Film costume design is a profession that has been dominated by women since the industry's beginning and, although it is an influential cinematic art, it is one of the least recognized. One reason is that although a film costume is a highly constructed garment made, fundamentally, to support the narrative, it is often, in culture and in scholarship, blurred with fashion (as branding or shopping versus creative design) and typically referred to as “fashion in film.” That these separate skills need to be redefined makes film costume a compelling, even frontier subject for feminist scholars, and in the last fifteen or so years it has gained greater status as more information emerges about how women influenced cinema.
Cinema's roots lie with the nineteenth-century stage giants. Costume, in this world, was important and openly discussed as a performance tool until the early 1900s.1 In 1906 fashion writer Eliza Davis Aria...
University of California Press