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'GIVES
GOOD FACE': Drake Stutesman
After 'The Fashion Collection,' AMC went further behind-the-scenes in a new series, beginning by profiling Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer costumer, Edith Head. In the much repeated swift, few seconds-long trailer for this program, a succession of extraordinary hats was shown, featured in the 1963 film to follow, A New Kind of Love (Melville Shavelson, US, 1963), with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. But credit needs to be given where credit is due. Head did not design these hats - though the hats are so compelling they're used to lure an audience. These hats were designed by the milliner, Mr John. Why is due credit important? What makes a hat deserve distinction over other accessories - shoes, gloves, jewellery - designed under the aegis of a costumer? The hat is an interesting piece of clothing. Less used now, in previous centuries, hats were ubiquitous wear. (Though the current use of the ball cap is almost as widespread as the ever-present cap, cloche, boater, and bowler of the earlier part of the century.) However, the hat has retained enormous power within the uniform, signifying identity in a way that virtually no other piece of clothing does. The crown, veil, turban, habit, helmet or yarmulke still immediately reveal a social status today exactly as each did thousands of years ago. Hats are, in this sense, an event hidden in plain sight. They combine the signifier with the signified as few objects do. Films, too, tapped the hat's ability to key in vital information. But film posed special costume problems. In black and white cinema, line dominated so designers were forced to focus there but in close-up texture was essential. Furthermore, unlike other effects, the garment had to look good from every angle. Textures were created in feathers, fur, and mat fabrics but sequins, beads and tinsels were needed to catch the light as a person moved (Long 1994:41). In looking at twenties' glamour clothes, what may seem indulgences are in fact a crafted cinema piece, integral to lighting, camera and narrative. But these outfits, made as a movable part of the film's entirety, also had to satisfy fans' over-the-top fantasies of what wealth and power would wear. Fans would not accept current fashions on screen. These polarities - constituent crafting and sole couturier style - combined to make cinema clothing so powerful that Adrian, film's first widely successful designer, declared - 'One could line up all the gowns and tell the screen story' (Adrian). But the hats especially circling the libidinous face would have to reveal covertly what lay within those features. The hat told the story too, and more succinctly. The film hat served complex functions. It connoted character information (is she mysterious, direct, repressed, sexual?). It's aided lighting (light, shading, or darkness may be needed around her head). It enhanced the plot (implying elements as diverse as depression - floppy, tattered, misshapen hat - or social status - tasteless hat, rich hat, child-like hat). But it's most valuable function was, as John described it, 'the proper display of a woman's beauty' (FIT). It could even be argued that screen goddesses most memorable apparel was their hats. Remembering a glamour idol, does one picture the eyes beneath: Garbo's jewelled triangular
helmet in Mata Hari. Dietrich's veiled cloche
in Shanghai Express. Leigh's wheel hat in Gone
with the Wind. Monroe's showgirl headdress
in Gentleman Prefer Blondes. If you were to look up these costumes, even in photographs where only the head is depicted, in any reference book, they would be attributed respectively to the designers Adrian, Travis Banton, Walter Plunkett, and William Travilla. That would be wrong. As with the hats in Head's work in A New Kind of Love, they were all designed by John P John, most often known as Mr John. Returning to due credit. The hats listed above are so associated with the actress and her sexuality, they mark germinal points in film iconography and, thus, literally in a particular look. These looks - the Dietrich, the Garbo, the Leigh, the Monroe look - as Madonna's song Vogue describes it, 'give good face.' These women's facial image is so powerful, it's sex itself. Their orgasmic looks are intricately woven in the American social fabric and into its socialised female identity. The illusion made in the unit of hat and face is generated by a contradictory process. Millinery craft must hide in order to do what it is supposed to do. The hat maker, to be good, has to access that balance between the person and the hat framing that person. As Vivien Leigh said when she and John met to discuss Gone with the Wind 's costumes: 'All I ask is - don't let them see the hat before they see my face' (interview). This is the milliner's task: to make the look, but if the hat shows off, the woman will disappear and so the look will vanish. The hat must be there but almost invisibly. In 1979, John described the trickiness of this relationship. 'A hat is the most dangerous thing in the world, because it shows what you are....A dress you can overcome. But you can't overcome a hat, because that's all you have, a face' (Scott 1979:46).
At this task, film's greatest milliner was Mr John. His work appears in virtually a thousand films. For the sake of brevity, one analysis of Marlene Dietrich's hats in Shanghai Express gives a good example of John's genius and his cinematic dexterity. In 1932's Shanghai Express, John worked, with Paramount costumer Travis Banton, for Josef von Sternberg, a director whose complex use of superimpositions, movements and screens to cast subtle mutations of lights and darks made every piece - actor, lighting, facade and cloth - an active piece of his films. Von Sternberg's ornate use of fabric - in nets, laces, veils, and the like - perhaps influenced by an early job as a lace factory salesman - showed an unusual integration of cloth as structural within the film itself. John's hats had to be part of von Sternberg's system. A system whose goal was, as John Baxter, in his von Sternberg critique, states to 'explore...mood or emotional state, chart the development of an attitude, analyse the delicate evolutions of a relationship in ascendancy or decline'(1971:22). To express something so ineluctable, the underlying foundation must be very sturdy. Only two hats appear in the film; each demonstrate ingenious success at co-ordinating the hat's multi-purpose. The hats are in themselves remarkable, subtle, and suggestive yet a functioning component of lighting. As with Adrian's adage, the Shanghai Express story can be summed up in four millinery parts: two hats, no hat, return to hat. The first hat introduces the heroine and hints at what is to come, the second hat shows conflict and the heroine's vulnerability and the third, hatlessness, shows the character in extreme danger, both mortal and romantic. The film's resolution, where the lovers rejoin, returns the heroine to the world of hats as she resumes her original demeanour.
Dietrich's character, Shanghai Lily, is described as 'a woman who lives by her wits on the China coast,' euphemisizing her prostitution but focusing on her intelligence, self reliance and daring. Her entrance must visually provoke these responses in the viewer. Lily is first seen in the crowded railway station. Her dress is black and not eye-catching, except for her thick collar of thin plumes, a theme picked up in her eye-catching hat. She wears a rimless cloche made of black iridescent feathers which are set in swirls over her head, though the feathers are not initially obvious. Across her face, in a flat shape, is a diagonal, lined veil ending just above her lip. This fascinating effect tells all. Her cloche's shuttered, alluring veil and snug glistening skull cap reveals sensual independence and tight-lipped call-girl secrets. In this hat she enters the train, establishes herself in her car, encounters the man who will be her enemy and meets her old lover, a chance passenger. The hat's close veil continually alludes to self protection but what seemed a stiff visor is later shown to be soft fabric, rippling in breezes. The tight dark cloche reveals warms and irregular rounds in the light-refracting feathers as Dietrich moves her head to speak and look. The hat's elegant style symbolises her sophistication and her contrastive nature: she is soft and hard, in a shell and pettable, as strong as the hat's controlled structure but as full of nuances as the hat's feathery gleaming texture. The hat's gradually exposed softnesses thus tells us what is to come: that strong Lily's humanity and suffering desire will become obvious.
The second hat appears once the journey begins, literally and metaphorically. Lily wears another cloche, made of plain mat fabric, an effect virtually dividing her oval face into white and black pieces. Now having met her lover, she is at odds with her old resolutions. Her emotions are beginning to show, mirrored in opposing white sweeps of thick willowy feathers, as long as twelve inches each, at the hat's right base. These horn shapes form a V, pointing toward the face, but also represent how her feelings for this man are spilling out of her, out of her control. Midway behind the hat, and upright, are white feathers, less distinct than those at the neck. Finally, and not instantly apparent, there is a veil, again diagonally crossing the face, very faint, ending below the lips, with strong black dots marking a line along its edge. Her veil appears and disappears to the viewer's eyes in much the way Lily's guard lowers and raises in the midst of her intense feelings. The hat's delineated blacks and whites contribute to von Sternberg's use of moiré-like patterns. The hat becomes a five piece (cloche, veil, three sets of feathers), exceptionally co-ordinated, unit of white and black, hard and soft, visible/invisible/less visible which never dominates Dietrich's exceptional beauty but is a solid frame around her features. Yet the hat is equally exceptionally beautiful, suitable for Lily to wear. Her control and strength are implicit in the hat's structure: the feathers are tightly constructed into the hat. They retain graceful softness yet never loosen even though they are at her neck and an awkward place of movement. The hat is steady, comfortably moving with each head turn, and retaining its specific five piece shape. It draws our eyes to Dietrich's face, is exquisite from every angle, yet acts as a light catcher or mat duller. In one scene, from long shot, in a very dark station, Dietrich's oval face is buoyed up by the V-shape at her neck, making us look at her all the more, yet continuing to impress as a hat. After these opening scenes, through most of the film, Lily becomes increasingly frantic for her lover's safety, overwhelmed in 'loving him madly.' Throughout this, including scenes when she sacrifices herself for him, prays for him and he continues to reject her, she is vulnerably without her hat. This is especially powerful when she shakes from his touch and the camera closes on her face looking upwards into muted light. She seems on the verge of dissolution. At the film's end, she gets off the train wearing the original cloche. Fearing her lover's loss forever (he still rejects her), the veil's lines have been intensified, as her self protection has redoubled, all the more obvious because, having been effected again by love, she must try harder to hold herself aloof. But, ultimately, her lover humbles himself before her and, united, they kiss. She retains her hat as does he (a colonel's, which she has worn once) but significantly she denudes him of his petty props - his riding crop and gloves. Their hats are all they need. Baxter sees Shanghai Express as 'an elaborate excursion into sexual domination' (1971:17). Certainly Dietrich has the upper hand in many respects as an object of supreme desire, but the hat-hatless subplot counterpoints this 'domination' revealing her as human with wants, needs, fragilities and strengths. This extraordinarily talented milliner, Mr John, was exceptionally famous in his day, but has now fallen into virtual public obscurity. His 'day' was a long one, spanning fifty years and covering places as diverse as Paris's 1920's music halls to New York's 1960's cat walks. He made hats coveted by the rich and famous from Greta Garbo, Mistinguett, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Wallace Simpson to Liza Minelli, Jacqueline Onassis, Doris Duke and Gypsy Rose Lee. This man was described in 1993, in his New York Times obituary as 'as famous in the world of hats as Christian Dior was in the realm of haute couture.' For a man as famous in his milieu as Dior is in his, John, in contrast, has very little available information. No books on him exist. He appears only briefly or not at all in fashion books and dictionaries, though one described John as the highest paid milliner in history (McDowell 1992:159). He was renown for his showmanship, extravagant appearance (with a physical resemblance to Napoleon), and publicity stunts, (not uncommon traits in the fashion world), but when he is mentioned it is always with high praise for his designs, described with respect for beauty, crafting, pragmatism and skill. Colin McDowell, in his huge survey of hats in history, describes John as 'practical and practising ....produc[ing] hats that were exuberant, witty and stylish without ever being crude. Behind all the posturing was a great milliner' (1992:159). Fashion writer Dorothy Hawkins declared John's work the 'most original, wearable and flattering hats to be seen anywhere' (McDowell 1992:160). Columnist Virginia Forbes noted that 'many fashion authorities' called him 'the world's leading hat designer' whose work 'invariably is a masterpiece of originality and good taste. His ideas .... make millinery history' (FIT). Diana Vreeland, long-time editor of Harper's Bazaar and then Vogue, felt, 'The world loved his hats.... Everyone loves him' (Scott, 1979:46). Adelle Dillingham, a grande English hostess, recognised John's core, 'It was a big act, but never phoney... [Y]ou could relax. John would not sell you a hat you didn't look good in' (Scott:43). John himself : '[T]hey called me an eccentric. They said I was a mad hatter. That isn't true. I always loved classical styles. I was conservative, though I had a theatrical flair' (Waltz and Morris 1978:122). This theatricality Nancy Phillips in the New York Times described as an 'audience with .... the King of Hats... rather like having an eighteenth century dream in twentieth century technicolor - with a sound track from La Dolce Vita.' John's limelight shone through different 'epochs,' as he called them (Scott 1979:43), for almost sixty years. His first epoch was as a student and a buyer for his family firm in Europe, his second was in film where he established a fantastic reputation, his third was a twenty year partnership under the John-Frederics label, and finally his supreme decades as Mr John Inc, the millinery superstar. During his film career, John worked with virtually every major studio, designer and movie idol. His range was prodigious, designing for films that became classics in their genre, working wit |
