With her straight-cut bangs, dark glasses, porcelain skin and tailored suits, Edith Head’s style made her a remarkable sight on some of the biggest films of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
The only thing more remarkable? Her 54 year career as the top costume designer in Hollywood, a title she continues to hold three decades later.
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Born Edith Claire Posener in San Bernardino, California, in 1897. Head’s parents divorced soon after her birth, a result of father Max’s small haberdashery failing in its first year.
When she was seven, her mother remarried to a mining engineer whose work took him across the United States. As such, Head’s early life was a migratory one, spent mostly in Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico.
Graduating from Los Angeles High School, Head first studied letters and sciences as part of a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of California, before enrolling at Stanford University to complete her Master of Arts in romance languages in 1920.
She started as a teacher, first teaching French in high schools. Wanting a higher salary, Head convinced the school that she could teach art, even though she had no experience doing so. To improve her drawing schools, she took evening lessons at the Chouinard Art College.
It was not the only little white lie Head would employ for the sake of her career…
Despite little art, and no design or costuming experience, Head applied for a sketch artist job at Paramount Studios in 1923. She needed the money; teachers didn’t get paid during summer holidays at the time, and her newly-married husband had a drinking problem.
There was one issue though: Head didn’t have any designs to present during her job interview.
“I was studying seascape and all I could draw was oceans. I needed a portfolio, so I borrowed sketches – I didn’t steal them, I asked everybody in the class for a few costume design sketches. And I had the most fantastic assortment you’ve ever seen in your life. When you get a class of forty to give you sketches, you get a nice selection,” she admitted to TCM.
“It never occurred to me that it was quite dishonest. And all the students thought that it was fun, too, just like a dare to see if I could get the job. I didn’t say the work was mine, I said, ‘This is the sort of thing we do in our school. ‘”
Head got the job, the salary for which was twice the amount she was making as a teacher. She would remain at Paramount for the next 43 years.
Initially, she began to design costumes for silent films. The first, The Wanderer, was released in 1925. This was followed by several William A. Wellman productions in which she sketched costumes for the likes of Gary Cooper and Fay Wray.
By the 1930s, Head had built a reputation as a marvellous talent, and was promoted to the role of design assistant in 1933.
In 1938, as her marriage was coming to and end, Head’s boss resigned, leaving her as the head designer, on some of the biggest films of the decade, at one of Hollywood’s biggest studios.
Over the next decade, she went on to design for Barbara Stanwyck in the genre defining Double Indemnity, Hedy Lamarr and Angela Lansbury in Cecil B. DeMille’s epic Samson & Delilah, and Betty Hutton as the the titular Incendiary Blonde.
Head first worked with Alfred Hitchcock on 1946’s Notorious, where she designed for Ingrid Bergman’s beguiling spy character. Hitchcock’s love and understanding of costume design laid the foundation for a strong relationship between the two, that would last decades.
The Emperor Waltz – a Billy Wilder musical – saw Head receive her first Academy Award nomination for Best Costume Design in 1949. She would be nominated 30 times over the next 18 consecutive years, a feat made possible by the Academy distinguishing between costume awards for films captured in black and white, and colour.
Head’s first win came the following year with The Heiress, and would be one of eight she received. Other wins resulted from her work on Samson and Delilah, All About Eve, A Place in the Sun, Roman Holiday (she was the first designer to create for Audrey Hepburn), Sabrina, The Facts of Life, and The Sting.
Head’s costumes were restrained. She understood the part they played in the telling of a film more than most, if not any, of her predecessors. “What a costume designer does is a cross between magic and camouflage. We create the illusion of changing the actors into what they are not. We ask the public to believe that every time they see a performer on the screen, he’s become a different person.”
Offscreen, her relationship with directors and actors played a crucial part in ensuring she delivered the best results. Though she had a fearsome reputation, her patience and commitment were invaluable. On one occasion, Hitchcock ordered Head to design a grey suit for Kim Novak’s character in Vertigo, even though the actress had expressed a willingness to wear any colour but grey.
“When Kim came in for our next session, I was completely prepared. I had several swatches of grey fabric in various shades, textures, and weights. Before she had an opportunity to complain, I showed her the sketch and the fabrics and suggested that she choose the fabric she thought would be best on her. She immediately had a positive feeling and felt that we were designing together. Of course, I knew that any of the fabrics would work well for the suit silhouette I had designed, so I didn’t care which one she chose.”
She was in such demand at the pinnacle of her career that Paramount ‘loaned’ (it was a period in which many cast and key crew members worked exclusively for studios) Head out to competitors at the explicit request of actors.
In 1967, Head moved to Universal Pictures, a decision experts put down to her extensive work with Hitchcock, who had transitioned to the studio seven years prior.
Head, now 70, discovered herself in a whole new world. Hollywood was rapidly changing as television saw audiences trickling away, on-location shooting had become the norm over studio-based production, and many of the stars she had worked with over the decades had retired.
Still, she worked hard, dabbling in TV while still focused on film. Her last Academy Award nomination came in 1978 with Airport ’77.
During the late 70s, Head was asked to design a woman’s uniform for the United States Coast Guard. Head would call it one of the highlights of her career, and would see her receive the Meritorious Public Service Award for her work.
Her last film was Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, starring Steve Martin and Carl Reiner, who also directed the film. Little did anyone but Head herself know, she was then suffering from myelofibrosis, a rare, incurable bone marrow disease.
While on set for the final scenes, Head noted to Reiner “I guess I’ve come full circle when I design the exact dress for Steve Martin that I did for Barbara Stanwyck. He looks very funny in it, doesn’t he?”.
Two weeks later, she had died.
Today, Edith Head remains the record holder for Most Academy Award Nominations and Wins for a woman. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, appeared on a commemorative U.S. stamp in 2003, and has had a critically acclaimed one-woman play, A Conversation with Edith Head, produced in her honour.
Bette Davis gave the eulogy at her funeral. “A queen has left us, the queen of her profession. She will never be replaced. Her contribution to our industry in her field of design, her contribution to the taste of our town of Hollywood, her elegance as a person, her charms as a woman – none of us who worked with her will ever forgot. Goodbye, dear Edith. There will never be another you.”