From now until August 14, 2016, a current
exhibition going on at The
Decorative Arts Center of Ohio in Lancaster, Ohio: Edith Head and Company:
Costumes and Jewelry, 1924-2015, showcases 40+ costumes and 16 pieces of
jewelry on display. Edith Head had an unprecedented career and this exhibition
about her and her contemporaries highlights her talent and influence. She
empowered women in the motion picture industry.
If you would like to connect with the
Columbus (OH) alumnae chapter or Delta Zeta alumnae who might be attending the
exhibition, please email Jessica Blevins, Columbus Alumnae Chapter President,
at dzcolumbusalum@yahoo.com.
Chances are the
movie credits on the screen at the height of Hollywood’s heyday would have
included the name of Edith Head. A winner of eight Academy Awards for her
costumes that dressed the stars for their motion pictures roles (a record that
still stands today), she outdistanced anyone else. Good clothes, she said,
“were the result of a pretty through-going knowledge of the people you are dressing.”
As a designer she was actually part of a team, a team that translated a star
into the different person he or she was playing.
Born in San
Bernardino, California, in 1897, Edith Spare Ihnen received a BA from the
University of California/Berkeley, and her MA from Stanford University. She
later took art courses at the Chouinard Art School. It was while she was an art
student in the late 1920s that she saw an advertisement for a sketch artist at
nearby Paramount Pictures. She began her design career working for Howard Greer
as that same sketch artist. Soon, she was designing clothes for minor
characters and became Greer’s hardest working and most involved assistant.
Edith went on to
She first designed the beautiful gowns that accented Mae West’s hourglass
figure in her movies of the early and mid-1930s. Later, she won recognition
when she designed the famous sarong for Dorothy Lamour in Jungle
Princess in 1937. One of her most famous design projects was for Barbara
Stanwyck in The Lady Eve (1941). She was
the first woman at a major studio (Paramount) to become head designer. She had
a talent for pleasing the stars, and many of them insisted that her services be
written into their contracts. Later she would become the chief costume designer
at Universal Studios.
In contrast to the
glamour she created onscreen, Edith’s personal style was conservative: tailored
suits, hair pulled into a bun with bangs, and tortoise-shell glasses. She
authored two books, How to Dress for Success
and The Dress Doctor, and worked with
stars such as Elizabeth Taylor, Marlene Dietrich, Kim Novak, Bette Davis, Clark
Gable, Robert Redford, and Audrey Hepburn.
She became Delta Zeta’s Convention initiate in 1960
and was active in the Southern California Lamplighters’ Flame Fantasy fashion
shows in the 1960s and 1970s with her friend, Gail Patrick, Samford – Alpha Pi,
actress and executive producer of the “Perry Mason” television series. She was
Delta Zeta’s Woman of the Year for 1968. She died in Beverly Hills, California
in 1981. A scholarship was established in her memory through the Delta Zeta
Foundation.
And read more here about “A Conversation with Edith Head,” a
one-woman show about Edith, which Delta Zeta’s Southern California alumnae
enjoyed seeing.
