Edith Head and Alfred Hitchcock; A Hauntingly Good Pair
I know that it’s Halloween month and I could be talking about all these different costume and horror movie ideas. But this month I wanted to focus on the legacy of Edith Head and her collaboration with the master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock. On what would be her 125th birthday I wanted to scratch the surface on their collaboration and her incredible eye for the craft of costume design. There’s a reason why she’s a legend.
Edith Head’s legacy has not only become synonymous with costume history but film history. A large part of that is due to her collaborations Hitch.
Head began working for Paramount in 1924 as a sketch artist, ironically enough she wasn’t a gifted artist and used the sketches of her former students to get by. Her superiors admired her gumption for gaining the job but recognized her eye for talent as a designer. She never took the credit for someone else’s sketches, but she was never explicitly asked by her superiors if they were hers either. By 1930 she has become a renowned designer who’s status in the motion picture industry only grew. In 1945 Ingrid Bergman asked Paramount to ‘loan out’ Head to RKO Pictures for Hitchcock’s newest film Notorious staring Bergman. She had worked with Bergman twice before, but she never really had the opportunity to design her more fashion forward pieces. Edith always admired and even looked to modern fashion to influence her designs for characters, but never wanting to truly become a “fashion designer”. She felt that job was to restricting, and she loved the freedom to play with these characters in their stories.
In the Golden Age and under the studio system, you were contracted to one studio, if another director at another studio wanted to use you or your work, new temporary contracts needed to be drawn up to then allow you to do your work elsewhere. The flexibility of moving studios was infinitely easier for directors and under the influence of Hitch and Bergman, Edith was able to go out on loan that much easier.
On their first collaboration Hitchcock trusted Edith with bringing this film to life through the medium of clothing. Head was so nervous because of how meticulous she knew Hitchcock to be, she quickly realized that they spoke the same language and because of their blunt personalities and specificities for how they each approached their craft, they were a match made in cinema heaven. Everything Hitch wanted down to the fabric of each piece was spelled out in the script and if it wasn’t a major plot devise, he relied on pieces that didn’t distract or deter the audience from the story. Edith says Hitchcock has a complete phobia of what he calls ‘eye-catchers’; unless there is a story reason for the color, we keep all the colors muted. She knew that Ingrid looked good in just about everything but wanted to blend the two worlds her character Alicia lives in. Conveying her purpose and story through line as a spy but highlighting the love story that takes place around the espionage. For a black and white film, Edith utilized the stark contrast of how blacks and whites appeared on the screen, knowing that any other color would appear in shades of grey. She singled out Bergman in many scenes with this pallet so that all eyes would be on her. That zebra top in one of our first encounters with her proves the simplicity but striking effect of how Edith understood the task at hand.
From this film and for eleven others, Edith and Hitch would collaborate. Each time fine tuning their collaborative process (as much as Hitch could collaborate) and create some of the most iconic looks on screen. These films have been remembered for their wardrobes since they graced the screens and yet she has never won an Oscar for one, don’t worry she has eight Oscar’s for her other work out of the thirty-five films she was nominated for over the years.
Her biggest crowning jewel in the Hitchcock collaboration were the pieces she created for the ever-timeless Grace Kelly in Rear Window (’54) and To Catch A Thief (’55). In Rear Window Grace plays Lisa Fremont, the girlfriend to Jimmy Stewart’s character L.B. Jefferies. She is a sophisticated and high-class woman who gets pulled into investing one of L.B.’s neighbors whom he suspects has killed his wife. Taking place in one location Grace enters the room each time with a new chic suit or dress contrasting Stewart’s powder blue PJ’s. Hitch never liked bright colors so Head had to find a way to use the colors in the story to show each character’s inner status but also not distracting. According to Dr. Landis in her BFI lecture on Head in 2012, she said that Hitch felt that Kelly was a piece of Dresden China compared to Stewart. Her clothing had to reflect that and tell that story. Head made Kelly look delicate on first glace but gave her this inner strength that she, by the end of picture, reveals to us. This was also one of the first and only times she put a character in a print. She chose florals for that gown used by Kelly in the final moments. Always afraid to use prints in case they went out of style, she never wanted to date her pieces, she knew that two things would never go out of style and that was Grace Kelly and florals. She also created a color specifically used for Grace in this movie that she reintroduced for Tippi Hedren in The Birds (’63). Odinie Green was that color, and you can see the beautifully tailored suit that Lisa walks in wearing. One of the most iconic shots from the film is of Grace lying in that suit in the foreground and Stewart seated in the wheelchair in the background. When she reintroduced the world to the Odinie Green suit again in The Birds, she and Hitch wanted a color and shape for Melanie Daniels that the audience would not tire of throughout the film. Hitch wanted Tippi in blue and green, that’s it. For ninety percent of the film Hedren is seen in that suit, so not only was a color needed to carry the story, but the garment itself needed to perform all the actions that Tippi’s character goes through.
Edith Head would make her last film with Hitchcock in 1976 with the Family Plot, and her life and legacy as a costume designer would carry on well after her death. What makes Edith such an incredible force in the field was not for her zany and out there designs, like so many others are revered for, but her simple understanding of character and how to wear clothing. Sandy Powell said it best in the introduction to the book on her life and legacy written by Jay Jorgensen; About eighty percent of what a costume designer does is psychology; only about twenty percent is art. Which is one-hundred percent true. Edith Head understood people, she understood storytelling, and above all she understood clothing. Her contributions to the horror genre and to the art of cinema as a whole are unmatched, and she has set a president today for every designer that has come after her. We all are upholding small bits of her legacy whether we realize it or not every time we approach a script.
