Geoffrey Beene, Tom Kalin, Grace Mirabella, and Matthew Yokobosky ...

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Copyright 1998 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 20.3 (1998) 12-21

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Fashion and Film: A Symposium

Geoffrey Beene, Tom Kalin, Grace Mirabella, and Matthew Yokobosky Figures
Art and Fashion

On the occasion of the retrospective Fashion and Film at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a "Conversation on Art" was held on December 4, 1997, with Geoffrey Beene, fashion designer; Tom Kalin, filmmaker; Grace Mirabella, editor of Vogue and founder of Mirabella; and Matthew Yokobosky, Associate Curator of Film & Video, Whitney Museum of American Art. The following was transcribed by Leslie Ava Shaw and edited by Matthew Yokobosky, who was also the curator of the exhibition. YOKOBOSKY: In 1992, Tom Kalin directed a film titled Swoon, which told the story of the 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder trial in Chicago. The two men, 18 and 19 years old, murdered a 13-year- old boy. It was known as the crime of the century. But it is not the story which begins our discussion, but the visual impact of the film. BEENE: I liked the graphic quality of it and the way it was photographed reminded me of the films that were made in Germany during the 1920s. Yes, I really became obsessed with that film. KALIN: Thank you. It was a very low budget movie that was shot over a series of 14 days. BEENE: Tom, that was a master feat. When I saw it, I just felt that fashion should be shot this way--that intense, that black-and-white, and that graphic. I saw that movie five times. So at that point, I wrote Tom a fan letter and asked him if he would please speak to me about doing something with fashion. He never had and wasn't sure he would like fashion. But I took a chance and met with him. KALIN: And eventually we made a 30th-anniversary celebration of Geoffrey's career titled Geoffrey Beene: 30. BEENE: It was a 30-minute film on the clothes that I had done during the first 30 years of my career. What was wonderful about the film was that I had absolutely nothing to do with it. Tom was given carte blanche to make the film. The results [End Page 12] were startling to me and still are. I was fascinated that he could take the clothes and cast the film and dress all of these characters from the clothes that I had made over 30 years. YOKOBOSKY: How did you begin the collaborative process to make the film? KALIN: After I recovered from getting the fan letter, I went up to the office and I got an education in the clothes in a really direct way. Geoffrey brought out a lot of clothes produced over many years on his house models, and then I saw the clothes undergo transformations. Most specifically I remember this coat that was really a big, black cape with a hood--like a monk's robe, but more exaggerated. It appeared like an architectural thing. It was made from a perfect circle of fabric, but then the model put it on and it turned into this conical shape, and then with a belt, it turned into something else. I think it was the architectural basis of the clothing that I really responded to, and the Minimalist, pared-down quality about them. After seeing the clothes, I understood what it was about Swoon that attracted Geoffrey. It made sense to me then. YOKOBOSKY: I think part of what Geoffrey was interested in was the black-and-white quality of it, which to me evokes a lot of silent-era film. KALIN: There is actually an accidental origination of the black-and-white film technique in Swoon. We shot Swoon in 16mm film, and when it became obvious that we were going to release it theatrically, I had to blow it up to 35mm, and suddenly there was this enormous contrast in the image. The grain was multiplied, and the most curious thing was that the blacks all took on a kind of inky outline, as if it were a photograph that had been copied on a copier again and again. So, when it came time to make the film 30, instead of shooting in 35mm black-and-white--which would have made the image look more vintage in period and with all of those silvery midtones--I decided to again shoot in 16mm and blow the film up to 35mm. By choosing the technical approach first, it frees you to think of the architecture and the space of the frame in a very different way, as opposed to modeling every single shadow and every detail. So the black cape becomes black space against white, and white clothing against white became more expressive and more dramatic without other gray tones. YOKOBOSKY: Did you watch films together? KALIN: That was an initial thought. I wondered if there was a way I could do a film which presented these clothes on people in real situations and have them speak. And that seemed difficult and wrong because then the concern of the film would be narrative, and it would be about the story. So that drove me to look at silent film. In the early stages of our collaboration I would make crazy little collage videotapes, using a little bit of Flesh and the Devil and a little bit of Pandora's Box, as well as other Louise Brooks films. I was looking at gesture and ways to frame the clothes. Then we returned to the idea to have a feeling of narrative. That there would be some story, but that it would never have dialogue--it would be an unspoken narrative. I was [End Page 13] [Begin Page 15] clear that I wanted to see the clothes occupied by lots of different people, so there were people from age 14 up through Viveca Lindfors, who was our senior member. And likewise to see the clothes juxtaposed in a lot of different situations. To see a black evening gown with a transparent back outside in broad daylight in a field. To put clothes in situations that they weren't meant to be worn in originally. The film was made of three 10-minute sections, each section more or less an homage or reference to a certain film or filmmaker. The first section is a response to Flesh and the Devil, in which Greta Garbo is the cause of a gun duel. In this version, two women fight the gun duel over a man. The second section was a reference to Jean Cocteau's Blood of the Poet in a general kind of surrealist approach to interior space. The last section is a circus fantasy. A lot of people think that it's inspired by Fellini, but it actually has a lot more to do with Ingmar Bergman's film Sawdust and Tinsel, which is a very expressionist clown movie. YOKOBOSKY: Instead of doing a fashion show or an exhibition, you chose to do a film to commemorate 30 years of fashion. Why film as opposed to just displaying the clothes? BEENE: I think the whole future will exist with film and that models on a runway will disappear. A fashion show is just not enough; it's also so boring. I remember once when I was in Munich in the big square there were two marionettes that came out at noon and they danced out and then they moved this way, and after twelve bell rings, they suddenly went back. Their going back reminded me of a fashion show--in that half of what you see in a fashion show is the back of the models. Even though more often than not the main interest of the clothing is the front. So you spend half of your time in boredom, and it should not be that way. You should be entertained at every moment from every angle, and films can bring that about. When I went to school in France for two years we were taught that clothing should be interesting. And while something else didn't need to happen at every turn, it should turn into something else that was interesting. I've been to fashion shows, and sometimes even when I look at my own clothes, they are not enough; then I have to move forward and make them more interesting from other angles. Otherwise a woman may as well stay perfectly still and never move, so that you could see the design--but that's not it. I try to embrace the body. I don't use many side seams because that bisects the body. I make a lot of seams that go from the front to the back or they wind around the clothes. But to bring movement and extra dimensions to clothes, I think that maybe actresses and performers are better than

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some models. YOKOBOSKY: So you see performers bringing more to the clothes, which explains why you have had members from the American Ballet Theater model in your shows. Perhaps they bring more character to the dresses? BEENE: And discipline. In the ballet the dancers are so disciplined that it is very difficult for them to make an awkward movement. Everything they do is graceful. I did that at a point in the early 1990s when fashion was beginning to look a little terrible, if not horrible. It was when grunge was imposed upon us, and I just would [End Page 15] not become a part of it. So it was my very intent to give fashion a bit of grace rather than sadness or poor looks, and you get that quality from the discipline of dancers. I've never enjoyed anything more than seeing my clothes move with the grace of dancers, because they travel so beautifully on stage. So while the clothes were not designed for ballet dancers, they took clothes from the collection and wore them. It was a wonderful experience. YOKOBOSKY: Grace, you've worked a lot with models and probably also with actresses in your years at Vogue and Mirabella and you've seen the rise of the supermodel. Has the supermodel really changed how clothes are perceived? MIRABELLA: Well, the supermodel arrived because of the popularity of media and television. Before, these girls were seen maybe once a month in magazines; now they are seen all over the place--at a very big price. Did their popularity take away from the clothes the way Geoffrey implies? Maybe they did, but at the same time the show biz atmosphere in fashion was developing, which was not an atmosphere for clothes. Diana Vreeland used to say at Vogue, "give 'em a little something extra," which meant give the clothes more than is there. Bigger presentation, supermodels, and show biz all grew up at the same time, I would guess. YOKOBOSKY: It speaks to the fact that fashion shows have become much larger theatrical presentations. They've become events on the scale of movie reviews or art openings, more than they had been during the 30s, 40s, and 50s. The shows that you would see then, let's say at Chanel or St. Laurent, were models coming out and wearing the clothes and going backstage as Geoffrey was describing. But at what point did you see the fashion show really become an event? MIRABELLA: Certainly St. Laurent changed the mode of presentation, but I want to take you back slightly, though not to the fashion show, and that was what was called the industrial show. Industrial shows were presentations where industrial items such as machines and mixers were presented. The presentation was really people who were acting as presenters, and to show things. Presentation and spectacle did not come to fashion shows until after the big industrial shows of the 1950s, as well as film and television, had made an impact. Can I explain a St. Laurent show to you? YOKOBOSKY: Absolutely. MIRABELLA: In the early 1970s, St. Laurent did a show in his salon and what you saw were wonderful girls marvelously styled in remarkable, beautifully tailored pants suits. You saw maybe one of those, two of them, ten of them, and then suddenly you saw a hula dancer, and then you saw another hula dancer. It was at this point that you started to realize why the salon was filled with exotic trees and pineapples and so on. That was the introduction of "give 'em a little something extra" in fashion presentation, but, you see, he didn't mix it up with the clothes. In other words, the clothes were not on the hula dancers. The clothes were presented as clothes and then came the entertainment, and it kept going on like that. It was stupendous. In my mind that was the beginning of shows which had a little bit of theatrical something [End Page 16] going on. Yves developed that further and further, but he never mixed up the clothes and the presentation. It was always perfect, and never dull. And I have to get this in--it did demand one thing: the ability to design. Geoffrey knows that. When the demand is on the design, you don't mess around. But people do mess around when the design is less good. YOKOBOSKY: Do you think that Geoffrey's shows have evolved over the past 30 years? Are they still very strict shows? MIRABELLA: They've evolved a lot. I don't know if most people here know Geoffrey, but if they do they will realize that they've heard sixty words more than they've ever heard before. You've never heard him say so much. Never. But yes, the shows have evolved and evolved and evolved in the most interesting ways. Because he never forgets the design. He never gave in to theatrical presentation, but moved subtly so that you could see the desire to use a film or ballet dancers. I remember when you were attempting to show clothes with live video monitors so that at certain times the model would arrive at a particular place and a camera would focus on a detail of the sleeve or the detail of the shoe. You tried to keep mixing mediums, all in an attempt to allow people the opportunity to see everything that was in the clothes. BEENE: Video cameras were aimed at the girls as they came down the runway. One camera would focus on the accessories. The other camera on the shoes, taken live as the model walked. That was the beginning of my affection and appreciation for film and how we could show clothes better, while being more entertaining. YOKOBOSKY: It might be interesting at this moment to let everyone know that Geoffrey actually started out in medical school and had studied anatomy for a long time, which is something most designers haven't studied in such a detailed way. Obviously, from that education you learned the proportions of the body very well and were able to come in with a learned, very clear vision of what it was to then put something on the body. How do you think that this knowledge has influenced your design? BEENE: One time I was in Tokyo and there was a show of my clothes, and with fashion presentations in Japan a press conference is held immediately after the show. One of the writers said to me, "Why is it that you can design with only a meter and a half of fabric?" and I thought, "Is that what I design with?" Because I'm sure that if someone gave me a meter and a half of fabric I would say that I couldn't design anything. But then I suddenly thought, well, maybe that's what makes my clothes last, because they are built around the body. And the more I think of it, it does go back to my medical education and my appreciation of the body. I am always conscious of the body and I'm always trying to define it. YOKOBOSKY: Defining the body has often been an impetus in itself for many designers. I have always thought how interesting it was that early costume designers were "responsible" for defining an actress's look. Adrian designed Garbo's look as [End Page 17] well as Jean Harlow's and Joan Crawford's, and ultimately the appearance of these women is somehow attributed to a designer. KALIN: The Hollywood system was such a controlling apparatus that every aspect was considered and integrated. At times it created a really clear vision, since the director is coordinating in the production design and costume design an overall graphic image. Clothes usually aren't functioning in that way in film because they're not intended to. They're intended to disappear into the scenery, become a part of the scene. And I think that part of the reason you see those kinds of design in the silent period is because the clothes became an instrumental part of telling the story. Think of all the movies that we've seen and all the clothes that we remember from them. YOKOBOSKY: At one point while researching the exhibition Fashion and Film, I was talking with Geoffrey about your film. He mentioned how much he liked the whiteness of the black-and-white film, and I started thinking about back when Adrian was working with the set designer Cedric Gibbons, and how together they developed something called the white on white look for Jean Harlow. Up to that point you always designed a film to be black-and-white and gray, but it was an innovation to think of a black-and-white film being mostly white, and so they bleached her hair and put her in white satin gowns all the time. Once film shifted from black-and-white to color, then there was a re-evaluation of how designers had to work in Hollywood. What is appealing to you about seeing the clothes in black-and-white? BEENE: Color has a way of making everything equal, but with black-and-white you get better shadows and contrasts. Color is just too even for me. KALIN: I just can't imagine surrealist film or Jean Cocteau's films being in color. Black-and-white renders everything in a graphic quality that turns it into something other-worldly. Thinking about expression on that level, actors' emotions seem more graphic and real in black-and-white, it's that reduced down. YOKOBOSKY: Later, though, Adrian designed in color, such as Lovely to Look At (1952), and even continued to design after he had left Hollywood and opened his own salon in Los Angeles. Which brings me to the fact that Hollywood fashion designers--even though they went on and opened their own salons--are never really discussed within the same genre of designers as Geoffrey and St. Laurent and Dior. It seems that there has been a real separation of the two histories. MIRABELLA: Very much so. I wouldn't be able to do a quick explanation of that except maybe to say simply that Hollywood, California, never became really part of the ready-to-wear design world, or the couture world. YOKOBOSKY: Do you think that it was just about being in Los Angeles? MIRABELLA: Well, it might have been the show biz part. I really mean that. As remarkable as it is on the screen, clothes are meant to be worn. You think "so what's the big deal," but I do think that could be part of it. It was another kind of world. [End Page 18] [Begin Page 20] The garment industry wasn't making a

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few wonderful dresses for a few lovely women. It was about ready-to-wear and dressing people, and that's much more responsibility than it is to have twenty private clients. YOKOBOSKY: Do you think that that may be the difficulty with someone like Bob Mackie's position in fashion? MIRABELLA: Well, it's very show biz. I heard him being interviewed and they commented, "I notice that you don't do any day clothes," and he said "Well, that's not what I know." His world is not about day clothes, not about women in life. It was about women in make-believe evening settings or dress-up time. YOKOBOSKY: Well, you've always been a champion of clothes that people could wear, and specifically, sportswear as an American archetype of fashion. MIRABELLA: Sportswear for me is a sign of very modern dressing which has been slightly shortchanged by the name "sportswear." People often think of it as warm-up clothes. But we all know differently. We know that sportswear gives you a certain ease in dressing. It's meant to have a certain regard for a liberation and an ease and good looks for women. So it is a very American way of thinking, and a very American way of designing and dressing. BEENE: In all honesty, I have to say I think sportswear began in California in defense of it all. But it is derivative of men's tailoring. In a funny way, Chanel picked up on that with the Duke of Westminster in a wool jersey jacket. She carried that wool jersey on and made history with it. The word sportswear though is a misnomer, particularly in Europe. They're very confused about what sportswear is because using the term sport, they think it's for active sport. I was in London a week ago going through this discussion on casual sport. There are so many terms for comfortable American clothes that it's becoming somewhat confusing. The word sportswear I do think came from just the comfort in clothes and the versatility of it. The pullover you have on [Grace] is exactly what I mean about the influence of American sportswear. It's something that I'm sure you wear in the evening or in the day, and that is very, very American. You would never see that type of clothing in Europe, and maybe not even in Hollywood. It's derivative of sportswear. YOKOBOSKY: Both of you talked about sportswear being derivative of menswear. Men's clothing has always gotten short shrift in film. It was thought that if a man was too particular--paid too much attention to his look--it wasn't good for the film or the actor's reputation. That to be macho or a classic male figure in film, you had to be rugged. Why do you think men's fashion has really not gotten as much flair or distinction as women's fashion has, especially in film? BEENE: Well, I think in everyday life women desire change much more than men. I don't know where that stems from or how that started. There's a strange thing going on today, and I talk with many men and women about it, and that is the popularity of women adopting men's clothes and particularly suits. They're very [End Page 20] masculine and they're curved more now for a woman, but I have never understood the desire for women to dress like men, because we men are not so happy with the way we dress. So eventually there will be a change in menswear. I was in Vienna last year, and there was a publisher who was a great friend of mine, and we were speaking on this same thing, and he said as the end of each century comes about and particularly the millennium that there are people who do wild, wild things and there are those who simply make beautiful things for the sake of beauty. And to me personally, there should not be retro; we should always move forward. There are glorious things with us now that we have not even begun to assimilate. That goes for medicine and science and everything. When I first met Frank Gorman, the astronaut, and his wife, Frank had become the president of Eastern Airlines, and wanted me to design the costumes. Well, I didn't get the job because I was too expensive, but Mrs. Gorman told me about all the fabrics that the astronauts had worn and how really useful they were in changing temperatures. I've never forgotten that. I think it's up to the scientists to change our lives, not the designers. The scientists have to give us fabrics that are more economical and that go into different temperate zones. That's the next revolution in fashion. It has nothing to do with hemlines or lengths or anything, but something that will change our whole life. I think that in this century there has not been a greater influence upon the world than America--and in fashion specifically Hollywood. Its designers, its movies, everything to me in this century that has been the great shining star has come from America. When you go throughout the world you can speak to someone in New Guinea about two things: one is food and the other is Hollywood. You always get a response. It's that important.

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