Crawford, Joan

Joan Crawford (1908-1977). Had it not been for a particular physical characteristic of Joan Crawford’s — who in real life was Lucille Fay La Sueur from San Antonio, Texas — fashion would not, in 1932, have experienced a fundamental shift that woman have enjoyed for more than 60 years. This had to do with her shoulders. When the mythical Adrian first met Joan Crawford in order to design the costumes for the film Letty Lynton, directed by Clarence Brown, he could not, evidently being a very extroverted man, refrain from exclaiming (or so the legend goes): “Oh my God, you look like Johnny Weissmuller,” which was not very kind indeed. There is no record of her reply, although she was not known to be a diplomatic person. But the clash was fruitful. From the attempt to mask her most evident defect — very broad shoulders, out of proportion to the rest of her figure — a new style was born: that of wide, padded shoulders, with an emphasis on the upper part of the body. Just as he had done for Greta Garbo, who owed the designer much of her charm, Adrian invented for Crawford — who was at a turning point in her career and reinventing what would later be defined as an “image” — a series of dresses with exaggerated shoulders that dropped loose at the hips making her silhouette both unreal and elegant, a line which would be very imitated up to the present day. It was an excellent way to balance imperfect figures but not so good for the effect it had on sales of blouses and similar garments. This was the second “imprint” that Crawford left on current fashions, the first one had to do with her mouth: excessive, cruel, marked with lipstick in a misshapen way that, over the years, would turn her into a tragic mask (how many unhappy characters did she play in her career!) and the bearer of a completely constructed artificial face in which the eyes shone out from under long black eyebrows (another Crawford trademark), a “drag queen” (as Marilea Solbiati and Miro Silvera wrote in Moda di celluloide). To get a sense of Adrian’s wisdom, it is enough to take a look at the black tailored suit with gold decorations that he created for her in 1938 for the film Mannequin by Franz Borzage, and which she would wear with a large brim hat. “If women imitate me, it’s for my clothing, and it’s Adrian who creates it for me,” she admitted. Instead of Adrian’s perfectly cut suits, in everyday life she preferred to wear trousers which, according to her, provided the “indispensable modern link to planes, penthouses, and a new way of life” shared with the other girls of the Pants Brigade: Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Sylvia Sidney, and Lupe Velez. What a pity, though, to cover those legs, Adrian must have thought. And he succeeded in making her show them almost completely in the film Dancing Lady of 1933 by Robert Z. Leonard, with the help of a marvelous transparent dress which revealed that the dress with the Weissmuller shoulders was just a joke: behind the see-through veils and crystal was the body of a real woman.