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Hollywood Costume

This exhibition grew out of a Ph.D. thesis which Frayling supervised, by Deborah Nadoolman Landis—a Hollywood costume designer, now Professor of Film and Television Costume at U.C.L.A. Together, we conceived and planned the exhibition—the first of its kind anywhere, on this scale, since the 1970s, and only the second exhibition devoted to film in the V&A’s history. As a Trustee of the museum, I persuaded it to back a feasibility study on a) the location and availability of authentic original costumes,, where possible with provenance b) innovative ways of displaying them, beyond the usual ‘waxworks’ approach c) the estimated costs. Eventually, Hollywood Costume was greenlit, with Landis (in Hollywood) and Frayling (in London) as guest curators, backed by a team from the performing arts department within the museum, and designers from Casson-Mann. The detailed planning and realisation took three years. Landis sourced most of the costumes, persuaded the owners to lend them and interviewed the designers/actors/directors; Frayling provided much of the written material in the exhibition, shaped the narrative and translated Hollywood into South Kensington. Exhibitions about film, turning a 2-D experience into a 3-D one, are notoriously difficult to accomplish in museums. Innovations in Hollywood Costume included: a continuous musical soundtrack, the digital displays, visual links between the costumes and the scripts as written, interviews with practitioners about individual exhibits, integrated film clips showing the costumes in their cinematic contexts under original lighting conditions. Hollywood Costume was extensively reviewed in the national and international press (see attached), and may have set a new benchmark for exhibitions about film in national museums.