20 Iconic Hollywood Dresses And The Wild Stories Behind Them

An ivory pleated cocktail dress was made by William Travilla for Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch. A publicity shoot in September 1954, with a wind machine placed under a Lexington Avenue subway grate, blew up her skirt in front of crowds and cameras. This reportedly infuriated her husband, baseball star Joe DiMaggio, and caused problems in their marriage. The film’s director, Billy Wilder, shot a few cleaned-up close-ups on a soundstage later. It sold at auction for $5.6 million in 2011.

When filming the Larrabee party sequence in Sabrina, Audrey Hepburn wore a white strapless silk organza ball gown with black floral embroidery, taken straight from the Paris atelier of designer Hubert de Givenchy. The film’s lead costume designer, Edith Head, received sole credit onscreen and took home the Best Costume Design Oscar in March 1955. This was because studio contracts at the time gave costume credit to the head of the costume department rather than the specific costume designer. Givenchy’s name was not mentioned. Ouch.

For the iconic film Gone with the Wind, designer Walter Plunkett constructed a gown for Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara. In the film’s narrative, Scarlett goes to her family plantation, Tara, and rips down green velvet drapery to fashion her gown, hoping to catch the eye of Rhett Butler while she’s trying to figure out how she’s going to pay her family’s plantation taxes. Plunkett used heavy velvet to construct the gown, adding gold fringe and a curtain tie; he faded the fabric to give it a sun-damaged effect. Later, the Harry Ransom Center put together more than $30,000 in public donations to help restore the dress.

The film Letty Lynton debuted in May of 1932, and Joan Crawford’s costume was designed by MGM designer Gilbert Adrian. The actress wore a white cotton organdy dress with exaggerated ruffled, puffed sleeves that created the illusion of narrower hips and waist when viewed on high-contrast, black-and-white film. At the New York department store Macy’s alone, about 15,000 local replicas were sold. Nationally, an estimated 50,000 to 500,000 budget knockoffs were produced and sold by various manufacturers.

In The Wizard of Oz, Judy Garland’s character Dorothy Gale wears a checked cotton pinafore. The costume has come to be remembered as bright white and blue, but MGM designer Gilbert Adrian actually made it in off-white and slate blue. These were muted shades that were selected specifically because they wouldn’t cause severe glare under early three-strip Technicolor soundstage lighting. A surviving screen-worn pinafore was sold by Bonhams auction house in 2015 for $1.56 million.

In Gilda, Rita Hayworth wears a floor-length strapless black satin gown for her famous “Put the Blame on Mame” number, a one-piece design with a slit on the side and an oversized bow. To keep the dress from coming untethered during the number’s dance sequence, Columbia costume designer Jean Louis constructed an internal harness made up of plastic boning, a canvas waist-nipper, and molded bust cups. There was apparently a lot of engineering going on underneath all that satin. It also worked as useful shapewear for Hayworth, who had given birth in late 1944.

William Travilla, the costume designer for the “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, created a strapless, hot pink, silk-satin gown for Marilyn Monroe with a lining of stiff black felt for a rigid, choreography-proof shape. The dress replaced an earlier, more revealing costume made of sheer material. Studio heads rejected the first dress after Monroe’s 1952 nude calendar went public and the press blew up.

The MGM costume department produced Grace Kelly’s entire wedding dress when she married Prince Rainier III of Monaco on April 19, 1956 (as opposed to the separate, shorter, pink lace outfit she wore for the civil ceremony). Studio couturier Helen Rose had thirty-six seamstresses working for six weeks to create the cathedral-length gown of 125-year-old Brussels rose point lace, with thousands of seed pearls sewn on by hand. The gown, including its heavy silk fabric known as peau de soie, is now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

For All About Eve, Edith Head created a dark brown silk gros de Londres cocktail dress trimmed in sable fur for Bette Davis’s Margo Channing, although it appears as black in the movie. The morning of the “Fasten your seatbelts” party scene, Head discovered that the bodice had been measured incorrectly and was too loose. During the shoot, Davis drew the garment down from her shoulders. Head re-sewed the updated neckline moments before the cameras started rolling.

The costumes for The Killers (1946) were designed by Vera West, who was the head of Universal’s costume department. West designed a black silk velvet evening gown, worn by Ava Gardner in the film, with an asymmetrically cut-out bodice suspended from a single diagonal shoulder strap and held up by internal boning. Gardner sang “Can’t We Talk It Over?” in this gown, establishing her breakthrough screen persona.

Edith Head designed a strapless white tulle ball gown with a cinched waist and a layered tulle skirt. The bodice had a violet floral velvet appliqué. This dress, worn by 17-year-old Elizabeth Taylor as Angela Vickers in A Place in the Sun, was licensed for mass production and proved to be a dominant style choice for American high school proms in 1951.

Edith Head dressed Grace Kelly’s character, Lisa Fremont, a fashion editor, for her debut scene in Rear Window in a slim, black velvet V-neck bodice and a full white silk organza skirt worn over layers of chiffon and tulle, which was embellished with flowered branch appliqués at the hip. It’s said that director Alfred Hitchcock wanted Kelly to look like “a piece of fine porcelain” against the claustrophobic backdrop of James Stewart’s tiny apartment set.

In a famous scene in Top Hat (1935), Ginger Rogers wore a Monet-blue silk satin gown covered in $1,500 worth of ostrich feathers, created by Bernard Newman. For the song “Cheek to Cheek,” she danced with Fred Astaire. Feathers were continually coming off and falling into Astaire’s face and tuxedo. He called Rogers “Feathers.” Despite this, Rogers refused to give up the dress and said she liked the way the feathers flowed when she turned. Fred Astaire may have disagreed, but she got her way. They continued dancing together in several subsequent movies.

For Angel, Paramount costume designer Travis Banton designed a floor-length silk evening gown for Marlene Dietrich, covered in thousands of hand-sewn metallic bugle beads and pearls, with Russian sable and feather trim. Far from her earlier top-and-tails tuxedo look in the film Morocco, the gown cost $4,000 at the height of the Great Depression, weighed more than 30 pounds, and involved fitting sessions that went on for up to eight hours.

MGM designer Adrian (Gilbert Adrian) designed the now-iconic backless, bias-cut white crepe-satin evening gown worn by Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight. Cut on the bias means cutting diagonally across the fabric rather than along its straight grain, allowing the dress to fall over Harlow’s body without using a zipper or any fastening. In 1933, there was no such thing as modern stretchy materials, so between takes she had to rest on a tilted wooden leaning board, since satin wrinkles and stretches when someone sits down on it. Yes, the dress looked incredible. Sitting was simply not part of the deal.

MGM designer Irene Lentz Gibbons (known simply as “Irene”) designed a Victorian-style gown for Paula Alquist (Ingrid Bergman) in Gaslight. The dress is made of dark ruby-red velvet that looks black in the movie’s black-and-white footage. Styled to be in keeping with the period setting, the gown serves as a visual metaphor for Paula’s increasing sense of being trapped psychologically as the manipulations of the plot close in around her.

Designer Cecil Beaton created a white silk and black lace evening dress trimmed with black velvet bows for Leslie Caron’s society debut scene as Gigi in a Paris restaurant called Maxim’s in the 1958 film. The costume signals that Gigi has become a proper society lady. Beaton was also nominated for and won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design for Gigi.

This simple ice-blue silk satin gown with spaghetti straps, draped sides, and a long cape train was designed by Edith Head for the New York premiere of The Country Girl. Grace Kelly first wore the dress at the premiere, then wore it again on the night that she won the Best Actress Oscar on March 30, 1955. The total cost of production, including labor and materials, was $4,000 in 1955 dollars. Even Grace Kelly repeated outfits. I feel vindicated.

When Audrey Hepburn won her first Academy Award for Best Actress for Roman Holiday on March 25, 1954, she wore an ivory floral lace dress created by Paramount studio costume designer Edith Head for the film’s closing scene. She had it remodeled by adding thin organza straps and a wide boatneck after being inspired by the Paris-based fashion house of Hubert de Givenchy, although Givenchy neither designed nor tailored the dress. The gown sold in 2011 for around $130,000.

The Australian designer Orry-Kelly designed this semi-translucent cocktail dress for Marilyn Monroe’s character, Sugar Kane Kowalczyk, to wear while singing “I’m Through with Love” in Some Like It Hot. The dress, constructed of a sheer fabric called silk illusion and detailed with strategic sections of beaded embroidery and a heart-shaped cutout in the back, gave the impression that Monroe was nude on screen, even though she wasn’t. Orry-Kelly received an Academy Award for Best Costume Design, Black and White.

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