20 Classic Hollywood Stars Who Accidentally Started Fashion Crazes

Marlon Brando played Stanley Kowalski, a working-class mechanic, in the 1951 film version of Tennessee Williams’s stage play A Streetcar Named Desire. The costume designer dressed him in a tight, sweat-stained white T-shirt, and nothing else, to be true to life. Until then, T-shirts were either underwear or clothing for manual laborers. They were never worn by themselves as outer garments. Fashion historians call Brando a catalyst, not the inventor, of the T-shirt as real menswear, but after the film, it became exactly that.

In the 1934 film It Happened One Night, Clark Gable, playing reporter Peter Warne, starred opposite Claudette Colbert. In a motel scene, he unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a bare chest, skipping the undershirt. He skipped it simply because unbuttoning two layers slowed down his comic timing. As Hollywood legend goes, undershirt sales plummeted up to 75% in the wake of the movie. But economic historians attribute this drop-off to the economic doldrums of the Depression that already dragged down retail sales.

Audrey Hepburn was only five foot seven and feared that she would loom over her male co-stars. During filming of Sabrina in 1954, she asked shoe designer Salvatore Ferragamo and shoe company Capezio to turn their soft dance slippers into street shoes. Capezio had been making flat dance shoes for years, but Hepburn’s request is credited with moving them into the realm of common fashion, not just a shoe to be worn with mandatory heels.

Marlene Dietrich wore a tailored men’s tuxedo in the 1930 Paramount film Morocco. After shooting wrapped, she continued to don custom trousers, suits, and fedoras simply because she liked them. In 1933, the police chief of Paris caught her at a train station and read her an old city ordinance forbidding women from appearing in trousers in public. She was not arrested, and she kept wearing what she wanted, helping to establish men’s tailored clothing as acceptable women’s attire.

In Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean played troubled teen Jim Stark. The film was released just weeks after Dean’s death in a car crash in September 1955. For Rebel Without a Cause, costume designer Moss Mabry needed a jacket that would pop against the dark night shoots and gray backdrops on color film, so he cut and hand-sewed three identical red nylon windbreakers for Dean. The red jacket, white T-shirt, and jeans became the symbol of ’50s teen rebellion, and the clothing maker McGregor sold near-identical copies.

In 1914, at the age of 24, Charlie Chaplin was creating his “Little Tramp” character at a studio in Los Angeles. Since large Victorian-style mustaches hid the actor’s lips from the camera’s view on black-and-white film, he opted for a small “toothbrush” style made of crepe hair. This Tramp became hugely popular, and throughout the 1910s and 20s, many millions of men across North America and Europe emulated his look, decades before the toothbrush mustache took on its later, darker connotations.

In 1956, Grace Kelly, the American actress who became Princess of Monaco, was caught on camera leaving a car and holding a large leather Hermes bag over her belly. She was secretly pregnant with her first child. The public already referred to it as the “Kelly Bag” after Life magazine ran it on the cover, but Hermes didn’t formally name the bag the “Kelly Bag” until 21 years later, in 1977.

In 1944, Lauren Bacall was 19, starring in her first film opposite Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not. As the cameras began to roll, she became nervous, and her head and hands began to shake. In order to stop the shaking, she pressed her chin against her chest and tilted her eyes up toward Bogart. Director Howard Hawks liked how it looked on film. Bacall confirmed in her 1978 autobiography that the look was a result of her anxiety, but she kept it as her trademark for the rest of her career.

It wasn’t until the 1931 picture “Platinum Blonde” that Jean Harlow’s hair was lightened to a platinum shade so light it was practically white. Producer Howard Hughes named the picture Platinum Blonde to attract a crowd, and even put up $10,000 for a beauty who could duplicate her shade. No commercial bleaching products were available, so women across the country bought hydrogen peroxide and mixed it with ammonia, Clorox, and soap flakes at home. Harlow used the same mixture to maintain her shade, and it killed her hair, so in later films, she wore wigs.

In early 1943, while shooting promotional swimsuit photos for Sweet Rosie O’Grady, Betty Grable, a musical star for 20th Century-Fox, was asked by photographer Frank Powolny to turn her back and look over her shoulder to provide a different view of the shot. Fox printed more than 5 million copies, and it became the most-requested pin-up photo during the war. It’s a popular myth that Grable posed that way to hide a pregnancy, but her daughter wasn’t born until March 1944, more than a year later, so she wasn’t yet pregnant when the photo was taken.

The flapper look was out, and Joan Crawford’s broad shoulders did not fit into the narrow silhouettes still in vogue at the start of the 1930s. When MGM costume designer Gilbert Adrian constructed her a white organdy dress with huge ruffled sleeves for the movie Letty Lynton in 1932, it was merely to even out her silhouette onscreen, but women rushed to buy tens of thousands of copies of the dress. This wide-sleeved style was the precursor to the heavily padded shoulders that dominated 1930s fashion.

A Canadian-born star of silent films, Mary Pickford was nicknamed “America’s Sweetheart,” in part because her look consisted of long, heat-curled ringlets. She looked like a teenager even in her late 20s, when she wanted a more adult look. Her studio bosses insisted that a haircut would reduce box office. Pickford fans from North America to Europe all had their hair done in the same manner with heated metal tongs. In 1928, she finally cut her hair into a short bob, a development worthy of a front-page headline.

Clara Bow was Paramount’s first “It Girl” of the roaring ’20s. But she had to contend with a new brand of early black-and-white film stock, which washed out skin and lips, making subtle facial expressions hard for audiences to pick up. To compensate, Bow began wearing lipstick only in the middle of her mouth. She pushed the center of her full lips upward and outward, accentuating the peaks of her cupid’s bow. In doing so, she created the pointed, heart-shaped mouth that was imitated by millions of women with lipstick stencils and metal lip tubes, becoming the most popular cosmetic trend of the decade.

Academy Award-winning actress Katharine Hepburn, who worked for RKO Radio Pictures, would not wear dresses unless she was on camera, despite the fact that wearing trousers as a woman at the time was scandalous. On the lot, she wore men’s trousers with button-down shirts. One day, an RKO executive had her trousers removed from her dressing room so that Hepburn would be forced to wear a dress. Hepburn then walked across the lot in her underwear until crew members returned her trousers to her. The story helped make trousers a common choice of clothing for American women.

Mae West was only five feet tall, but she had to look as tall as many of her male leading men. So she got the studio cobblers to make her shoes with double platforms about eight inches high underneath her gown, which she had specially made longer. Ferragamo, the Italian shoe designer, saw this and introduced platform heels to the fashion industry as a look in their own right.

Greta Garbo, the Swedish-born MGM actress, used to pull soft, wide-brimmed felt hats and berets down over her eyes when out and about in Los Angeles to avoid being snapped by street photographers. MGM costume designer Gilbert Adrian incorporated the practice into her wardrobe for the 1928 film A Woman of Affairs. Milliners imitated the low-brimmed style, and the “Garbo slouch hat” was one of the best-selling women’s hat styles of the 1930s as fans sought after the look that the star only wanted for herself.

In 1941, Veronica Lake, a Paramount film noir actress, let a single lock of blonde hair dangle down over her eye in a publicity photo. Within weeks, her “peek-a-boo” look was all the rage in the U.S. But as millions of American women entered World War II defense factories, her signature hairstyle was getting them injured when that same hair would catch on drills or lathes. Federal safety inspectors petitioned Lake to change up her hair in 1943. Lake complied, appearing in a newsreel where she tied her hair back into a neat Victory roll.

In the 1942 wartime drama Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart played Rick Blaine, a character whose wardrobe included his own clothing, purchased because of tight wartime costume budgets. These articles of clothing included his double-breasted Burberry trench coat, a British military design originally created during the First World War. The garment was worn during the famous airport scene of the movie, where Rick says goodbye to Ilsa. The trench coat transformed standard rain gear into the cinematic image of hardboiled romantic mystery and contributed to the popularity of civilian trench coats following the war.

In June 1959, Brigitte Bardot, the French screen actress, was married to actor Jacques Charrier in Louveciennes, France. She didn’t want a conventional silk bridal gown, so she asked fashion designer Jacques Esterel to make her a plain pink-and-white checkered cotton dress. Her decision to reject a formal wedding garment created a furor. Brides across Europe rushed out to buy the gingham, textile mills were swamped with orders, and the fabric went out of stock throughout France.

Buster Keaton, known as “The Great Stone Face,” did most of his own stunts and falls without pads or wires while making silent comedies in the 1920s. But when performing his famous pratfalls and running along rooftops, he would inevitably lose his standard felt fedora. So Keaton purchased soft commercial fedoras and chopped the crowns down, ironing them flat on top. Then he stiffened the brims by soaking them in a solution of sugar water and starch. He made thousands of flat “pork pie” hats over the years. People liked them, and the “pork pie” became a huge craze in men’s headwear.

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