Strange Beauty: Barbette and the Art of Transformation

In 1912, at twenty-three, French writer Jean Cocteau collaborated with some of the most talented
artists in Europe when he wrote the libretto for The Blue God, a ballet performed by Diaghilev’s
Ballets Russes. Nijinsky danced the title role, Reynaldo Hahn wrote the music, and Léon Bakst
designed the set and costumes. A decade later, when Cocteau wrote to his friends about a terrific
new performer called Barbette at the Casino de Paris, they took note. To the Belgian music critic
Paul Collaer, Cocteau wrote, “A music-hall act called Barbette has been keeping us enthralled
for a fortnight.” Cocteau described the young American from Texas as a graceful daredevil on
the trapeze and one of the most beautiful entertainers in theater. “No mere acrobat in women’s
clothes. He blends a tightrope dancer’s skill and perilous performance with the creativity of a
poet. An angel, a flower, a bird. We all found him an absolute knockout.”

Clothes Make the Character: Costume Collaborations of Edith Head and Alfred Hitchcock

“I knew I was not a creative design genius. I was never going to be the world’s greatest costume designer, but there was no reason I couldn’t be the smartest.” —Edith Head

In 1946, Alfred Hitchcock arranged for Paramount to loan Edith Head to RKO to dress Ingrid Bergman in his spy thriller Notorious. This was Edith’s first time working with the English director, and she found in him a like-minded collaborator who was as exacting and blunt as she was. While her fellow costume designers often made clothes to display their style, Edith had learned over her past twenty years at Paramount that the objective was to create clothes to suit the character and advance the storyline, an approach that suited Hitchcock’s philosophy. Hitchcock was famous for using clothes in his films to express the psychology of his characters. In his scripts, he was explicit about color, style, and accessories. Once the parameters were decided, Edith was given creative freedom and a big budget to make beautiful garments.

The Great British Teddy Girls: Ken Russell’s Forgotten Photographs

When the Second World War ended in 1945 after six years of conflict, it quickly became evident that Britain had paid a high price for victory. The nation’s wealth was severely depleted. The German blitz had destroyed large swaths of English countryside and many cities were reduced to ash and rubble, resulting in a dire housing shortage and a reduction in the number of functioning factories and stores. Postwar London resembled the city of Charles Dickens’s novels, with overcrowding, rubbish-filled alleys, poor sanitation, and only intermittent running water and electricity. Social services struggled to serve the physically and mentally scarred people who grappled with loneliness, illness, and bereavement. It was also clear that the responsibilities of a large empire were handicapping the home economy. During the Age of Austerity, as it came to be known, meat and petrol were in short supply and sold at high prices, while basic household necessities such as milk, butter, and sugar, as well as clothing and shoes, were rationed. After almost ten years of impoverishment, austerity finally began to recede. Unemployment and the working and middle classes were able to participate in consumer culture for the first time in decades

Just Nina Mae: The Struggle of an Early African American Movie Star

During Hollywood’s early years, tantalizing stories of discovery flourished, luring young hopefuls to the fledgling industry out west. According to movie lore, The Hollywood Reporterfounder Billy Wilkerson came across sixteen-year-old Lana Turner drinking a Coke at a soda fountain. Photographer David Conover spotted Marilyn Monroe while she was working on an airplane assembly line. And John Wayne was a prop man on John Ford’s movie set when the director made him an extra in his film. Fame and fortune for these actors soon followed.

Nina Mae McKinney’s story of discovery was no less fantastic. She left high school at sixteen to join the chorus of impresario Lew Leslie’s all-Black Broadway musical revue, Blackbirds of 1928. Hollywood directors and producers regularly raided Broadway productions for fresh, inexpensive talent to fill their stables at their California studios. After failing to sign jazz singer Ethel Waters, one of MGM’s top directors, King Vidor, was on the lookout for an extraordinary Black actress to play the title role of Chick, a singer and dancer in Hallelujah. The movie was a serious look into the lives of African Americans in the South. When he saw Blackbirds, McKinney stood out. He later recalled, “She was third from the right in the chorus. She was beautiful and talented and glowing with personality.” When they met after the show, he offered her the lead, skipping the usual preliminary screen tests, acting classes, and makeovers. There is no evidence that McKinney was seeking a movie career; she had fallen in love with theater as a young girl growing up in South Carolina and trained herself as a singer and dancer, borrowing songs and choreography from the movies she saw at the local theater. In many ways, films were still inferior to Broadway, which in 1925 staged over two hundred productions; nevertheless, she accepted Vidor’s offer.

In 1907, when Coles Phillips sold his small New York City advertising agency, he had enough money to set himself up for one month as a magazine illustrator. He convinced a landlord to rent him an artist’s studio, promising payment as soon as money from his commissions came through. In truth, Phillips had not yet sold a single drawing, but he worked well under pressure. He studied the market and decided that Life, one of the top general-interest magazines in the country, suited his style and sensibility. For days, he sketched ideas for cartoons, but nothing seemed fresh or inspired. Frustrated, he took his sketch pad to a neighborhood tavern. Across the room, two women—one young and pretty, the other older and handsome—sat at opposite ends of a long wooden table and toasted each other over a shared carafe of wine. It was a simple yet compelling moment that inspired him to draw it.

A lamp may be as much an object of art as a painting or a piece of statuary. In fact, it should be.

—Tiffany Studios, a company advertisement

In 1903 a strike was brewing at the Tiffany Studios in New York. The men of the Lead Glaziers and Glass Cutters Union were demanding that Louis Comfort Tiffany fire Clara Driscoll and thirty-five women who worked for her in the glass-cutting department. The men complained that Clara’s thirty-five-dollar-a-week salary was a personal affront and that the young women were taking jobs from men who needed to support their families. They got the dirty work. They assembled the lampshades and soldered the cut pieces of glass, while Clara’s department designed the shades, selected the glass, and cut the individual segments.

The Many Lives of Anna May Wong

“Life is too serious to take seriously”

—Anna May Wong

“Literalism has no place in theater.”

—Jo Mielziner

NOTES FOR THE DESIGNER

The set is the bed-sitting-room of a plantation home in the Mississippi Delta. It is along an upstairs gallery which probably runs around the entire house: it has two pairs of very wide doors opening onto the gallery, showing white balustrades against a fair summer sky that fades into dusk and night during the course of the play which occupies precisely the time of its performance excepting, of course, the fifteen minutes of intermission.

Literary success came to Charles Dickens with the publication of his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, in 1836-37. Following Pickwick, he brought out in quick succession Oliver Twist (1837-39), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), David Copperfield (1849-50), and Bleak House (1852-53), as well as A Christmas Carol (1843), four other Christmas books, three additional novels, two books of travel writing, and a history of England from the Roman conquest in 1688 intended for children. By the early 1850s, he was a world-renowned celebrity.