07 October 2009

Art Raises Its Head | Edith in Hollywood, 1955

Movie costume designer Edith Head, in signature sunglasses, standing behind dressmaker's model and holding up dotted black tulle in front of her, in her studio. Head was a very private woman, a trait well illustrated by the dark sunglasses that became her trademark.

Originally the lenses were blue, but later they were dark shades of gray. Originally, they were worn to see how the clothing would appear in black and white. The glasses and her unchanging hair style helped her to hide her true age. In the 1920s, she wore a Colleen Moore Dutch boy cut, but in the 1930s she noticed Anna May Wong's style and copied it: flat bangs with a chignon at the back. She would wear it for the rest of her life. These features and the consistency of her appearance over the decades helped make her an instantly recognised figure.