Irene Sharaff She once said: “Elegance can be acquired, but having style is a rare thing.” Certainly, under her skilled hands and attentive eyes, stars with this characteristic have passed, stars whose charm factor she has certainly helped to enhance with her creations.
After Edith Head, in fact, we are talking about the film costume designer who has won the most Oscars, five during her career: the last one in 1966 for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (the others for An American in Paris, The King and I, West Side Story And Cleopatra).
She preferred to dress men (but created fabulous women’s clothes) and is considered the forerunner of color harmony. Let’s give thanks to Edith Head, a teacher who accidentally became the greatest costume designer of all time (now celebrated with an exhibition), for giving us cinematic looks that are the stuff dreams are made of.
Not just Hollywood: Irene Sharaff is also recognized as one of Broadway’s most famous costume designers from where she took her first professional steps in the 30s. First illustrator for Vogue And Harper’s Bazaarthen served an apprenticeship as assistant to the theatre costume designer Aline Bernstein at Civic Repertory Theater Company.
Tireless, while making costumes for theAmerican Ballet Theatre and the New York City Balletin his free time he paints and sculpts, also dealing with scenography. Thus he attracted the attention of Hollywood where he landed in the 40s with a future already written: to be the the cream of the cream of the stylists (as he liked to call himself because, as he claimed, he designed clothes rather than costumes) of the Golden Age of American cinema (and, among other things, among the highest paid).
If shoulder pads exist in fashion, precursors of feminist revolutions, if women show off androgynous looks with cloche hats and if designers use cellophane for their creations, it is all thanks to him. Adrian, among Hollywood stylists, is perhaps the most important: with him, in fact, the figure of the costume designer was born
Among the first actresses he dressed, Judy Garland: among the protagonists of the film Let’s meet in St. Louis (the one mentioned in the first film of Sex And The City), for her he created a scarlet velvet ball gown, the most sophisticated costume the diva had ever worn on screen and which allowed her to reach the highest peaks of charm.
Sharaff, meanwhile, had returned to New York. She didn’t like the Los Angeles lifestyle and, in any case, she was offered some tempting jobs on Broadway, among which The king and I, with Gertrude Lawrencewhich gave the costume designer the opportunity to experiment with both oriental silks and Victorian crinolines. The moment highlight of the musical at a sartorial level is the dress in heavy silk and with an exaggeratedly wide skirt.
But it was the meeting with Elizabeth Taylor to deliver Irene Sharaff to history: for the purple-eyed diva, in fact, the designer was called to create the wardrobe for the blockbuster Cleopatra. Back in Los Angeles, the challenge was to create costumes that wouldn’t be dwarfed by the gigantic sets.
The result was breathtaking, sumptuous designs, which saw the on-screen actress literally dripping in elaborate jewels, draped in vibrantly hued chiffon and silks, not to mention the famous 24-karat gold cape.
Designed to resemble the wings of a phoenix, it was intricately assembled from thin strips of gold leather and embellished with thousands of horn beads and sequins anchored to other beads. In 2012, the iconic cape sold at auction for $59,375. Before that, it had been stored in a cedar closet, wrapped delicately in tissue paper.
His name is closely linked to that of Marilyn Monroe but William Travilla is the man who whispered glamour to many sex symbols of the Hollywood Golden Age. King of pleats, he made Errol Flynn wear tights. Few people know that his signature is also behind the costumes of a famous 80s TV series
Even today, the number of costume changes for Elizabeth Taylor still holds a record with 65 costumes: from a sartorial point of view the film had a significant influence on the fashion of the time, popularizing snake rings, cuffs, geometric haircuts and maxi dresses. The partnership between the costume designer and the actress continued off the set: Liz wanted Irene to design them her wedding dress for her 1964 wedding to Richard Button, met right on the set of Cleopatra. Even in this case it was a dress handed down to posterity: the yellow organza dress is still today among the most unconventional and glamour of bridal fashion of all time.
Among other records achieved by Sharaff is that for the dress worn by Barbra Streisand in the musical Hello, Dolly! from 1966, which appears in the top ten of the most expensive dresses ever made for a film. It is the very luxurious dress worn by Dolly Levi, Streisand’s character, in the final scenes of the film, made of fabric decorated with real gold threads (14 carats) and studded with Swarovski crystals weighing 18 kilos. To complete the look a large feather headdress, a multi-strand choker necklace and long gloves.
Irene Sharaff had designed the dress with a long train to be as regal as possible. However, during the dress rehearsal, which included a dance, Streisand and the dancers tripped several times on the fabric. The costume designer did not change the dress but insisted that the choreography be changed because the costume was the epitome of the character, thus leaving intact this masterpiece of cinematic costume, which cost 10 thousand dollars, sold at auction in 2011 for the incredible sum of 123 thousand dollars. When style, in short, also shapes films.
Source: Vanity Fair
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