MGM Archives via Wikimedia Commoms
March 3, 1903 – Adrian
In Sunset Boulevard (1950), Gloria Swanson playing Norma Desmond says: “We had faces then”. For certain, yet more importantly, female stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood had clothes.
Garbo in “Romance” (1931)
During that era, the single-named designer Adrian created the most glamorous and widely seen clothing in the world. Ironically, his glittering gowns and flamboyant ensembles made for Jean Harlow, Norma Scherer, Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo were film costumes, not high fashion. As chief costume designer for MGM, Adrian did more than design, he transformed actors into glamorous movie stars. He designed costumes for over 250 films and his screen credits usually read: “Gowns by Adrian”. Seen by millions of film fans across our pretty planet, his costumes were the most copied clothes in the world.
He was born Adrian Adolph Greenberg; his parents owned a millinery shop in Connecticut. He studied at the NY School for Fine and Applied Arts (now Parsons) in 1922 before transferring to the Paris campus. There he was hired by Irving Berlin to design costumes for Berlin’s The Music Box Revue. Natacha Rambova, Rudolph Valentino’s bisexual wife, herself a talented designer, saw his work and hired him for A Sainted Devil (1924) and he was soon hired as head designer for Paramount Pictures. He moved over to MGM in 1928 and stayed until 1941.
In a 1937 interview he said:
“Few people in an audience watching a great screen production realize the importance of any gown worn by the feminine star, the fact that it was definitely planned to mirror some definite mood, to be as much a part of the play as the lines or the scenery, seldom occurs to them.”
Proving a woman didn’t need a perfect figure to look gorgeous, he drew attention to the garment itself to camouflage an actor’s imperfections. Crawford was short with broad shoulders and large hips, so Adrian created her signature look using padded shoulders that made Crawford’s hips look smaller. Garbo was flat chested and straight-waisted yet in her costumes for Mata Hari (1931), she has curves.
Preferring simplicity, his talent was for draping featuring bold outlines and long tapered waistlines with diagonal fastenings.
Adrian’s greatest skill was his ability to absorb high fashion trends from Paris, rework them for a particular star, and amp up the look to enhance a film’s dramatic story line. He transformed the traditional studio wardrobe department into a full-fledged creative machine in the manner of the fashion workrooms in Paris.
Shearer with Leslie Howard in “Romeo And Juliet, MGM via YouTube
When designing for period pieces, Adrian overlooked historical accuracy, making the dresses more dynamic onscreen. Shearer’s beaded cap in George Cukor’s Romeo And Juliet (1936) was thoroughly modern and became all the rage among American women. I am not sure what era MGM was going for, but the disagreements between Adrian, art director Cedric Gibbons, and set designer Oliver Messel, resulted in Romeo And Juliet’s incoherent look, pleasing no one. But Adrian’s gowns, what ever period inspired him, are the star, and copies of them were everywhere that year.
The wide-shouldered white organdy dress worn by Crawford in Letty Lynton (1932) was widely copied; Macy’s Cinema Shop which sold dresses based on “Gowns by Adrian” sold half a million of them. Some retail garments were marketed as having the “Adrian silhouette”. MGM used Adrian’s costumes as a promotional tool and allowed magazines to publish his designs and techniques so that women could make them at home.
The December 1932 issue of Fortune Magazine wrote an in-depth piece about the success of MGM Studios. The focusing of the article was Irving Thalberg, the studio’s production head at the time. Thalberg said that the praise for MGM’s success should really go to two others: art director Cedric Gibbons and costume designer Adrian. Adrian routinely produced 50 sketches a day and earned $1,000 a week at MGM.
With Garbo
Camille (1936), with Garbo, is nearly an entirely gay film, almost every actor, notably Robert Taylor, involved, as well as the director (Cukor) and all the designers, were either L, G, B T or Q.
Adrian designed 14 gowns for Garbo for The Two Faced Woman (1941) but MGM wanted low-cut gowns that both Adrian and Garbo loathed, so the pair left MGM. Adrian:
“It was because of Garbo that I left MGM. In her last picture they wanted to make her a sweater girl, a real American type. I said, ‘When the glamour ends for Garbo, it also ends for me…’ When Garbo walked out of the studio, glamour went with her and so did I.”
He returned to MGM one more time a decade later for Lovely To Look At (1952).
When those nasty Nazis invaded Paris in 1940, the couture houses closed. American designers had always looked to Parisian fashions for their inspiration and they were also affected by the fabric restrictions during WW II. In 1941, Adrian opened his salon in Beverly Hills, Adrian Ltd, with new looks that were casual, practical and durable.
His first collection was shown at the May Company department store in L.A. and he was soon selling his designs in department stores across the USA. His ready to wear line was called “Adrian Original” and his couture clothing was labeled “Adrian Custom”. To remain exclusive, he allowed just one store in each city to sell his collections. He designed suits that served as both career clothing for the emerging class of professional women and as travel wear. He had an ability to seam and piece complimentary gradations of striped woolens, varying their widths and placement into seemingly endless pattern variations. None of his hundreds of suit designs were exactly the same. This creativity and elevated level of custom-made quality were even more amazing considering it was a wartime era.
Katharine Hepburn in “Philadelphia Story” via YouTube
He frequently designed prints of animals, such as the famous “Roan Stallion” evening gown, now part of the 100 Adrian costumes in the Costume Institute at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the The Egg And I (1947) at-home dress with its furious barnyard hens. After a trip to Africa in 1949, animal and reptile prints were used for a gown of tiger-skin taffeta and a hooded evening suit made from heavy silk that looked like an iridescent snakeskin.
Metropolitan Museum
He also produced fragrances, notably “Saint” and “Sinner” perfumes and “Gilbert” cologne. Gilbert was his father’s name and he sometimes used the name Adrian Gilbert professionally.
The Academy Award for Best Costume Design wasn’t introduced until 1948, so Adrian was never nominated. Yet, he was the definitive force behind 1930s Hollywood glamour, probably the greatest fashion decade.
Although openly gay, in 1939 Adrian entered into one of those modern marriage arrangements with actor Janet Gaynor, a lesbian, in response to the anti-gay attitudes of studio heads, particularly Louis B. Mayer, the ‘M’ of MGM studios.
With Jeanette MacDonald, MGM Archives via YouTube
During his time at MGM, Adrian worked with the biggest female stars: Garbo, Shearer, Harlow, Jeanette MacDonald and Katharine Hepburn. He worked with Crawford 28 times. He was Garbo’s designer of choice over the course of her career. The Eugénie hat he created for her in the film Romance (1931) became a sensation and influenced millinery style for the rest of the decade.
Shearer, Crawford and Rosalind Russell in “The Women”, MGM via YouTube
Adrian was most famous for those evening gown designs worn by these fabulous females, and nowhere do you get to see his range quite like as in The Women (1939). The Women was filmed in black and white, but it originally included a 10-minute fashion show filmed in Technicolor, which featured Adrian’s most outré designs. The scene is cut in most versions released, but it has been restored to the film by Turner Classic Movies. Adrian also went over the top with his extravagant costumes for The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and theatrically opulent dresses for Camille (1936) and Marie Antoinette (1938).
He had a little antique shop on Sunset and a house in Palm Springs, but after suffering a heart attack in 1952, Adrian closed his businesses and retired to a ranch in Brazil with Gaynor, where they both spent time painting. He returned to the USA in 1958 to design costumes for the Broadway musical Camelot, when he suffered a second, fatal heart attack. Adrian was gone at just 56-years-old. However, there has always been speculation that his death was actually a suicide. Gaynor lived to be 77-years-old and left this world in 1986 at the house in Palm Springs.
All those astonishing gowns of his design, yet Adrian is now probably best remembered for a little blue and white gingham dress and a pair of red shoes. He designed all the costumes for The Wizard Of Oz (1939) from Judy Garland’s dress to Glinda’s gown, flying monkey hats to the Scarecrow, including 100 costumes for little people in the Munchkinland.
Via YouTube
He designed two test pairs of Ruby Slippers. Though the shoes were silver in the books, Adrian made them ruby red for Technicolor film. One, the ‘Arabian test pair,’ had curling toes and heels, but they detracted from Dorothy’s farm girl image.
Each ruby slipper had 2,300 sequins, and there were at least 10 pairs. One pair was a half size larger for Garland to wear in the afternoon after her feet were swollen.
One pair of the slippers were auctioned by MGM’s wardrobe department in 1970 for $15,000. The anonymous donor gave them to the Smithsonian Institution in 1979. In 2000, another pair of ruby slippers sold for $666,000 at auction.
