20 Hollywood Outfits That Secretly Changed How We Dress

Marilyn Monroe straddled a Manhattan subway grate in 1955 while shooting The Seven Year Itch. As the press photographed her, an updraft lifted her pleated ivory dress. William Travilla designed the iconic outfit, which was made of rayon-acetate crepe and featured a sunburst-pleated halter skirt. The image quickly gained worldwide circulation, and by the late 1950s, the sunburst-pleated halter style had become a summertime wardrobe staple. The original garment was later auctioned for $4.6 million.

In 1954’s romantic comedy Sabrina, Belgian-British actress Audrey Hepburn donned a black cocktail dress with a high, straight-cut neckline designed by a young Parisian couturier, Hubert de Givenchy. The dress launched a partnership between them that endured for decades. Paramount Studios’ own costume designer, Edith Head, received official screen credit and an Oscar for best costumes, even though the dress was by Givenchy. Pattern makers referred to the neckline as the Sabrina neckline.

In the 1951 drama A Streetcar Named Desire, Marlon Brando portrays Stanley Kowalski, a blue-collar worker whose wardrobe consists mostly of a simple white T-shirt. Before this movie, people were accustomed to T-shirts being worn only underneath their clothes, like a uniform issued by the military. To get the look for Brando, costume designer Lucinda Ballard washed standard cotton undershirts and sewed them to fit his torso tightly. Audiences saw him in these T-shirts, and suddenly they became popular as a garment that didn’t need to be hidden.

In the 1934 classic comedy, It Happened One Night, Clark Gable plays a reporter who unbuttons his shirt in a motel scene. The reason is that he doesn’t want to go through the trouble of changing his ribbed undershirt in front of the camera. As a result, Gable’s bare chest is supposedly behind a steep, though never precisely documented, drop in American undershirt sales. While economic historians might blame the Great Depression for the decrease in undershirt sales, the image of Gable without an undershirt may have made the undershirt seem like a completely optional garment.

In the 1946 film noir classic Gilda, Rita Hayworth performs a sultry rendition of “Put the Blame on Mame,” donning a strapless black satin gown that never slips. Jean Louis, Columbia’s main costume designer, had the dress constructed with plastic boning, stiff molding, and a heavy waistband to ensure it stayed in place during the dance sequence. The combination of the dress and opera gloves made both items staples in post-war women’s eveningwear.

In the 1939 blockbuster Gone with the Wind, Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara needs a ball gown that will make her look wealthy enough to pay her family’s plantation taxes, so she makes one from the curtains hanging in the parlor. Costume designer Walter Plunkett constructed the “curtain dress” from thick green velvet with gold trimmings and intentionally discolored it so it appeared faded by the sun. This iconic green dress is often credited with popularizing deep emerald velvet as a fashion color for evening wear in the 1940s.

In 1942’s wartime drama Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart plays nightclub owner Rick Blaine. When the film’s climactic airport goodbye scene was shot, he put on a double-breasted trench coat and fedora from his own closet rather than a wardrobe department rental. In the Warner Bros. production files, the coat is referred to only as “Mr. Bogart’s coat.” There remains a debate over which of two British coat brands actually made it. Regardless, it is an iconic image of noir masculine fashion.

Mae West appears as an 1890s saloon singer in the 1933 comedy She Done Him Wrong. She wears an hourglass gown with an internal corset, produced by the Paramount wardrobe department headed by Travis Banton with assistance from Edith Head. This costume became a pattern for a host of similar rigid dresses. West declined to go to Paris for fittings, so Paramount made a plaster cast of her body in Hollywood and sent it to French couturier Elsa Schiaparelli, who created a wardrobe for her character in the 1937 picture Every Day’s a Holiday. The same mold became the basis of the bottle shape for Schiaparelli’s signature Shocking perfume, which was also launched in 1937.

The German actress Marlene Dietrich, in her first American role in 1930’s Morocco, appeared in her opening scene dressed from head to toe in a tailored tuxedo, top hat, and tails, created by Paramount costume designer Travis Banton. Off screen, Dietrich kept wearing custom suits and wide-leg trousers in public, when the sight of women in trousers was often viewed with disdain. Dietrich’s cinematic style turned wearing a man’s suit into an attractive look instead of a shocking one.

The actress Joan Crawford wore a white organdy gown with huge ruffled puffed sleeves in the 1932 film Letty Lynton, a silhouette that MGM costume designer Gilbert Adrian designed to create wider shoulders and a narrower waistline. A “Cinema Fashions” store was created at Macy’s in New York City, where ready-to-wear knockoffs were sold for approximately $10 apiece, and about 50,000 dresses were sold. In addition, up to an estimated 500,000 copies were made by local dressmakers across the country, effectively creating an industry from a single dress.

In 1943’s The Gang’s All Here, Portuguese-born Brazilian singer Carmen Miranda performs a song wearing a giant fruit-laden turban. Yvonne Wood, the film’s costume designer, created the headpiece as a comical exaggeration of the traditional dress of Afro-Brazilian Baiana street sellers, who sell tropical fruits out on the street. Miranda was just five feet tall, and she wore the turban with about seven-inch platform wedge heels, which were soon ubiquitous in American department stores.

Shirley Temple was only six when she became a movie star, and in Stand Up and Cheer and Bright Eyes, she sported a red-and-white polka dot dress with puffed sleeves. The dress came from her mother Gertrude Temple’s stock, from Shirley’s dance school wardrobe. It wasn’t long before Nannette Manufacturing signed a licensing agreement to sell exact ready-to-wear copies of Shirley’s dresses, and during the 1930s, Nannette sold more than 6 million copies. The line was among the first mass-licensed children’s clothing lines in American retail.

At age 19, Lauren Bacall walked onto the big screen clad in a black wool-crepe evening gown with a diamond-shaped cutout at her midriff in To Have and Have Not, the 1944 drama that gave us the line “you know how to whistle, don’t you?” Designer Milo Anderson of Warner Bros. added padding to the shoulders to make Bacall appear more modern and self-assured. That midriff-baring cutout ushered in the trend for bare stomachs in postwar cocktail and evening wear.

In 1933’s Dinner at Eight, Jean Harlow portrayed a social climber who donned a backless white satin gown cut on the bias. The dress hugged her figure with not even a hint of a zipper. According to MGM’s publicity office, Harlow had to lean against slanted boards during filming breaks so the silk wouldn’t wrinkle, although this story was part of MGM mythology. The gown, however, did spur genuine consumer demand for bias-cut satin evening gowns across the country.

In the 1940 comedy The Philadelphia Story, Katharine Hepburn, as an heiress, wears pleated, wide-leg cream trousers with silk blouses created for her by MGM’s costume designer Gilbert Adrian. Women from high society did not often wear trousers socially, but Hepburn’s own preference for slacks off-camera, together with her stylish trousered look, hastened their acceptance into suburban and wartime wardrobes.

The 1928 silent film A Woman of Affairs, starring Swedish actress Greta Garbo as Diana Merrick, featured her in a simple, belted trench coat designed by MGM costume designer Gilbert Adrian. He took his inspiration from a men’s World War One raincoat, and accessorized with a slouched cloche hat pulled down over her eyes. The look was widely noticed by fashion writers of the day, and the style was soon copied by female moviegoers. Slouch hats and belted coats became regular wardrobe items for women, and rugged rainwear transformed itself into stylish everyday 1930s womenswear.

In the 1929 German silent drama Pandora’s Box, Louise Brooks, who was from Kansas, starred as Lulu. She wore a simple black silk slip dress and a sharp, geometric black bob she had worn ever since she was a child, a style that later stylists at salons in New York further simplified. The black slip and her straight-cut bob were a reaction against the heavy, ornate styles of previous decades, and women in Europe and North America began to cut their hair short and to wear simple dresses to match Brooks’ look.

In the 1927 silent comedy “It,” Clara Bow stars as a shopgirl who can’t afford to buy a formal gown to wear on a date with her wealthy employer. Instead, she grabs a pair of scissors and snips the collar and sleeves off her basic work dress, creating the illusion of an evening gown. Travis Banton designed the dress for the scene. The scene resonated with female workers, and the practice of modifying a simple dress by hand quickly became popular across the country.

In The Son of the Sheik (1926), the Italian actor Rudolph Valentino wears a gold Cartier wristwatch on a leather strap. He kept it on even while wearing traditional Bedouin robes. It’s an anachronism that the director let slide. For years before this, wristwatches were worn mostly by women as jewelry, and men continued to use pocket watches. Valentino’s image popularized the leather-strap wristwatch as a male accessory.

James Dean wears a red blouson windbreaker, a plain white T-shirt, and blue jeans in 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause. Costume designer Moss Mabry and director Nicholas Ray chose a bright red windbreaker for James Dean that would pop on Technicolor camera. He was killed in a car accident on September 30, 1955, only a few weeks before the film premiered, and never knew the jacket became the clothing of his generation.

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