Dressed Cinema: Inspired: Michael Kors

[btw - January 5th was National Bird Day. I only know this because of Ian Padgham's tweets for SFMOMA. You inspired me to write this as well as my post on national hat day! Coincidentally, the first scenes of the film I'm featuring today are set in San Francisco! So cheers to you, this one's for you!]

Everyone seems to be going Mad Men for the fifties and sixties lately, Marc Jacobs’ Louis Vuitton collection and Miuccia Prada’s were among my favorites this past Fall. But back in 2008, even though Mad Men might have been on Michael Kors’ mind when he designed his ready-to-wear collection, it was from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) where he got most of his inspiration.

Costume designer Edith Head’s biggest challenge was probably making sure the actors could actually do the movie's action in the clothes. Hitchcock specified that the heroine, Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), should wear a green dress during the crows chase scene, so Head created a dress that allowed her to move as the script required her to (Landis, 2007, 179). Edith was limited to using green and blue in Hedren’s wardrobe because Hitchcock was planning on using a lot of green in the production of this film, so she resurrected the eau de nil suit she had designed for Grace Kelly in Rear Window (1954) using a more Chanel-like structure this time (Jorgensen, 2010, 297).

Grace Kelly above left for Rear Window (1954) and Edith Head's illustration of the eau de nil suit above right. Tippi Hedren below left for The Birds (1963) and Head's illustration.