Gowns by Adrian, the ASU FIDM Museum Shows the Couturier Who Dressed Crawford and Harlow
More than 50 ensembles by MGM’s costume chief and Beverly Hills couturier fill the free ASU FIDM Museum through December 12.
In the 1930s, three words in a screen credit promised the audience a spectacle. “Gowns by Adrian” meant whatever the star had on, she would look extraordinary. Those gowns are now off the screen and on view downtown, in Adrian, Designing Hollywood, Dressing America at the ASU FIDM Museum on South Grand Avenue.
The free exhibition gathers more than 50 rare garments and accessories by Gilbert Adrian, who shaped the looks of Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer and Jean Harlow. It runs through December 12, open Wednesday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and closed November 26 and 27.
As head of costume design at MGM from 1928 to 1941, Adrian sharpened Crawford’s silhouette and exaggerated her shoulders, and wrapped Harlow in bias-cut satin, TheWrap reports. The Harlow gown in the show comes from Bombshell. Chief curator Kevin Jones told TheWrap’s WrapStyle column that the dress, in candlelight silk charmeuse cut on the bias, “defines 1930s Hollywood glamour.” “She wore it in ‘Bombshell’ which gave her the nickname ‘the blonde bombshell,’” he said. Gowns worn by Garbo in Queen Christina and Shearer in Marie Antoinette are on view too.
Adrian knew the screen could sell clothes. Hundreds of thousands of copies of his white Letty Lynton gown sold after Crawford wore it in the 1932 film. When he left MGM in 1941 he opened his own house, Adrian Ltd., in Beverly Hills, dressing Shearer, Greer Garson and Marlene Dietrich and selling ready-to-wear across the country. “He was a master of proportion and fit onscreen and in real life,” Jones said.
The show also includes a sketch from his final project, the original 1960 production of Camelot. And Time Out notes that Letty Lynton, the film whose Adrian dress became more famous than the movie, is newly available to watch again after decades in legal limbo.
