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'GIVES
GOOD FACE': Drake Stutesman
After 'The Fashion Collection,' AMC went further behind-the-scenes in a new series, beginning by profiling Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer costumer, Edith Head. In the much repeated swift, few seconds-long trailer for this program, a succession of extraordinary hats was shown, featured in the 1963 film to follow, A New Kind of Love (Melville Shavelson, US, 1963), with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. But credit needs to be given where credit is due. Head did not design these hats - though the hats are so compelling they're used to lure an audience. These hats were designed by the milliner, Mr John. Why is due credit important? What makes a hat deserve distinction over other accessories - shoes, gloves, jewellery - designed under the aegis of a costumer? The hat is an interesting piece of clothing. Less used now, in previous centuries, hats were ubiquitous wear. (Though the current use of the ball cap is almost as widespread as the ever-present cap, cloche, boater, and bowler of the earlier part of the century.) However, the hat has retained enormous power within the uniform, signifying identity in a way that virtually no other piece of clothing does. The crown, veil, turban, habit, helmet or yarmulke still immediately reveal a social status today exactly as each did thousands of years ago. Hats are, in this sense, an event hidden in plain sight. They combine the signifier with the signified as few objects do. Films, too, tapped the hat's ability to key in vital information. But film posed special costume problems. In black and white cinema, line dominated so designers were forced to focus there but in close-up texture was essential. Furthermore, unlike other effects, the garment had to look good from every angle. Textures were created in feathers, fur, and mat fabrics but sequins, beads and tinsels were needed to catch the light as a person moved (Long 1994:41). In looking at twenties' glamour clothes, what may seem indulgences are in fact a crafted cinema piece, integral to lighting, camera and narrative. But these outfits, made as a movable part of the film's entirety, also had to satisfy fans' over-the-top fantasies of what wealth and power would wear. Fans would not accept current fashions on screen. These polarities - constituent crafting and sole couturier style - combined to make cinema clothing so powerful that Adrian, film's first widely successful designer, declared - 'One could line up all the gowns and tell the screen story' (Adrian). But the hats especially circling the libidinous face would have to reveal covertly what lay within those features. The hat told the story too, and more succinctly. The film hat served complex functions. It connoted character information (is she mysterious, direct, repressed, sexual?). It's aided lighting (light, shading, or darkness may be needed around her head). It enhanced the plot (implying elements as diverse as depression - floppy, tattered, misshapen hat - or social status - tasteless hat, rich hat, child-like hat). But it's most valuable function was, as John described it, 'the proper display of a woman's beauty' (FIT). It could even be argued that screen goddesses most memorable apparel was their hats. Remembering a glamour idol, does one picture the eyes beneath: Garbo's jewelled triangular
helmet in Mata Hari. Dietrich's veiled cloche
in Shanghai Express. Leigh's wheel hat in Gone
with the Wind. Monroe's showgirl headdress
in Gentleman Prefer Blondes. If you were to look up these costumes, even in photographs where only the head is depicted, in any reference book, they would be attributed respectively to the designers Adrian, Travis Banton, Walter Plunkett, and William Travilla. That would be wrong. As with the hats in Head's work in A New Kind of Love, they were all designed by John P John, most often known as Mr John. Returning to due credit. The hats listed above are so associated with the actress and her sexuality, they mark germinal points in film iconography and, thus, literally in a particular look. These looks - the Dietrich, the Garbo, the Leigh, the Monroe look - as Madonna's song Vogue describes it, 'give good face.' These women's facial image is so powerful, it's sex itself. Their orgasmic looks are intricately woven in the American social fabric and into its socialised female identity. The illusion made in the unit of hat and face is generated by a contradictory process. Millinery craft must hide in order to do what it is supposed to do. The hat maker, to be good, has to access that balance between the person and the hat framing that person. As Vivien Leigh said when she and John met to discuss Gone with the Wind 's costumes: 'All I ask is - don't let them see the hat before they see my face' (interview). This is the milliner's task: to make the look, but if the hat shows off, the woman will disappear and so the look will vanish. The hat must be there but almost invisibly. In 1979, John described the trickiness of this relationship. 'A hat is the most dangerous thing in the world, because it shows what you are....A dress you can overcome. But you can't overcome a hat, because that's all you have, a face' (Scott 1979:46).
At this task, film's greatest milliner was Mr John. His work appears in virtually a thousand films. For the sake of brevity, one analysis of Marlene Dietrich's hats in Shanghai Express gives a good example of John's genius and his cinematic dexterity. In 1932's Shanghai Express, John worked, with Paramount costumer Travis Banton, for Josef von Sternberg, a director whose complex use of superimpositions, movements and screens to cast subtle mutations of lights and darks made every piece - actor, lighting, facade and cloth - an active piece of his films. Von Sternberg's ornate use of fabric - in nets, laces, veils, and the like - perhaps influenced by an early job as a lace factory salesman - showed an unusual integration of cloth as structural within the film itself. John's hats had to be part of von Sternberg's system. A system whose goal was, as John Baxter, in his von Sternberg critique, states to 'explore...mood or emotional state, chart the development of an attitude, analyse the delicate evolutions of a relationship in ascendancy or decline'(1971:22). To express something so ineluctable, the underlying foundation must be very sturdy. Only two hats appear in the film; each demonstrate ingenious success at co-ordinating the hat's multi-purpose. The hats are in themselves remarkable, subtle, and suggestive yet a functioning component of lighting. As with Adrian's adage, the Shanghai Express story can be summed up in four millinery parts: two hats, no hat, return to hat. The first hat introduces the heroine and hints at what is to come, the second hat shows conflict and the heroine's vulnerability and the third, hatlessness, shows the character in extreme danger, both mortal and romantic. The film's resolution, where the lovers rejoin, returns the heroine to the world of hats as she resumes her original demeanour.
Dietrich's character, Shanghai Lily, is described as 'a woman who lives by her wits on the China coast,' euphemisizing her prostitution but focusing on her intelligence, self reliance and daring. Her entrance must visually provoke these responses in the viewer. Lily is first seen in the crowded railway station. Her dress is black and not eye-catching, except for her thick collar of thin plumes, a theme picked up in her eye-catching hat. She wears a rimless cloche made of black iridescent feathers which are set in swirls over her head, though the feathers are not initially obvious. Across her face, in a flat shape, is a diagonal, lined veil ending just above her lip. This fascinating effect tells all. Her cloche's shuttered, alluring veil and snug glistening skull cap reveals sensual independence and tight-lipped call-girl secrets. In this hat she enters the train, establishes herself in her car, encounters the man who will be her enemy and meets her old lover, a chance passenger. The hat's close veil continually alludes to self protection but what seemed a stiff visor is later shown to be soft fabric, rippling in breezes. The tight dark cloche reveals warms and irregular rounds in the light-refracting feathers as Dietrich moves her head to speak and look. The hat's elegant style symbolises her sophistication and her contrastive nature: she is soft and hard, in a shell and pettable, as strong as the hat's controlled structure but as full of nuances as the hat's feathery gleaming texture. The hat's gradually exposed softnesses thus tells us what is to come: that strong Lily's humanity and suffering desire will become obvious.
The second hat appears once the journey begins, literally and metaphorically. Lily wears another cloche, made of plain mat fabric, an effect virtually dividing her oval face into white and black pieces. Now having met her lover, she is at odds with her old resolutions. Her emotions are beginning to show, mirrored in opposing white sweeps of thick willowy feathers, as long as twelve inches each, at the hat's right base. These horn shapes form a V, pointing toward the face, but also represent how her feelings for this man are spilling out of her, out of her control. Midway behind the hat, and upright, are white feathers, less distinct than those at the neck. Finally, and not instantly apparent, there is a veil, again diagonally crossing the face, very faint, ending below the lips, with strong black dots marking a line along its edge. Her veil appears and disappears to the viewer's eyes in much the way Lily's guard lowers and raises in the midst of her intense feelings. The hat's delineated blacks and whites contribute to von Sternberg's use of moiré-like patterns. The hat becomes a five piece (cloche, veil, three sets of feathers), exceptionally co-ordinated, unit of white and black, hard and soft, visible/invisible/less visible which never dominates Dietrich's exceptional beauty but is a solid frame around her features. Yet the hat is equally exceptionally beautiful, suitable for Lily to wear. Her control and strength are implicit in the hat's structure: the feathers are tightly constructed into the hat. They retain graceful softness yet never loosen even though they are at her neck and an awkward place of movement. The hat is steady, comfortably moving with each head turn, and retaining its specific five piece shape. It draws our eyes to Dietrich's face, is exquisite from every angle, yet acts as a light catcher or mat duller. In one scene, from long shot, in a very dark station, Dietrich's oval face is buoyed up by the V-shape at her neck, making us look at her all the more, yet continuing to impress as a hat. After these opening scenes, through most of the film, Lily becomes increasingly frantic for her lover's safety, overwhelmed in 'loving him madly.' Throughout this, including scenes when she sacrifices herself for him, prays for him and he continues to reject her, she is vulnerably without her hat. This is especially powerful when she shakes from his touch and the camera closes on her face looking upwards into muted light. She seems on the verge of dissolution. At the film's end, she gets off the train wearing the original cloche. Fearing her lover's loss forever (he still rejects her), the veil's lines have been intensified, as her self protection has redoubled, all the more obvious because, having been effected again by love, she must try harder to hold herself aloof. But, ultimately, her lover humbles himself before her and, united, they kiss. She retains her hat as does he (a colonel's, which she has worn once) but significantly she denudes him of his petty props - his riding crop and gloves. Their hats are all they need. Baxter sees Shanghai Express as 'an elaborate excursion into sexual domination' (1971:17). Certainly Dietrich has the upper hand in many respects as an object of supreme desire, but the hat-hatless subplot counterpoints this 'domination' revealing her as human with wants, needs, fragilities and strengths. This extraordinarily talented milliner, Mr John, was exceptionally famous in his day, but has now fallen into virtual public obscurity. His 'day' was a long one, spanning fifty years and covering places as diverse as Paris's 1920's music halls to New York's 1960's cat walks. He made hats coveted by the rich and famous from Greta Garbo, Mistinguett, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Wallace Simpson to Liza Minelli, Jacqueline Onassis, Doris Duke and Gypsy Rose Lee. This man was described in 1993, in his New York Times obituary as 'as famous in the world of hats as Christian Dior was in the realm of haute couture.' For a man as famous in his milieu as Dior is in his, John, in contrast, has very little available information. No books on him exist. He appears only briefly or not at all in fashion books and dictionaries, though one described John as the highest paid milliner in history (McDowell 1992:159). He was renown for his showmanship, extravagant appearance (with a physical resemblance to Napoleon), and publicity stunts, (not uncommon traits in the fashion world), but when he is mentioned it is always with high praise for his designs, described with respect for beauty, crafting, pragmatism and skill. Colin McDowell, in his huge survey of hats in history, describes John as 'practical and practising ....produc[ing] hats that were exuberant, witty and stylish without ever being crude. Behind all the posturing was a great milliner' (1992:159). Fashion writer Dorothy Hawkins declared John's work the 'most original, wearable and flattering hats to be seen anywhere' (McDowell 1992:160). Columnist Virginia Forbes noted that 'many fashion authorities' called him 'the world's leading hat designer' whose work 'invariably is a masterpiece of originality and good taste. His ideas .... make millinery history' (FIT). Diana Vreeland, long-time editor of Harper's Bazaar and then Vogue, felt, 'The world loved his hats.... Everyone loves him' (Scott, 1979:46). Adelle Dillingham, a grande English hostess, recognised John's core, 'It was a big act, but never phoney... [Y]ou could relax. John would not sell you a hat you didn't look good in' (Scott:43). John himself : '[T]hey called me an eccentric. They said I was a mad hatter. That isn't true. I always loved classical styles. I was conservative, though I had a theatrical flair' (Waltz and Morris 1978:122). This theatricality Nancy Phillips in the New York Times described as an 'audience with .... the King of Hats... rather like having an eighteenth century dream in twentieth century technicolor - with a sound track from La Dolce Vita.' John's limelight shone through different 'epochs,' as he called them (Scott 1979:43), for almost sixty years. His first epoch was as a student and a buyer for his family firm in Europe, his second was in film where he established a fantastic reputation, his third was a twenty year partnership under the John-Frederics label, and finally his supreme decades as Mr John Inc, the millinery superstar. During his film career, John worked with virtually every major studio, designer and movie idol. His range was prodigious, designing for films that became classics in their genre, working with directors as diverse as Josef von Sternberg (The Scarlet Empress, US, 1934), Howard Hawks (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, US, 1953), Victor Fleming (Gone with the Wind, US, 1939), Luchino Visconti (Death in Venice, Italy, 1971) and George Cukor (Dinner at Eight, US, 1933). John spent at least a decade as Adrian's milliner at MGM and as Travis Banton's at Paramount. John's most publicised film work was for Gone with the Wind making all the hats for Walter Plunkett's costumes, and his advisory role on My Fair Lady's (George Cukor, US, 1964) hats for Cecil Beaton. But his influence was far wider, permeating many things we take for granted. John is credited with some extraordinary fashion firsts. He originated the everyday use of the shoulder strap bag and of ballet shoes for street wear (a progenitor for every other form of street slipper). In the fifties, he introduced the stole. Differently shaped and in uncommon blends of material, his shawls could be as unusual as reversed denim trimmed with expensive dull gold braid, edged with large crocheted hoops of hairy, ordinary wrapping string. These interpretative blends were equally found in his clothes, such as his sixties' suede jump-suit shorts, (a purple version was worn by Jackie Onassis). In hats, he invented the 1920's Charleston cloche, hats that folded, hats that converted, crocheted hats, wimples, scarf hats and tailored hats decorated with tulle, jet or pearls. He created the 'monocle veil,' a loose mask over the eyes, (worn by the Duchess of Windsor) and he hung veils from tennis visors. His hats could be fantastic - a banana hat unpeeled with a zipper - with names like 'Video Pink,' 'Sights You Shouldn't Miss,' or 'Sirens on the Levee;' could be specially suited for the occasion - a 'glovey hat' for a glove manufacturer; or could be the most subtle of cloches (as worn by Dietrich) or the plainest beret (as worn by Monroe.) He always knew what was appropriate. He designed for balls, advertisements, follies, revues, charity events, Broadway shows, magazine covers, photographers (such as Penn and Horst), jubilees, interviews, conventions. He made widely distributed hats and single hats worth thousands for individual clients. For all his extravagance, he was unpretentious, hardworking, entertaining, aware of his own artistic worth as much as aware of his place among other artists, a man who loved a challenge and a man who knew the value of his talent. Within the rag trade, a John anecdote is still told today. A woman came to his salon, needing a hat immediately. He took up materials and shaped a hat on her head. She loved it but was shocked at its price. John calmly undid the hat and handed its pieces to her. 'That's $3.59,' he said, 'You make it.' His attitude was: 'I billed; they paid' (McDowell 1992:160). His advice to young designers, though, focused solely on the feel and understanding of hands-on work - 'Buy buckram, select material, and start: practice. Your factory must be in your head' (John). His flair was humorous and legendary. In 1938, John filled a coffin with miniature Parisian hats, declaring that style dead. In 1939, when he and Frederic Hirst opened their extravagant new showroom with fitting rooms constructed as floor to ceiling birdcages, he filled his entry hall with Civil War- abilia: cannon balls, helmets, sabres, soldiers capes. For one fashion writer, this was to 'remind women they wore their headgear in a masculine world' (Shields 1991:113). It's just as likely these objects were straight publicity for his work on the soon to be released Gone with the Wind. John's taste far more inclined to the Louis XVI style with which he later adorned his own salon. A single sentence from the press release sets the mood: 'Sweeping white and gold doors form an entrance into the seventy-foot custom fashion salon decorated in white, gold, crystal and mirrored Louis XVI decor where a life-sized white Bisque cupid with paired doves and blackamoors dressed in gold and jewels stand guard' (quoted in McDowell 1992:159). At random, the following list of events show his eclecticism, sense of fun, diligence and inventiveness. He went everywhere, did everything. He made a hat for a live elephant at a Republican Convention, leaning on a ten foot ladder to fit the hat himself. He made hats for advertisements, including the well known Chesterfield cigarette ad of a woman in a quilled large green felt hat. He made hats for theatre productions, his own hats appearing on stage as his creations (at one time his hats were simultaneously in two separate Broadway productions where the protagonist would reply to a question about her hat with, 'It's a Mr John.') He made hats for seven Life covers. He made a hat specifically for a reporter flying to France to interview the Eisenhowers. It had to be elegant and but durable. For the 1955 National Housewares Show, John literally trimmed their pots and pans with white fox fur, diamonds and velvet. When an actress broke her leg before her wedding, John diamond-studded her crutches. For the torch singer Sophie Tucker's fifty year Golden Jubilee, John made her a headdress of 24 karat gold cloth, embroidered with diamonds and aigrettes. A few years previous, he made hats for the Roxie's Easter 'Ice-Colorama' stage show. For special fashion articles, he made a stainless steel hat (bejewelled and in an asymmetric bow), an Eiffel Tower hat, an airplane hat. His larger-than-life qualities appeared in all aspects of his life: At one time, he owned a vast property in Brewster, New York, which still had on it a working railroad station. Visiting guests would get out at John's own personal stop. His large Central Park West apartment, replete with custom-made white and gold Italian carpentry, Gobelin tapestries, life sized porcelain leopards, and a decor he described as 'Louis Unrecognisable,' had twelve macaws, cockatoos and parrots freely moving around their unclosed fifty foot aviary. He would spread his hands outward across his living room's gilt furniture and announce, 'Johnsylvannia.' Arriving in Dallas to receive his Neiman-Marcus award, John appeared at a friend's home in 100 degree heat, wearing a gold cape to the floor with a bird on his shoulder. In his heyday, he was a New York institution, the quintessential milliner. The New Yorker, in the fifties, consistently ran light-hearted cartoons by regular cartoonist Saxon, of a milliner recognisably shaped and dressed as John in his recognisable showroom. During one of his last public interviews, in the late eighties, when asked to name the best dressed person, John answered, 'The Pope.' Within the strum und drang of this century's events, John himself was, like his hat designs, a rich mix. A citizen of Germany and the United States, he became one of many immigrant Europeans in opportunistic America. International and sophisticated, he was equally down-to-earth and outrageous. He knew urbane society, hardworking Hollywood, playful decadence, conservative money and the workroom floor. His professional name, Mr John or John P John, was one he took when he dissolved a twenty year partnership with fellow designer, Frederic Hirst. They worked together until 1948 under the John-Frederics label. After their separation, John opened his own six-storey salon in New York, on the then uber-chic 57th street. Within a few years, his ten employees had increased to two hundred and fifty, his business generating a million and half dollars in custom hats alone (approximately 16,000 hats) with an annual turnover of seven million dollars. His prices ranged from $50 to $20,000 (the 1939 cost of the French hat in Gone With The Wind). Fortune magazine described his business as the 'financial phenomenon of the fashion industry' (Scott 1979:43). That salon operated until 1970 when the sixties' style changes, and personal financial management problems, closed it's doors. John's story - embellished, forgotten and fantasised by him - has many question marks. He used to say that his life partner, Peter Brandon, would have written his best biography with the necessary mix of 'truth and bullshit.' (interview) Information about him varies considerably and can be incorrect. (For example, in Phaidon's new 1998 Fashion encyclopaedia, the entry 'John-Frederics,' discusses this name as if it is one man - John - and not two - John P John and Fred Hirst.) According to information I've collected, John was born in Germany, possibly in Hamburg, Cologne, or Munich, in 1902, 1904 or 1906. Or he was born in Italy, in Florence or Venice. His mother, a milliner, was German, born, according to John, in Vienna. His father was very likely an Italian but born, according to John, in Munich. The parents met in Berlin both working in department store millinery. His maternal grandmother had been possibly a court milliner to German royalty. John's possible original surname has been variously spelled as Harburger or Harberger and his parents named as Rose and Henry. Yet, John's middle name, "P" for "Pico," has been ascribed - by him - as his father's name. John's own original name could have been Hansi Harburger or John Pico Harberger or Juan Pico or even John Piocelle! As a child, (age six), after World War I, John emigrated to New York with his parents, his twin sister, Margarete, and younger sister, Elsa, settling in New Rochelle. Despite this early arrival in America, John would always refer to himself, as a way of explaining his outlook as 'European.' (interview) There's no doubt he had a deep feel for a European manner. In describing his close friendship with German singer Lotte Lenya and other performers he had known, John said he found Frank Sinatra's talent far less interesting than Lenya's and when asked why, said, 'He didn't have a heart education....His blood wasn't warm enough.' (interview) I think this illustrates the divide in John as a European born but American made man. He felt heat in the generations of old world sensibility, where hardship - something not unknown to Sinatra or Lenya (who had been a street singer in Germany) - formed into a different kind of expression. For John, the hat maker created something living. The milliner had, as he put it, a 'green thumb'(John). It's this sense of organic form that was John truest separation from the millinery practised by his mother where the entire hat was constructed on hat blocks. John was renown for fashioning a hat on a model's (or client's) head, making a prototype in willow, a soft straw he referred to in palpable terms as 'the tissue in the blood-stream of the hat' (FIT). He completed his hats with his hands. This adroitness silenced any critic who saw only John's ostentation. Fay Hammond, New York Time's Fashion Editor in 1955 described John as 'like Napoleon incarnate but when he manoeuvres a silk scarf into a hat before your eyes, he commands the dexterity of a magician and the sensitivity of a fine artist' (Oliver). John's own description of the millinery workplace's animal feel reveals where his deepest loyalties lay - not in the world's social bravado but in the hard work of physical creativities: 'And besides this aroma [of strong coffee], at precisely four o'clock - as if by magical prearrangement - a peculiar, pungent tang rises, pervades the air, and plunges into your nostrils; it is composed of the heat from the lights, the glue from the many pots, the dyes, the fibres, the fuzz, the I-don't-know-what-all. It's in my own workroom - that late afternoon, unmistakable millinery smell. I love it. I'd die without it' (John). His hats were part of him: 'I like to feel - the element that makes my creations distinctly mine. It comprises the total experience of all my many years of living. It is the recollections of the countries I visit and the impressions of customs I see, paintings I admire, houses I visit and, sometimes, sounds I hear. It is the result of a sensitive boy's reaction to the fold and the feel of a fabric. It is his thrill at sudden awareness of the diversified beauty an artist can achieve with one simple line. It is that boy's love of growing flowers, his discovery of the drama of colour. It is his lonely uncontrollable urge to do what he has to do, be the workman he wants to be' (John). These worldly feelings made his hats a piece of life, not an idea. 'I love every hat I make... Spiritually, I am a creator and I know the mechanics of making a hat. I do not call myself a designer' (FIT). His autobiographical article in Good Housekeeping magazine, where he is introduced as 'the most notable milliner of our time,' starts John's love of hats in childhood, in Germany where, 'breathing in her knowledge,' he had watched his mother work. Later in America, 'unhappy in school,' and taunted for his foreignness, he would leave his family's New Rochelle home to hang around the Manhattan workroom of his parents wholesale millinery business on West 39th St. near Fifth Ave. Using the label, Madame Laurel, his father managed and his mother designed. Disapproving of John's fashion interest, his father spent years trying to push him in another direction. But this was futile, as John adamantly knew, '...with me, from the start, from the beginning of the beginning, from the moment I knew anything at all - with me, the road was one way, with no turnoffs - it simply had to hats' (John). At this time, John 'longed to become something else, something then absolutely unheard of on matter-of-fact 39th street - a man milliner' (John). Millinery design, as different from marketing (either the finished product or the materials) had always been dominated by women. Caroline Reboux, Agnes and J Suzanne Talbot, now unknown, were great milliners of inventive skill who often worked for or trained later famous couturiers. Reboux made all of Madeleine Vionnet's hats. Talbot trained Jeanne Lanvin. Some of fashion's most influential forces came out of millinery. Coco Chanel, Jeanne Lanvin, Halston, Christian Dior, Adrian, and many others, began their careers in hats. But they all made their names in clothing. What John wanted was to stay a milliner. His father, anxious to dissuade him of this yearning, sent John to textile houses in Indianapolis and then Philadelphia where he earned good money designing fabrics. In Philadelphia, lonely and hungry for a glamorous life, he haunted the vaudeville theatres. Eventually, joining the family business, he took over the European buying trips. During Paris stays, he got to know other unknown hopefuls, such as Dior, who, like him, frequented the sidewalk cafes, pursuing the grande couturiers and being ignored by them. According to one version, John was sent to Switzerland's University of Lucerne to study medicine (Watkins 1972). Whether or not this is true, it's certain he was in Paris and that he probably studied at the Sorbonne with fellow student Erté. Anecdotes abound about his life there: Mata Hari picked him up on the streets of that city and had given him a jade ring which he smashed accidentally on the table. He met Nijinski. He has said he was employed in his early twenties making hats for Cècile Sorel at the Folies Bergère and Mistinguett at the Casino de Paris. Mistinguett, at the height of her fame, embodied glamour supreme, her stage hats' plumes reaching five feet in the air. During these Paris trips, John copied eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century hats he saw in museums, making a large miniature collection. These hats, then disparaged as a waste of time by his friends, became the trove from which John drew creations in filmwork to come. When Selznick came to him in 1938 to design the hats for Gone With the Wind, he rushed immediately to his collection for inspiration and accuracy. The collection itself is now permanently housed in the Museum of the City of New York. John left the family business in 1928 and formed the John-Frederics firm with Frederic Hirst. They opened a New York salon that year in a two-and-half room apartment over Delman's Madison Avenue shoe store. Word of mouth brought crowds to the tiny flat. Business prospered into elite branches in Palm Beach, Hollywood, Miami and outlets in seven hundred major department stores. The John-Frederics name became, at one time, the century's most sought after. In 1940, in the American market alone, their label earned sixty million dollars (Watkins 1972). During this time, John also worked for Adrian, the film designer credited with more fashion trends than any other American couturier. Adrian was the first to define a quintessential American fashion. A young Parsons student, Adrian began costume work for the Greenwich Village Follies, Irving Berlin's Music Box Revues, and George White's Scandals. Barely into his twenties, he designed for Valentino and Natacha Rambova in New York and then accompanied them to Hollywood. After working with Cecil B De Mille, in 1925 at the age of twenty-two, Adrian became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's head of costume for sixteen years, designing virtually all of Garbo's pictures, 'his delight,' (Adrian) and eventually Joan Crawford's, who became his favourite model. Throughout his life, Adrian fiercely criticised fashion magazines' extolling of French over American fashion. This passion was as pragmatic as patriotic because his striking designs eventually usurped the sneers of New York and Paris who, in the words of Howard Greer, another top film designer, saw film clothes as 'vulgar.' By the mid-thirties, couturier Elsa Schiaparelli flatly declared, 'What Hollywood designs today, you will be wearing tomorrow' (Mulvagh 1988:123). Many costumers of the twentieth century's early decades produced amazing, even trend anticipating clothes (for example Rambova, in 1922, for Salome (Natacha Rambova, US, 1922) made a rubberised-satin cling dress) but Adrian was the first luminary in an 'American look.' His was the country's pioneer overall recognisable style, and in this sense, films, through Adrian (and John), became the core out of which a cultural image emerged. There are many strangenesses in this. Not least is that the original fashion's components were sheer mechanical craft and exaggerated fantasising, created solely for the film's ambient storyline and fandom's hunger. This eerie combination, involving a complexity of restrictions, extravagances and ingenuity, was the genesis of American fashion influence in the world. In those years, the link between fashion and film was overt. Stars were often commercially photographed in cinema fashions, appearing in a full range of advertisements, from the grandest magazines to the work-a-day Sears and Roebuck catalogues. An Adrian creation was marketing's most famous first mass production of a film outfit. The 'Letty Lynton' dress worn by Crawford in Letty Lynton (Clarence Brown, US, 1932) sold 500,000 copies in Macy's department stores alone (Stegmeyer 1996). Furthermore, Adrian is credited, among other inventions, with the padded shoulder, allegedly to allow Crawford increased back fabric to move her arms more freely. By 1930, this film trick would become a fad that still endures. Mass desire for these interesting garments forced haute couture's attention Millinery was no exception in this race. McDowell finds that 'a convincing case can be made for New York as the leading millinery city from the late 1930's up to the 1950's, with designers such as Lilly Daché and Mr John often outstripping the Parisians in wit, daring and style' (1992:149). John's production of film hats during these years was astoundingly prodigious. Adrian's 1937 fall collection had almost one hundred exclusive John hats; most seasons carried the same numbers. Strong parallels knit their partnership. Both came from German parents who ran millinery businesses and both had names which went through various permutations before being shortened to a single word. (Adrian, born Adolphus Greenburg, had four.) Equally, they are known for similar abilities - pragmatism, glamour, originality, ambition, business acumen - and for combining unusual fabrics in stream-lined designs. Who influenced who over what details is impossible, now, to pinpoint. But it is reasonable to say that John's work is a crucial percent in Adrian's definitive influence. In 1948, Hirst and John parted. Their label, expanded to a mini-empire by the time of their separation, was seen on gloves, stockings, hairnets, scarves, stoles, cologne for men, and men's and women's clothes. Hirst continued under the label Mr Fred and John under the labels Mr John and John Juniors. As Mr John Inc. the Emperor of Fashion, he produced full ranges of women's clothing and men's wear such as ties, shirts, jackets. He had his own perfume, 'Chapeau' said to be mixed by rocking in a boat anchored in the Long Island Sound. As with his years in film and theatre, and with Frederics, John continued to work well with top talents, forming a consortium during World War II, called the Joint Designer Group, with two other leading New York milliners - Sally Victor and Lilly Daché. Daché remains America's most known woman milliner and Victor's immense success came through making very affordable, high standard hats. All three appreciated the eclecticism of the American, as John put it - 'the true American aristocrats were international... they worked to a level of world taste' (McDowell 1992:160). The Joint Designer Group was an attempt to establish 'a unified direction to a welter of styles' that was dominating the wartime market (Ginsberg 1990:118). Daché, French, arrived in the United States in 1924 after her apprenticeship with J Suzanne Talbot and Caroline Reboux, eventually becoming the first custom milliner in New York to own her own building (nine storeys), in Manhattan's 18 East 56th Street. Her hats were the first on the front pages and she is responsible for some of the century's most famous hats often commencing signature styles. Even her 1946 autobiography, Talking Through My Hat, became a bestseller. Daché too worked in film, creating three of film's most recognisable hats. Daché made Carmen Miranda's fruit headdresses. For Travis Banton, (with whom John had done many films), Daché made the instantly voguish, wildly popular, draped toque for Dietrich's 1935 film Desire (Frank Borzage, US, 1936) She was the first milliner in mass fashion when she launched her Betty Grable snood and half-hat at the beginning of the war. Like John, she loved publicity and the theatrical but her sharp eye for talent discovered Halston, in Chicago, bringing him to New York - and ultimate fame - to work for her. Sally Victor, from Pennsylvania, worked her way up through department stores to become by the 1930's, through the 1950's, a profound influence on millinery. Inventive and experimental in fabrics, (especially, as in John's work, in felt and denim) her hats took inspiration from sources as diverse as painters Mondrian and Van Gough, Asian lanterns, topknots, bonnets and sailor hats. In the late fifties, she made ingenious hats of black feathers that mimicked men's pompadour hairstyles of the time. Often a designer's affrontative imagination begins as one thing and ends as another. For example, the classic 'little black dress' now epitomising chic and money was introduced by Chanel in 1920 as a variation on the maid's black uniform. At that time Chanel's black dress was déclassé, 'poverty de luxe' to Poiret and, disparagingly, the practical 'Ford of fashion' to Vogue. Milliners were no exception in their ability to see across the 'definition' of an object and redefine it in an exciting take-off. Elsa Schiaparelli, involved with the Surrealist movement, is ever associated with the shocking hat. But the shocking hat was another of John's accomplishment. Along with only two others - Daché and Aage Thaarup (McDowell, 1992:152) - among thousands of milliners - John was known for managing the near impossible task of mixing elegant sophistication with the outré hat's humour. Something hard to imagine today is the social importance hats once had. The hat ruled. Top milliners enjoyed unheard of publicity. In the thirties, Schiaparelli's newest hats were regularly part of the weekly newsreels shown in the movie theatres. In the forties, Lilly Daché's hats made the front page. In the fifties, Mr John's name was a household word. By the sixties, the hat's power was effected by the force that effects fashion in general - the unexpected. Important changes in the twentieth century have been created by the inventions of synthetic fibres, by shortages and excesses (for example, cork platforms in W.W.II were created to use up supplies and thus deprive the occupying army), by a visiting dignitary, a victory, or a star's preferences stirring vogues as sweeping as 'Orientalism' or, even, 'Americanism.' It was the invention of hairspray in the late fifties that devastated the millinery industry forever. The woman's hat had once made her image. By the mid-sixties, a new image-maker arrived: hair. With new hair products, hair spray and the loss of dyed hair's sleaze connotations, hair could do what the hat had previously done: make an identity. By 1970, when John closed his 57th Street salon, what he called the 'orthopaedic hairstyles and french-fried curls' (interview) of hair had won over the hat. John continued to design for special clients off and on in the next twenty years. For all the changes of those decades, when I interviewed him, in his nineties and not able to walk well, his joie de vivre was still greenly present. Generous and hospitable, he often said, 'I've had a wonderful life.' The fashion world has always honoured and adored him. In 1950, he was the first milliner to receive the Neiman-Marcus Award, fashion's version of the Oscar, seven years after being given the Coty American Fashion Critics award. He also earned the Venice Award from the Centre of Arts and Costumes. Yet, a man as much of a New York force as John, 'one of New York's great entertainers' (McDowell 1992:159) whose ideas 'made millinery history,' has no personal entry in Caroline Milbank's otherwise excellent New York Fashion, documenting the history of that city's garment world. He appears only in passing lists. He does not show up in the subject catalogue of New York's leading design university, the Fashion Institute of Technology. No one under sixty recalls his name. John's life, spanning the twentieth century as it does, fuses the European and the American with an eclecticism few lives do. His creativity is involved in that fusion's many germinal elements and its resultant Americanism. John fabricated his life in much the way he fabricated his hats, in wonderful synthesis. He could be very funny about himself, but took himself very seriously and knew his accomplishments. John's 1979 interview (Scott) ends with his declaration - 'I live in an illusion I created for myself. I don't want to know who I am.' In my interviews, I found John's honesty unusual in its rawness and its tenderness, revealing a man who knew himself with that same animal feel with which he described his hats. He always knew himself as part of a greater whole. 'You have to be natural and to face your own mistakes and tear them up and forget about them and don't suffer to think that you're the best because you're not the best. I'm still not the best... I know when I see something good that I've done and... the thing I would like to do is not change one thing, now that I'm older.' Drake Stutesman taught at University of North London and Holloway Women's Prison, and ran the East West Gallery performances of readings, lectures, music, and films. She is writing a book on Mr John and film millinery and is on the New York Women in Film and Television's committee for costume design and film preservation. She is an editor of Framework. Bibliography Adrian, papers: Special Collection: New York: Fashion Institute of Technology Baxter, John (1971) The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg London:Zwemmer Blum, Dilys E (1993) Ahead of Fashion: Hats of the Twentieth Century Bulletin vol.89 no.377-378 (summer/fall) Philadelphia:Museum of Art Clark, Fiona (1982) Hats London:Batsford FIT, (1951-1953) clippings: Special Collection: New York:Fashion Institute of Technology Finch, Christopher and Rosenkrantz, Linda (1979) Gone Hollywood The Movie Colony in the Golden Age London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson Fredericks, Pierce G (1951) 'The Mad Hatter' in Cosmopolitan April Ginsburg, Madeleine (1990) The Hat Trends and Traditions Hauppage:Barrons Greer, Howard (1949) Designing Male, New York:Putnam Hawkins, Dorothy New York Times interviews (1992-1993) with Mr. John by Drake Stutesman John, John P (1951 ) told to Nanette Kutner, Good Housekeeping magazine Look (1955) magazine, July 25 Landi, Louis (1970) History of Fashion - Gilbert Adrian: Hollywood's Highest Paid Couturier of his Time PhD Thesis Cinncinati:University of Cincinnati LaVine, W. 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