Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1333810
78 The Costume Designer Winter 2021 Morocco (1930) Travis Banton For Marlene Dietrich's American film debut, costume designer Travis Banton dressed her in top hat, white tie, and tails, perhaps the image most indelibly identified with Dietrich ever since. As cabaret singer Amy Jolly, performing the film's opening number in trousers at a time when women could still be arrested in some places for wearing men's clothing and casually kissing a female audience member on the lips, Dietrich caused a furor and established herself as a powerful sex symbol. Banton, considered one of the greatest costume designers of Hollywood's Golden Age, was known for his long collaboration with Dietrich. While her mentor, director Josef von Sternberg, is often credited with creating "the Dietrich look," Banton played a huge role. In addition to designing knockout costumes for many of her most famous roles, he also advised her on exercise, weight loss, attitude, and body presentation. Together, they crafted her glamorous image, with a sense of ambiguity that made it all the more powerful. That sophisticated image, carefully curated for years, was both a political stance and a fashion force. Dietrich's fondness for menswear, both on screen and off, added to her mystique and spawned fashion trends that still resonate today. More importantly, she paved the way for more acceptance of gender fluidity. Vanessa Thorpe, writing in The Guardian in 2017, called Dietrich's androgynous style "a prescient challenge to the male hierarchy of the film industry, and to restrictive sexual norms." "Glamour," Dietrich once declared, "is assurance. It is a kind of knowing that you are all right in every way, mentally and physically and in appearance, and that, whatever the occasion or the situation, you are equal to it." SCRAPBOOK Illustration by Travis Banton Photo: Getty Images