available for free on The Internet Archive! Also included in the subscription for MGM+.

Do the Right Thing captures a single sweltering day in Brooklyn. The story follows a group of Bed-Stuy residents during the hottest day of the summer, their actions set against an oppressive heat that becomes more symbolic as the story unfolds.

The movie’s costumes were designed by Ruth E. Carter. Carter first met director Spike Lee while working in LA’s Theater Center in 1986, beginning a collaborative relationship that has spanned 14 films. Carter has been nominated for the Best Costume Design Academy Award four times, winning twice for her work on Black Panther (2018) and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022). Carter was the first Black woman to win the Best Costume Design Oscar, and is the first Black woman to win multiple Academy Awards in any category.

The fashion of Do the Right Thing is bold, colorful, and Afrocentric. The costume design was strongly inspired by the real-life style of 1980’s Brooklyn, whose communities were one of the strongest influences on the burgeoning aesthetic that we all know today as streetwear. The fashion of Do the Right Thing is one of the earliest examples of streetwear on the big screen, helping shape the aesthetic of major streetwear brands in the decades following its release.

In Carter’s book, The Art of Ruth. E Carter, she recalls “instructions from Spike: ‘This film is going to have to look hot! Everybody is sweaty.’ He wanted me to make special crop tops and midriffs for the ladies and basketball shorts for the men. We walked around the set all day with spray bottles filled with glycerin and water, spraying people under the arms and on the chest.”

The movie’s younger characters sport colorful tank tops, graphic tees, and (of course) sneakers. Do the Right Thing secured a product placement deal with Nike, a natural fit in what would later become a decades long relationship between Lee and the brand.

Lee’s feature film debut, She’s Gotta Have It, was released just a few years prior and prominently featured Air Jordans. The movie’s success led to Lee revisiting his sneaker-obsessed character Mars Blackmon to star alongside Jordan himself in a now-iconic ad campaign, cementing Lee’s legacy as one of the most influential people in sneaker culture.

One of Do the Right Thing’s most memorable moments comes from a scene in which Buggin’ Out (played by Giancarlo Esposito) confronts a stranger for stepping on his pristine Air Jordan 4s. Lee was the first to bring the rules and etiquette of sneaker culture to the big screen, giving mainstream audiences a look into a growing subculture that was rooted in Black American life. The offending character, the singular white neighbor on the block, represented white privilege, the effects of gentrification, and a (familiar to many) disrespect for the existing community’s culture.

While most of the sneakers used in the film were selected specifically by Lee, Carter added personalized touches. Carter’s additions, like tying a Pan African flag colored bracelet to the laces of Radio Raheem’s Nike Air Revolution’s, remain a touchstone in the visual aesthetic of the sneakers of the film.

In 2006, Jordan released the Spiz'ike in tribute to Lee, which has dropped in dozens of playful colorways in the years since its release. For the 35th anniversary of Do the Right Thing in 2024, 100 numbered pairs of Jordan Spiz’ike Lows were released with numerous special details in homage to the movie. In 2017, Jordan released a Buggin’ Out-inspired kit that included a pair of pre-“scuffed” sneakers to commemorate the scene. Jordan also put out Air Jordan 1 Retro ‘Radio Raheem’ and Air Jordan 2 Retro ‘Radio Raheem’ in colorways inspired by the character’s outfits in the film.

The film’s use of athletic symbols extend beyond shoes - specific team logos and player jerseys reveal character context and personalities without any additional dialogue. The sneaker-scuffing neighbor wore a bright green Larry Bird tee, immediately signaling tension and giving the audience an instant framework for the character, despite his brief appearance.

Spike Lee as Mookie wore his own Jackie Robinson jersey, bringing it to set and announcing to Carter: “I’m gonna wear this.”

“The leather necklaces worn by Buggin Out were also requested by Spike,” recalled Carter. “It was in style to wear something African in Brooklyn and Harlem. Culture was everywhere. But it was truly in direct opposition to the massive amounts of gold being worn by many other urban youths, especially Black inner-city kids. Spike would have none of that. Instead, he insisted on these handwoven necklaces, which were purchased off the tables of street vendors from Brooklyn to Harlem. Giancarlo Esposito added his own personal crystals to his collection of necklaces"

In July of 1989, a month after the release of Do the Right Thing, The New York Times ran a trend piece on the Afrocentric accessories that were suddenly being sold all over the city. The press reflected the continuing cultural and political conversations about Black identity taking place throughout many American communities at the time, and reflected the movie’s immediate impact on NYC style.

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William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996)

Costumes by: Kym Barrett

Directed by: Baz Luhrmann

This movie may be for you if: you love costume parties, you have a flair for the dramatic, and you’ve ever smoked a cigarette on the beach with your shoes and socks on.

Where to watch: available on Hulu, and included in Disney+ premium subscription

For Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 interpretation of Shakespeare, the director brought on fellow grad of Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art, Kym Barrett.

Romeo + Juliet was Barrett’s first official film credit, kicking off a 29 year (and counting!) career in Hollywood. Her work on Romeo + Juliet was widely celebrated, leading her to numerous future collaborations - keep an eye out for her re-appearance in the 100 Fashion Films Project. Barrett’s design skills have taken her beyond the silver screen, with wide-ranging credits that include costumes for Cirque du Soleil, the Metropolitan Opera, and the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Barrett had previously worked with Luhrmann and art director Catherine Martin as a wardrobe assistant on their 1992 movie Strictly Ballroom. The project was the first entry in what would become their Red Curtain Trilogy, followed by Romeo + Juliet and concluded with Moulin Rouge! While their retelling of Shakespeare’s classic was one of many times The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet was adapted for screens (most notably in 1936 and 1968), it’s widely considered one of the most influential film adaptations of his work.

“It was definitely the job you want to have been your first job,” Barrett told Vogue in a 2021 interview. “It was unforgettable.”

Romeo + Juliet noteably retained the play’s original Shakespearean dialogue, pairing Early Modern English with contemporary music and fashion, all against the backdrop of the gritty invented Verona Beach.

“For me, the created world came down to the fact that Shakespeare's plays were always a bit of a pastiche,” noted Martin in the film’s production notes. “They were never one pure period. He never went to Verona and studied in detail the workings of Verona society.” Much as Shakespeare himself conjured a fantasy of Italy, the 1996 Romeo + Juliet invented a beachfront world that included gas station shootouts, video surveillance, and Radiohead.

The weaponry of the original story was replaced with guns, stylized to match the colorful costumes and emblazoned with tongue-in-cheek names like Dagger and Sword.

While most of the movie wardrobe was made from scratch, a few major fashion houses stepped in to offer a hand to the world of Romeo + Juliet. The project was working on a tight budget, so Barrett tapped connections from past photoshoots for help. Miuccia Prada designed Romeo’s custom blue suit for the wedding scene, YSL outfitted the elder Capulets, and Dolce & Gabbana gave the production boxes full of old stock.

“Being Australian, we weren’t really in the fashion world yet,” Barrett said in a 2021 interview with Nylon. “But everywhere we went, people helped us, so it was a pretty cool moment in time.”

The warring Montagues and Capulets were set apart through starkly contrasting stylization. Romeo’s crew wore relaxed, colorful attire, inspired by the kitsch of beachfront cityscapes. “I wanted them to feel like Miami Beach,” Barrett told Nylon. “Like they probably surfed, they went to the beach, they wore Hawaiian shirts, they maybe could have gone into the military.”

The Montagues accessorized with dog tags, chunky rings, and distinct hairstyles. With the exception of one Hawaiian shirt worn by DiCaprio, all of the other colorful prints were hand painted by the costume team. Like the rest of the film, the shirt designs were imbued with religious imagery and symbols with ominous foreshadowing.

One of the most prolific symbols used in the film was the cross, doubly a religiously reference as it was a nod to the film’s titular “star-cross’d lovers.” One was even hidden in the title of the movie, which opted for a “+” symbol instead of “&” or “and” like in Shakespeare’s original naming.

On Juliet’s side, the Capulet uniform was a sleek, Western-inspired look of leather, quilted vests, and lots of silver hardware. Their vests (and matching guns) were hand-painted, like the Montague’s shirts, often including similar religious themes but in their contrasting signature style. Instead of bleached cuts and baby smooth faces, the Capulet men sported slicked back hair and sculpted beards.

For the background characters of Verona Beach? Italian designer, of course.

“[Dolce & Gabbana] came from the showroom with these big boxes of stuff, so the extras fittings were amazingly fun. Everybody loved it,” Barrett told Vogue. “We were able to bastardize some things—we chopped the sleeves off, or we overdyed them to age them, or threw dirt on them.”

What wasn’t hacked up D&G was designed and made by a network of artisans, many of them local to the Mexico City set location. The incredibly detailed craftsmanship seen in Romeo + Juliet went beyond just clothing, including the work of glove makers, milliners, and shoemakers.

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3 Women (1977)

Costumes by: Jules Melillo

Directed by: Robert Altman

This movie may be for you if: you’ve always wanted to have a signature color, you often have strange, vivid dreams, and your summer plans involve haunting a nearby pool.

Where to watch: Available for free via The Internet Archive! Also included in The Criterion Collection if you’re a member.

The colorful wardrobe for 3 Women was created by costume designer Jules Melillo. Almost all of Melillo’s other costuming credits are for menswear looks, most notably a slew of popular crime dramas during his time as Warner Brother’s TV costume director. 3 Women was a distinct departure from the rest of Melillo’s work, a singular bright spot of floral prints and puffy skirts amongst decades of slacks and suiting.

3 Women’s titular women were each given a signature color - Shelly Duvall as Millie wears yellow, Sissy Spacek as Pinkie wears Pink (of course), and Janice Rule’s Willie wears all neutral shades of tan. We also see lots of purple as a neutral fourth color, seemingly belonging not to a single character but to the eerie filmscape itself. Millie lives in the Purple Sage Apartments, and the uniforms at the health spa are a greyish purple that forces the characters out of their chosen colors.

Director Robert Altman said the film came to him in a dream, right down to casting Duvall and Spacek in the leading roles. The resulting movie captured a surreal essence, unfolding with dreamlike uncertainty and a loose plot that departs from the rigid structure of more traditional screenplays. 3 Women maintains an unsettling tension despite a listless aesthetic, not in small part due to the eerie desert setting and composer Gerald Busby’s electrifying score. The main character’s strangely rigid costume colors heighten the sense that they aren’t quite real people, but instead living placeholders for archetypes.

Alongside the three women are three pools, each one linked to a different character in a significant way. While on-screen pools are often associated with luxury and leisure, the pools of 3 Women are unwelcoming, used in strange and unconventional ways. The film was shot in the barren desert landscapes of inland California, providing an endless, seasonless heat that escapes time and reality. Altman described the film as being about “empty vessels in an empty landscape.”

Rule’s Willie is the least central to the story, her wardrobe blending into natural terrain of the film’s the Palm Springs setting. Her clothing is loose and draping, making her pregnant belly the only part of her body that we can clearly see. She doesn’t have any lines at all until late into the movie, spending most of her time as a ghostlike presence observing the other characters from a distance. The pool mural in the film was created by 26-year-old artist Bodhi Wind.

Shelley Duvall as Millie, by contrast, spends most of the movie talking, whether or not anyone is actually listening. Her screen time is rarely punctuated with silence, constantly buzzing with her rambling, mundane, and often improvised dialogue. Millie’s personality is seemingly equal parts naive delusion and boilerplate advice parroted from women’s magazines. Everything about her life is shades of vibrant yellow, coordinated to the extreme. Outside of work, her clothing is almost always yellow, a perfect match to her car (“French mustard”), her plates, her bedding, her furniture, and her bags.

Millie is like a walking time capsule of the biggest trends of the mid-70’s - ruffles, floral prints, puff sleeves, exaggerated collars, long dresses, and matching sets. Her aggressively 70’s dressing feels charming from a modern perspective, sort of obscuring the message of Millie’s costume design for the contemporary viewer.

Her outfits probably felt painfully on-the-nose to its original audience, the 1977 version of the microtrend final boss. In many ways, Millie was a wannabe influencer.

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13 Going on 30 (2004)

Costumes by: Susie DeSanto

Directed by: Gary Winick

This movie may be for you if: you’re a sucker for a gleeful dance number, you fantasize about a walk-in closet full of Fendi baguettes, and you always make a wish at 11:11.

Where to watch: Netflix, also available to rent on multiple other platforms

This movie came out the year I turned 13. I’m now 30(ish). Revisiting 13 Going on 30 for the first time as an adult was charming, nostalgic, and mildly unsettling. The costume design is just as much fun as I remember, and Garner and Ruffalo were a magical pairing. The romantic storyline itself? Sketchy, at best. This is definitely a movie firmly planted in a bygone era, only possible with an audience ready to ignore the major issues with a child-in-an-adult-body romcom. I’d like to think this wouldn’t fly today, but who really knows anything about anything anymore.

So let us suspend reality, sprinkle ourselves in magic dust, and get into the whimsical costume design of 13 Going on 30.

The fabulous 80’s-meets-Y2K world of 13 Going on 30 was brought to life with the help of costume designer Susie DeSanto.

Fashion cycles have reached superspeed in recent years thanks to rapidly shifting technology and culture, but throughout most of the 20th century, style moved on a 20 year cycle. The 20 year gap between the 1980’s and 2000’s meant there was a strong 80’s influence on Y2K fashion, making the two eras the perfect counterpoints. 13 Going on 30 starts in the late 80’s with spandex and side ponytails, jumps to the early 2000’s with Miu Miu and stilettos, then slowly finds itself somewhere in the middle as our characters discover their own balance.

Jennifer Garner stars as Jenna Rink, an awkward teenager in 1987 who magically finds herself thrown into her own future. In the year 2004, Rink is a stylish NYC fashion editor, the career du jour for rom com starlets of the early 2000’s (and why so many women my age grew up dreaming of working in print media!).

Rink’s 30-year-old closet was full of designer clothing, key to the lifestyle of someone in the fashion industry elite. DeSanto crafted a style for the movie that was chic but playful, expertly crafting a tween fantasy told through an adult wardrobe.

“It speaks to a time in fashion when things were more feminine and weren’t deconstructed yet,” she said in a 2019 interview with InStyle. “People were really wearing a lot of color.” The 13 on 30 wardrobe included labels like Marc Jacobs, Fendi, Prada, Miu Miu, Chloé, and Nanette Lepore.

DeSanto told InStyle that the film’s numerous Fendi baguettes made their way into the film courtesy of director Gary Winick. “He grew up on the Upper West Side, and his mom was quite the fashionista,” she said. “So he really knew his handbags.” The purse was hugely popular in the early 2000’s largely thanks to Carrie Bradshaw’s extensive collection, so it made sense that a fashion editor like Rink would also be a fan.

Fendi was the first luxury brand to lend pieces to Sex and the City, and it proved to be a brilliant marketing move that paved the way for a growing industry of on-screen brand gifting.

While working on 13 Going on 30, DeSanto met someone from Fendi who similarly insisted for the film “‘You must use our purses. Pick whatever you want.’” That connection resulted in over 30 genuine Fendi baguette bags on set, most of which can be seen displayed in the scene in which Jenna first steps foot in her dreamy grown-up closet.

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Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Costumes by: Theadora Van Runkle

Directed by: Arthur Penn

This movie may be for you if: you love a chic little hat, you’re into mixing decades, and your type is whoever is the worst for you.

Where to watch: included in Hulu & YouTube premium subscriptions, available to rent for $3.99 on various other platforms

Long before the days of viral podcasts and Netflix specials, America was captured by scandalous newspaper clippings on American true crime’s first couple: Bonnie and Clyde. The infamous duo has been reimagined in dozens of ways since their thrilling rise and demise, but few renditions have impacted the cultural consciousness like Arthur Penn’s loosely biographical 1967 neo-noir film Bonnie and Clyde. The movie is set in the real-life couple’s depression era hayday, influenced by violent gangster films of the 1930’s and the French New Wave movement of the late 50’s and early 60’s.

Bonnie and Clyde marked the end of Hayes-era subtlety, shocking audiences with frank sexuality and previously unseen amounts of blood. “The movie opened like a slap in the face,” wrote Roger Ebert looking back on the film. “American filmgoers had never seen anything like it."

While many critics struggled to praise the movie’s so-called glorification of graphic violence, Bonnie and Clyde’s embrace by its countercultural era audience proved that America were ready for the New Hollywood. The movie was brash and shocking, but beneath it all, undoubtedly romantic. Stars Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty made crime look good, in no small part to costumes design by Theadora Van Runkle. The trailblazing project marked both the start of Van Runkle’s film costuming career and her relationship with Dunaway.

The two would go on to work on several films together, with Van Runkle also creating Dunaway’s entire off-screen wardrobe at the time. This was somewhat common in the days before celebrity stylists, when many older Hollywood stars bonded with costume designers and hired them to work on their personal wardrobes. Van Runkle was nominated for the Best Costume Design Oscar for her work on Bonnie and Clyde, and would receive two more nominations throughout her costuming career.

To create the looks for Bonnie and Clyde, Van Runkle studied the styles of the 1930’s. She referenced old photos of gangsters from the era, focusing on a famous series of the real-life Bonnie and Clyde. In the midst of the duo’s crime spree, they were joined by Clyde’s brother, Buck, and his wife, Blanche, in Joplin, Missouri. The crew temporarily hid out in an apartment, narrowly evading the police and leaving their possessions behind in their escape.

Amongst a large arsenal of abandoned weapons were Buck’s three-week-old parole papers, a handwritten poem by Parker, and several undeveloped rolls of film. The photos were developed at The Joplin Globe, revealing numerous shots of the young fugitives posing with guns and cigars. The dramatic staging indicated that the photos were exaggerated for the crew’s own entertainment, but the striking images catapulted them to instant stardom. Several publicity photos for the 1967 movie were almost shot-for-shot recreations of the titillating originals.

Van Runkle had no design experience prior to starting working on Penn’s “little Western” - the director purposely chose a fresh new talent to ensure the film carried no vestiges of Old Hollywood. While shopping for textile samples in Beverly Hills, Van Runkle ran into legendary costume designer Edith Head. According to Van Runkle’s telling, Head’s advice was to “just dress [Bonnie] in chiffon.” She ignored the advice, instead choosing to create outfits more closely in line with the real Bonnie Parker’s style, but with updates to appeal to the late 60’s audience.

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Casino (1995)

Costumes by: Rita Ryack and John A. Dunn

Directed by: Martin Scorsese

This movie may be for you if: your first stop in a time machine would be 1970’s Las Vegas, your personal style has been described as “loud,” and your favorite word is fuck.

Where to watch: It’s currently free on Tubi!

What better way to commemorate the 2nd anniversary of my own Las Vegas wedding than a look at the film that inspired our nuptial aesthetic: Martin Scorsese’s 1995 mob drama Casino.

Casino illuminates a unique intersection of American excess, set in a particularly debaucherous decade in a particularly debaucherous city. The original story was based on the real lives of Frank Rosenthal, Geri McGee, and Anthony Spilotro, and the highly dramatic movie retelling is surprisingly more accurate than I would have expected. The movie was adapted for the screen from a non-fiction book by author Nicholas Pileggi, who worked on the screenplay alongside Scorsese. The stellar cast played perfectly alongside the film’s larger-than-life star: the city of Las Vegas itself.

Costume designers Rita Ryack and John Dunn created a wardrobe with a reported budget of over a million dollars. Robert De Niro as Sam “Ace” Rothstein had over 70 different looks, while Sharon Stone as Ginger McKenna wore over 30 outfits. Beyond the numerous highly detailed looks for the main cast, the costume department was also responsible for over 7,000 extras, from blackjack dealers to showgirls. Much of Casino’s wardrobe was pulled from vintage archives to create an authentic 70’s-80’s look.

To be as accurate as possible for both costuming and character, De Niro and Ryack went to Florida to meet with the real life Rosenthal. They looked at his photo albums, went through his closet, and consulted with his shirt makers. All of De Niro’s suits were custom made by a New York tailor to match the cuts, colors, and styles of Rosenthal’s original suiting, but to be perfectly fitted to De Niro just as Rosenthal’s were perfectly fitted to him.

My husband knew he wanted to wear a green suit for our wedding, and a re-watch of Casino during our planning sparked the inspiration for the direction of his look. He went to P. Johnson tailor here in New York to design a wide lapel, double breasted forest green mohair suit. He opted for monochrome styling, as seen on De Niro in one of the best shots in Casino, pairing a silk Tom Ford shirt with an ecru silk tie. A sweet Lily of the Valley boutonniere tied the look together (flown from New York by my dear friend and florist Joanna Block!).

“Rita was an enormous help, and she really is a genius,” Stone told Vogue in a 2020 interview for the film’s 25th anniversary. “Very few people have that kind of intense understanding of the whole amalgam of everything—how it goes with the period, how it goes with the emotional sweep of the picture. Very few people see it as a whole, and not just a rack of clothing. When you walk on set and the costumes are correct, they not only define your character but they define the interplay of your character with the other characters and where you belong on the set. It all starts to make sense.”

As the son of a seamstress and a garment presser, Scorsese was raised with a special appreciation for clothing. Rita Ryack is my favorite costume designer - you may remember my annual obsession with the fashion of The Grinch. Scorsese has worked with Ryack on multiple projects thanks to her masterful way of storytelling through fashion.

In an unforgettable scene, Ace stands up at his desk before a meeting to reveal that he isn’t wearing any pants. The character cares so much about his appearance that he works in his shirt and underwear so that he doesn’t wrinkle or ruin the creases in his crisply pressed suits.

When Ryack and Dunn couldn’t find the exact vintage items they were looking for, the wardrobe team made the pieces themselves. “If we couldn't find specific [pieces], then we would create an exact replica of a costume that was worn,” said Stone. Ginger’s bridal suit, shown below, was a copy of the look that the real Geri McGee wore to her wedding to Rosenthal.

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Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Costumes by: Anthea Sylbert

Directed by: Roman Polanski

This movie may be for you if: your husband and neighbors may be gaslighting you, you wear a lot of yellow, and you’re constantly fighting the urge to chop off your hair (again).

Where to watch: Included with a few subscriptions (The Criterion Collection, Paramount+, YouTube, Roku Channel, Amazon Prime Video) and available to rent on several other services.

Rosemary’s Baby is a perfect film to me, with the singular exception of the horrendous behavior of its director. Let us turn our attention instead to the three shining stars of this movie: Mia Farrow as Rosemary Woodhouse, Anthea Sylbert as the movie’s costume designer, and Rosemary and Guy’s glorious 60’s Renaissance Revival apartment.

The horror genre often utilizes darkness and gloom, relying on dingy interiors and foggy nights to create a sense of foreboding. Rosemary’s Baby is instead unsettling in its brightness, full of cheerful floral wallpaper, sweet babydoll dresses, and buttery yellow kitchen appliances. The film’s visual levity mirrors the unsteadiness of Rosemary’s world, an eerie reflection of the evil that can lurk beneath picture-perfect aesthetics. The film manages to remain just as scary 57 years later through its masterful use of tension.

Costume designer Anthea Sylbert dressed Rosemary as the ideal 1960’s gamine - feminine, youthful, sweet. Her outfits feature Peter Pan collars, exuberant prints, and ruffles in swingy, babydoll shapes. Her style was typical of the era, stylish in a way that audiences would find familiar. In Designing Movies: Portrait of a Hollywood Artist, Sylbert recalls her conversations with the director. “'Let's make 'em think we're doing a Doris Day movie,’” Sylbert remembers him telling her. “He wanted everything to look ordinary. People are put at ease by ordinary, and in fact, are put at ease by garish. He didn't want anything in the film to seem sinister."

In contrast to the demure, stylish Rosemary is neighbor and villain Minnie Castevet. Played by Ruth Gordon, Mrs. Castevet wears 1960’s style turned all the way up. Her character is on-trend in a way that viewers are meant to find distasteful - too made up, over accessorized. And worst of all, as a woman: old. Her jewelry is always overized and piled on, even when she’s dropping by in the middle of the day, her blush always harshly applied on her cheeks.

Below is a stunning shot in which Mrs. Castevet makes a phone call from Rosemary’s bedroom, her face and most of the phone obscured from view. (For more on the film’s brilliant camera work, read cinematographer William A. Fraker’s recollections of his experience on set here.)

Color plays an essential role in the film, with entire scenes washed in full monochrome from the furniture to the dresses to Rosemary’s blonde bob. Yellow is a core color, used liberally on both the costumes and the set design as Rosemary and Guy move in and decorate their new home. We first meet Rosemary in a white dress, and we quickly learn she gravitates towards blue, yellow, and neutrals. As the tale progresses, her wardrobe darkens to match her darkening fate, serving as a visual marker of her innocence and purity slowly tarnished.

Vivid splashes of red appear in striking moments throughout the film, jarring in their contrast. Rosemary suddenly appears wearing all red at the start of a pivotal scene in the film, cluing in the audience that something about that night was unlike the others. A single piece of red artwork hangs on their apartment walls, red roses are delivered into a scene otherwise devoid of any other bright colors.

If you’re in the resist-the-urge-to-cut phase of growing out your hair, I do not recommend watching this movie. Rosemary goes from a perfect bob to a perfect pixie, pulling off both cuts with such aplomb that I’m guaranteed to have my hair stylist’s booking calendar open by the time the end credits are rolling.

The film plays with the vital importance of hair and autonomy. As Rosemary’s life and body spiral out of her control, she clings to the choices she is allowed to make for herself. Her dramatic haircut is a final act of desperate self-determination, an attempt at grasping on to her slipping agency, if only in some small part. It also continues a central theme of men’s control over women’s bodies as we see the male characters react negatively to Rosemary’s new hair.

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Shaft (1971)

Costumes by: Joseph G. Aulisi

Directed by: Gordon Parks

This movie may be for you if: you are inspired by the styling of Black revolutionaries, daydream about 1970’s New York City, and love a man in a turtleneck (with a gun).

Where to watch: I don’t currently see it streaming free anywhere. It’s available to rent for $3.99 on YouTube, Apple TV, and multiple other platforms.

Shaft is a cornerstone and early example of the American Blaxploitation film, widely considered one of the best movies in the genre. The term itself was coined a year after the release of Shaft by Junius Griffin, president of the Beverly Hills-Hollywood branch of the NAACP. Griffin and other members criticized the burgeoning genre for proliferating stereotypes of violence and inherent criminality in the Black community. The legacy of John Shaft’s character is complicated, but there’s one thing we can all agree on: Shaft looked cool as hell.

Costume designer Joseph G. Aulisi worked on theater productions for years before making his film debut with Shaft. Like almost every other costume designer featured in this project, Aulisi is white. The costumes in Shaft are clearly inspired by real-life Black culture, but interpreted from the outsider perspective of a white designer.

Leading man Richard Roundtree was a successful model before pivoting to the big screen, launching a long-running movie career with his portrayal of private detective John Shaft. The film opens on the streets of 1970’s New York City, following Roundtree as he jaywalks in a striking leather coat. The scene is emblematic of director Gordon Parks’ signature style, offering viewers stylized yet storied depictions of the Black experience in America.

Roundtree’s confident masculinity was essential to creating a successful hero character at the time. Shaft is hot, strong, and misogynistic - exactly what audiences in 1970 wanted.

The film’s opening montage concludes with Shaft entering a shoe shine shop, quickly establishing the importance of appearance to his character. His signature piece is a long, dark brown leather coat with oversized lapels, a fashion-forward silhouette of the time. Beneath the coat, Shaft wears well-tailored suits, flares, and fitted sweaters. His fashion is firmly planted in the early 70’s, suave but showy, in warm earth tones that characterized the fashion of the era. Shaft is always impeccably dressed, his sharp attire always trumping the questionable logistics of actually wearing a long leather coat to do action-hero detective work.

Shaft’s costuming was highly referencial to the styling of the Black Panther Party, founded five years before the movie’s release. Black revolutionaries of the 1960’s had adopted leather jackets as an unofficial uniform, marking a shift away from the “Sunday Best” fashions of earlier Black liberatory organizations. Powerful activists were rejecting the respectability politics as prescribed by earlier factions in the American Civil Rights Movement, instead turning to Afro-centric fashion and symbolic garments like berets, slogan buttons, and afros.

The Black militant group in the film, called The Lumumbas, were undoubtedly inspired by the real-life Black revolutionaries that Parks knew. In 1970, LIFE Magazine tasked Parks with reporting on the Black Panthers, focusing on party leader Eldridge Cleaver. Fleeing government persecution, Cleaver and his wife Kathleen moved to Algiers, where they were interviewed and photographed by Parks around the same time that he would have been working on Shaft.

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Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

Costumes by: William “Billy” Travilla

Directed by: Howard Hawks

This movie may be for you if: you’ll happily run up a man’s tab, you love a classic bestie caper, and you believe no outfit is complete without matching accessories.

Where to watch: I don’t currently see it streaming free anywhere. It’s available to rent for $3.99 on YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Movies, and multiple other platforms.

Hollywood has never been a stranger to a remake. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a fun, glamorous musical comedy based on a 1949 stage musical, which was itself based on a comic novel from 1925. The original story was written by Anita Loos, the first female staff screenwriter in Hollywood. Her story debuted the now-legendary Lorelei Lee as a self-indulgent flapper during the Jazz Age. Every version of this story was a hit - the Broadway show had a 740 show run, and the book was the second-best selling title of 1926 in the US, highly praised by literary stars like William Faulkner and Edith Wharton.

Now known best for one of Marilyn Monroe’s most memorable roles, the costume design for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was done by William Travilla. The artist and designer primarily worked on Twentieth Century Fox films before moving to TV costuming in the 1970’s. Travilla provided award-winning designs for everything from Adventures of Don Juan (1949) to Dallas (1984-1986), but is best known for dressing Monroe in eight of her films. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes includes one of the most iconic dresses in movie history, along with an additional 20+ looks for its leading ladies.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was one of three movies released in 1953 starring Marilyn Monroe. She was paid significantly less than her co-star, Jane Russell, who was much more well known at the time of filming. According to Monroe in one of her final interviews, she was paid her usual salary of $500 per week for the project, earning her only $18,000 compared to Russell’s $200,000 paycheck. 1953 was really the year Monroe became a true mainstream movie star, and the costuming for Blondes played a big part in cementing her legacy of playing sultry, glamorous characters in fabulous Travilla designs.

The fashion of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is feminine, form-fitting, and highly coordinated. Every look has multiple complementary accessories - of course there’s tons of dazzling jewelry, but also belts, hats, scarves, and shawls. Showgirls Lee and Shaw were dressed to turn heads even when they weren’t performing, often wearing bright colors, bold prints, and plenty of matching sets as were popular during the time.

Though not nearly the most famous look from the film, my personal favorite outfit is Monroe’s bright orange dress. Trust Travilla to make crystals and beads in Hi-C orange look classy. This look undoubtedly inspired many of the tragic knockoffs on the dance floor of my 2009 prom, as the figure-hugging ruched mermaid shape has inevitably come back in style every other decade. The dress was likely kept by the studio after filming, as it reappeared on Abbey Lincoln just four years later for her movie debut in The Girl Can’t Help It (1957). Lincoln appeared on the cover of Ebony magazine in the dress, though has lamented the look and its associations in later interviews.

More famous was Monroe’s pleated gold lamé dress, which is actually more recognized from publicity images than its brief appearance in the film. The dress was deemed too inappropriate for audiences to show in its entirety, so was only glimpsed by audiences from behind in one short scene.

But most famous of all, of course, is Monroe’s hot pink dress and gloves for a legendary rendition of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” An outfit fitting such a song clearly needed to be sparkly, but the original concept was completely different than the finished look. Travilla later recalled in an interview that “the idea then was that the studio make her the sexiest, most exciting, almost-naked lady on the screen.”

The original costume design, shown below in wardrobe tests, was an illusion look created with fishnet hose over a nude bodystocking and layers of jewelry strategically placed to cover just enough skin.

During filming, news broke that Monroe had posed for fully nude photos just a few years prior. The photos were included in a calendar that was already quite widely circulated, and one of those images would be featured later that year in the first issue of Playboy Magazine without Monroe’s consent. The executives as Twentieth Century Fox tried to convince Marilyn to deny the claims, but she refused. She granted an exclusive interview to discuss the situation, in which she very honestly admitted “I was broke and needed the money. Why deny it? Besides, I’m not ashamed of it, I’ve done nothing wrong.”

The scandal and the ensuing press just made Monroe an even bigger star, but the studio executives scrambled to “fix” the scandalous look planned for the upcoming film. They demanded that Travilla redesign the fishnet look for something significantly more covered up. The new design was a vibrant pink dress and gloves that covered most of Monroe’s body. A belt cinched her famously small waist, while an oversized bow was added to highlight her figure while dancing.

Travilla created the shape by backing the pink silk in green billiard felt, and the piece came together using just two side seams. “The dress was folded into shape, rather like cardboard,” he said of the design. “Any other girl would have looked like she was wearing cardboard, but on the screen I swear you would have thought Marilyn had on a pale, thin piece of silk. Her body was so fabulous, it still came through!”

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Early sketches of the look actually show it paired with long black gloves and black shoes, but Travilla changed the accessories to pink for the final design. The gloves worn were an exact match to the dress, with a lighter pink fabric at the palms.

The number’s dazzling “diamonds” are frequently misattributed to Harry Winston, who loaned real jewels to films like The Graduate and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. However, the many gems in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes were synthetic stones credited to Joan Joseff of Joseff of Hollywood. A collection of Joseffs’ costume jewelry is currently on exhibition at The Hollywood Museum in LA. Marilyn Monroe is mentioned in some of the exhibit press, but I couldn’t find more information on exactly which items are on display. Maybe you could see these exact “Girl’s Best Friend”s for yourself!

The pink dress sold for auction in 2010 for over $300,000, though there were some questions about whether the piece at auction was the exact piece used in the original performance.

This look has gone down in history as one of the most memorable and influential looks in Hollywood, earning itself its own wikipedia page. Lorelei’s pink dress and gloves have been imitated, referenced, and parodied in everything from ad campaigns to red carpets. Perhaps the most well-known homage comes from Madonna’s 1985 music video for Material Girl, in which the singer recreates Monroe’s performance from the set to the hair to, of course, the dress.

Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 Moulin Rouge! references both Monroe and Madonna in a mash up rendition of “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” and “Material Girl.” Kidman doesn’t wear hot pink, instead drawing parallels through a sparkling showgirl suit and a crowd of adoring men.

Monroe’s song and dance number is so immediately recognizable, it’s also served as a go-to dream/fantasy sequence for the delusional main characters of Birds of Prey, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and Gossip Girl.

Mattel produced a Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Barbie in 1997. I was pretty surprised not to see a reference to the look in the 2023 Barbie movie, but eventually received an homage in Ryan Gosling’s pink-suited Oscar performance. And Gosling’s song and dance number actually wasn’t the first time a male actor had made reference to the “Diamonds” look at the Oscars, following a 2011 cross-dressing bit by James Franco that definitely wouldn’t amuse contemporary audiences today.

While the list is missing a few of my favorite examples, People magazine put together Every Star Who Has Had a Marilyn Monroe ‘Diamonds’ Moment if you’re curious to see who else has paid tribute to Travilla’s original design. The Wikipedia page for the song also includes an extensive list of covers and tributes.

For obvious reasons, this movie sits firmly atop the 100 Fashion Films Project list. While other 10/10 films will inevitably join it at the summit, William Travilla created a truly legendary look that will be pretty hard to beat.

Overall Rank: 10/10

Fashion: 10/10

Influence: 10/10

Movie: 7/10

Confession: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was my first Marilyn Monroe movie! Clips and photos don’t do her unique brand of breathless charm justice, and I really did enjoy the one-of-a-kind performance she brought to the big screen. She’ll be making one more appearance on this project, but you’ll just have to wait and see how and when…

Until next time! Happy Valentine’s Day, lovers.

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