BANTON OF PARAMOUNT

The fashions of old Hollywood, and the man who helped define them.

If one thinks about Hollywood movies of the 1930s, one is likely to think about the costumes. Together with MGM’s Gilbert Adrian and Orry-Kelly at Warner Bros., Paramount’s Travis Banton was more than just “the vibrant third member in a triumvirate of the most influential Hollywood costume/fashion designers.” In this fun and amply illustrated book, Gutner shows how Banton became so highly regarded that Modern Screen magazine called him “Paramount’s designing genius.” Born in Waco, Texas, in 1894, he was raised in Ridgewood, New Jersey, and studied at the Art Students League and the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts. Banton rose from an early stint at the fashion house run by Lady Duff-Gordon, who “is widely credited with inventing the runway fashion show,” to his years at Paramount, where he demonstrated “his aptitude for delineating a character at first glance through costume design.” He dressed all of the studio’s major stars, from Marlene Dietrich—for whom he created a Shanghai Express outfit that was “the ultimate symbolic use of feathers in a costume” (black coque), helping “create one of cinema’s most famous and notorious femme fatales”—to Carole Lombard—for whom he designed a gown for My Man Godfrey, “created from layer upon layer of bugle beads fashioned from glass.” This book will appeal to cinema fans, fashion enthusiasts, and anyone who enjoys juicy gossip. At one point, Banton got so fed up with Claudette Colbert’s complaints about his designs for Cleopatra that he told her she “could slit her wrists for all he cared.” When she returned one set of his sketches, “They were stained and smudged with dried blood. Colbert had apparently cut her finger deliberately in order to express her opinion of the new designs.”

Welcome recognition of one of cinema’s most important designers.