Dorothy’s famous ruby red slippers from The Wizard of Oz have found their way home yet again. The famous slippers worn by Judy Garland in the 1939 musical fantasy are one of the highlights of a Hollywood exhibition, showcasing iconic costumes across years of cinematic history.
The Hollywood Costume exhibit, opening on Thursday in Los Angeles, has been organised by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in collaboration with London’s Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A). The exhibition will be showcasing more than 150 costumes from different eras of cinema.
The exhibition has been expanded from a similar 2012 V&A exhibition held in London, and includes 40 new costumes, including those worn by Oscar-winner Jared Leto in the 2013 Academy Award-nominated film Dallas Buyers Club, and Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games. And, of course, no costume exhibit can ever be complete without Harisson Ford’s leather jacket and fedora from the Indiana Jones film franchise.
“This landmark exhibition reflects the Academy’s mission of celebrating and preserving the past, honouring the present and shaping the future of world cinema,” said Cheryl Boone Isaacs, president of the Academy, the film organisation, which hosts the annual Oscars ceremony.
The exhibition, which will be held at the Wilshire May Company Building, where the Academy’s film museum will officially open in 2017, spans across four rooms, which chronicle the journey of a costume from a sketch to a final product.
From the glamorous, such as Marlene Dietrich’s Persian-inspired embroidered gown from 1937’s Angel, to the casual, such as Jesse Eisenberg’s grey hoodie and flip flops from his role as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, each outfit in the exhibition is accompanied by a breakdown of the character and outfit choices.
“This is not an exhibition about clothes, this is about the movies,” said exhibition curator Deborah Nadoolman Landis, the renowned costume designer behind The Blues Brothers, 1941 and The Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Landis said she hoped the exhibit would help educate people on how “costume designers contribute to every single production,” as well as how a costume can help audiences become more invested in a movie character.
The exhibit includes Darth Vader’s constume from Star Wars, Christian Bale’s Batman suit, Amy Adams’s American Hustle gown, and Robert Pattinson’s costume as the vampire Edward Cullen in Twilight.
In one room, long black tables and chairs have videos projected onto them, resembling a roundtable discussion with actors such as Tippi Hedren, directors including Alfred Hitchcock and Quentin Tarantino, and costume designers such as Oscar-winning Edith Head, discussing key costumes.
Three-time Oscar-winning actor Meryl Streep, a former student of costume design, has her own section, housing many of her key film outfits and video projections of her discussing the choices made for her characters.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 2nd, 2014.
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