When Schiaparelli Battled Banton
Updated: 2 days ago
In the 1930s, the famed couturier disagreed with the Hollywood costume designer about style and its influences, and fashion journalists loved it.
A delicious feud bubbled up between Paris and Hollywood in the 1930s, a fashion squabble that’s rarely discussed today, but at the time was enthusiastically covered by the fashion press. One corner was occupied by Elsa Schiaparelli, who spent most of the decade being lauded as the world’s top-ranking couturier, while in the opposite corner, costume designer Travis Banton defended Hollywood’s place in the style spectrum.
Banton may have had public opinion on his side: As early as 1933, journalists were declaring that Hollywood had usurped Paris as the preeminent voice in fashion, largely due to the influence it wielded with Depression-era women who could sit in movie houses and take their style cues from Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Claudette Colbert and other screen goddesses. “Is Hollywood Becoming the Style Capital of the World?” asked a story dated September 20, 1933, in the Santa Cruz Evening News. Consider the article’s opening paragraphs as an average reader, and then read them again while imagining yourself as a Paris-based couturier:
“Time was when the magic names of Patou and Chanel could send women a-scuttling after any dress that bore these labels. Advertising copywriters effervesced over sleeves that came from Schiaparelli, necklines from Mainbocher, feathers from Agnes. To quote any other authority was downright suicide.
“But it is getting so that the best of the great Paris designers are but vague names to the average woman. She is more interested in trying on the frock worn by Miss Joan Crawford in her latest picture, which she hopes will transform her into a radiant and glamorous being, ready to meet all the exciting situations that movie queens seem so prone to fall into … Movie queens do occasionally go to Paris for their frocks, but the great majority of movie fashions are designed on the lot for a particular star. Every company has its master designer—and what we mean, they are masters!”
It’s likely no accident that such a pronouncement not only happened when it did, but also mentioned Crawford in particular. The 1932 release of Letty Lynton, starring Crawford as a scandal-ridden socialite aboard a cruise ship, created a frenzy for one Adrian-designed gown in particular, crafted in organdy with exaggerated ruffled shoulders. Sanctioned by MGM, the dress was copied and sold at retailers that included the Cinema Shop at Macy’s—depending on which figures you believe, the “Letty Lynton Dress,” as it came to be known, sold as few as 50,000 copies and as many as 500,000 (without any of those profits finding their way into Adrian’s pockets, it should be noted). A similar frenzy among the public over one onscreen design wouldn’t occur again until 1951, when Edith Head designed a strapless ballgown embellished with silk flowers for Elizabeth Taylor to wear in A Place in the Sun, a dress that girls everywhere clamored to wear to their proms.
But the Letty Lynton dress and its retail potential indeed created a game-changing moment in fashion, aided by another high-wattage design that same year. Never one to shy away from unabashed glamour, Banton created one of his most memorable looks for Marlene Dietrich to wear in 1932’s Shanghai Express, a sleek black dress and veiled hat accented with a flurry of rooster feathers that framed her face and shoulders. Dietrich, unsurprisingly, had weighed in on the design, demanding a particular look and quality of feathers, which Banton soon secured from Mexico. In Marlene Dietrich: The Life, by the star’s daughter, Maria Riva, she recalls the process with intricate detail:
“[W]hen the feathers arrived, their black-green iridescence was so intense it shimmered through the tissue paper they were wrapped in. My mother was pleased —kissed Travis on both cheeks, called to me in my assigned corner: ‘Sweetheart, come! Look! A Dream! Black, with its own light! Narrow, naturally curved! Now, Travis can design the first costume, that will be THE look of the film.’ He did and it was.”
More than 90 years after its onscreen debut, Banton’s iconic design for Dietrich’s first scene as Shanghai Lily continues to rank high among the 20th century’s most dramatic film costumes. At the time, however, there was just one problem, according to Schiaparelli: This look was too ostentatious to be copied, though try telling that to American women. The couturier did not hide her criticisms of Hollywood, or of Banton in particular. The climax of this kerfuffle occurred in August 1934, when Schiaparelli and Banton appeared in side-by-side columns across the U.S. to defend their points of view (today, of course, they would have launched a feud on social media, allowing their respective fans to spring to each designer’s defense in real time). Here’s what the headline looked like on style pages:
Schiaparelli didn’t hold back. “Big sleeves, trailing organdy ruffles, exaggerated collars, feathers everywhere until I feel we can no longer look a bird in the face,” she said in her side of the battling interviews, which were syndicated across several newspapers in the U.S. “Those are the effects we see in the movies and not the effects which create real smartness. Chic lies in simplicity, in framing the body and the face, not over-elaborating them.”
Banton, meanwhile, seemed only amused by Schiaparelli’s remarks. “Well, I could take that personally, you know,” he said of his rival’s ‘bird in the face’ comment. “I’m fond of feathers — in their place.
“The trouble is that people insist on taking film clothes out of their contexts in the film, which is as unfair as judging a book on an isolated phrase,” he continued. “Take the things I made for Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express. There were some feathers, all right. No woman of taste would dress as I dressed her for traveling. What they forget is that Miss Dietrich in that picture portrayed a demi-mondaine, whose clothes would be flashy and gaudy. Adapted for eveningwear, however, the same outfit would be suitable.”
If Banton sounds like he had good reason to feel confident in his costume choices, it’s because women indeed were clamoring for the looks he was designing — not only for Dietrich, but for 1930s stars that included Kay Francis and Carole Lombard, both roundly agreed to be among the most stylish women in cinema. “Here’s another good example — the clothes I made for Carole Lombard for Twentieth Century,” Banton pointed out in his debate with Schiaparelli. “She played a young girl from the dime store who became a famous and temperamental stage actress. I dressed her extremely, flashily, as a girl of her type would dress. Miss Lombard is now making Now and Forever, playing a woman of a different sort. The clothes for that role, I think, would not be frowned upon by Madame.”
In Schiaparelli’s defense, she was not completely degrading the work of Hollywood costume designers; what she seemed to be saying was that, merely because a woman falls in love with an onscreen look, it doesn’t mean she’s suited to wear it. (And honestly, that sentiment can be stated of almost every fashion design in recorded history.) Still, Schiaparelli laid the blame for what she viewed as current bad taste at Hollywood's feet, noting that even Paris designers were not immune to cinema's influence, as some were “copying the movies,” she said. “There are still elegantly dressed women in Paris, but this summer I saw some horrors. All due to over-elaboration.”
"There are still elegantly dressed women in Paris, but this summer I saw some horrors." — Elsa Schiaparelli
A year later, the brouhaha continued. “World Copies Fashions of Hollywood — Designers of Filmdom Menace Supremacy of New York, Paris” a headline announced in October 1935. “While Paris and New York fashionists argue the importance Hollywood designers have in the fashion picture, the men who dress the stars sit back and do the jobs they are hired to do with nary a thought as to what will happen throughout the world to each individual creation,” wrote Marian Young, a reporter for NEA, a syndication service that merged with Scripps company in the 1970s. Young’s story, part of a series during a trip the correspondent made to Hollywood, put a spotlight on “the Hollywood dressmakers whose reputations fast are outshining those of the ‘old guard’ couturiers in Paris and New York.”
But Banton demurred. “When I create a costume for a star, I have nothing under the sun in mind except the actress and the plot of the production,” he said in an interview with Young. “If the creation becomes a vogue and is copied by dress shops throughout various countries, I am pleased, naturally. But I do not think of this while I’m working. After all, I’m hired by the studios to dress the stars — not the public. While I am fixing an exotic slit in a skirt for Marlene Dietrich, I never stop to consider it as a practical style for the average woman. My job is to make Marlene look as glamorous as possible.”
And glamorous Dietrich was, roundly agreed to be among the most stylish women in Hollywood throughout the 1930s. In 1937, Screen & Radio Weekly awarded Dietrich the number-two spot in its annual poll of the “best-dressed women of filmdom,” with Norma Shearer scoring the top position. That same year Dietrich starred in Angel, an Ernst Lubitsch comedy that costarred Herbert Marshall and Melvyn Douglas, Dietrich played the neglected wife of Marshall’s diplomat, and during a trip to Paris, she meets Douglas’s suave playboy and enjoys an innocent flirtation with him. Because this is a Lubitsch comedy, the two men soon meet, neither knowing about the other’s relationship with Dietrich’s Maria. Banton’s costumes for the star are plentiful and, indeed, glamorous.
It’s difficult to say who ultimately won the argument, though it’s notable that Schiaparelli’s Paris atelier, located on the prestigious Place Vendôme since 1935, currently is enjoying tremendous critical and client success under the creative direction of Texas-born Daniel Roseberry. Inspired by the surreal elements behind many of its founders most iconic designs, the house continues to thrive among private clients and Hollywood alike, with Tilda Swinton, Selena Gomez, Natalie Portman and Zoe Saldana among the A-list actresses who have worn the label on recent red carpets.
Banton remained at Paramount until 1938. The effects of alcoholism led to his departure — and there also has been some conjecture that Edith Head, working under him, assisted in ushering him out the door so she could become head of the department. Banton returned to private design for clients, but he didn’t depart costume design entirely, taking on projects for Twentieth Century-Fox and Universal in subsequent years. He died in 1958 — but Banton’s influence in Dietrich’s onscreen look endures, with milliner Philip Treacy and Dolce & Gabbana among the designers who continue to be inspired by the legendary actress’s style.
It’s also notable that Banton and Schiaparelli at one point shared a client: Mae West. Banton designed costumes for the actress, famed for her husky voice and double-entendre humor, for films that included 1933’s I’m No Angel and 1934’s Belle of the Nineties, but for 1937’s Every Day’s a Holiday, West enlisted Schiaparelli to create her gowns. For her fittings, however, West did not make the trek to Paris; instead, she sent a plaster cast of her famed hourglass figure after dictating copious notes to the couturier about both her body and the looks she envisioned.
“She had sent me all the most intimate details of her famous figure, and for greater accuracy a plaster statue of herself quite naked in the pose of the Venus de Milo,” Schiaparelli wrote in her famed autobiography, Shocking Life. “She was preparing a new film and from the start everything kept changing. Jo Swerling had first written it as a drama under the title of Frivolous Sally, but Mae, deciding otherwise, changed the whole play and called it Sapphire Sal. Jo Swerling in disgust hung his manuscript to a tree for the children to shoot at.”
That plaster cast soon came in handy for another reason, as Schiaparelli used it as inspiration for the bottle that housed her first perfume, Shocking, also released in 1937. In 1931 the couturier developed her signature color by blending magenta with a touch of white to create a bold, in-your-face hue that she dubbed "shocking pink." When Schiaparelli decided the time was right to release her first fragrance, only one name was considered. With bergamot, jasmine and sandalwood among its notes, Shocking indeed lived up to its name, housed in a bottle inspired by West's torso and the plaster cast that had lived in Schiaparelli's studio.
Even with her own experience as a costume designer for Hollywood films — which also included uncredited looks for 1935’s Brewster’s Millions and one among many couturiers whose looks were featured in 1938’s Artists and Models Abroad — Schiaparelli continued to adopt an air of Parisian superiority when speaking of America. In 1937, she noted to a U.S. reporter during a visit to New York, “Why should we fashion designers slave and toil to invent new and lovely clothes for you American women — only to have you wear them all wrong! I don’t object to the way our fashions are copied in America — in fact, I think they are copied excellently. But it’s the way they are worn here that ruins the effect.”
But in his mid-1930s battle with Schiaparelli, it seems Banton ultimately got the last word. “Hollywood has never pretended to be the Rue de la Paix,” he said in 1934, name-checking the famed Parisian street that leads directly into the Place Vendôme. “It is always well-meaning visitors who claim for Hollywood the distinction of style superiority, never any of Hollywood’s designers.”
“Shap” or “Skap”: the Argument Settled
For anyone who’s ever wondered how to pronounce Schiaparelli, this brief news clip, a sidebar to a U.S. style column written by the couturier, definitively answers the question.
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