On July 27, 1928, a few weeks short of his 25th birthday, a young designer who had emigrated from New York to Los Angeles to work in the movies signed his first contract with the newly formed studio of Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Born Adrian Adolph Greenburg in 1903 in Naugatuck, Conn., he later changed things so that Adrian became his last name instead of his first name, and it was as Gilbert Adrian that he had been recognized as a designer for Broadway musical revues. By the time he was hired by Metro, at $500 a week, he was known simply as Adrian, and his contracted stipulated that his billing would be “Gowns by Adrian.”
For the next 13 years, when MGM was the proudest studio of the golden age of Hollywood, the screen credit of “Gowns by Adrian” promised the luxury and abundance of a studio boasting more stars than in the heavens. Adrian himself became a star, shaping fashion trends, creating character through costume and churning out one spectacular achievement after another.
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It was Adrian who designed all the costumes for MGM’s 1936 Oscar-winning “The Great Ziegfeld,” and it was Adrian who supervised his small army of 250 cutters, tailors, beaders, embroiderers, jewel craftsmen, feather workers and seamstresses as they applied 50 pounds of silver sequins, 300 crystal drops, 10,000 yards of pleated chiffon and more than 75 pounds of costume jewelry to the movie’s gowns.
It was Adrian who had red sequins hand-sewn onto a piece of pink chiffon, which was in turn hand-sewn onto a pair of patent leather shoes, thus creating Judy Garland’s ruby slippers for “The Wizard of Oz.” It was Adrian whose costumes for the royal gowns of “Marie Antoinette” were so heavily decorated that special heavy-duty hangers had to be manufactured for them.
And, most famously, it was Adrian who dressed the greatest stars of the studio: Jean Harlow, Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn and, of course, Joan Crawford.
“Who would have thought,” he once said, “that my entire reputation as a designer would rest on Joan Crawford’s shoulders?” It was an exaggeration, but not by much. A woman with a long waist, short legs and broad shoulders, Crawford did not have the ideal model’s physique, but Adrian used those broad shoulders and that long waist to create indelible fashion images. The most celebrated was the dress, labeled 578 in the workshop, that he fashioned out of tucked apricot-rose organdy for Crawford in the film “Letty Lynton.” It had lots of ruffles, the largest of which were perched on Crawford’s big shoulders.
It looked great in the ’30s and it looks great today in photographs from the period that appear in a handsome new volume, “Gowns by Adrian,” to be published next month by Harry N. Abrams Inc. The author, Howard Gutner, first became interested in Adrian’s work while attending film studies at Northwestern University, and he has transferred that ongoing interest into an informative, hugely entertaining and lavishly illustrated book.
Ironically, as Gutner points out, since the category of costume design was not introduced into the Oscars until 1948, Adrian, who died in 1959, never received an Academy Award, although he did receive a posthumous Tony Award for his designs for the 1960 stage musical “Camelot.”
His imprint on fashion is permanent, however. As Gutner states: “His most successful creations took on a life of their own, nurturing and sustaining the character onscreen. They remain potent artifacts of the American dream — of that limited and romantic vision of life’s possibilities that once dominated American film.”
In her own way, Crawford too paid tribute to her favorite designer. Recalling her Oscar-winning performance in the 1945 “Mildred Pierce,” she said, “It was not one of the dozens of films that made the critics rave about the way I dressed. No Adrian. I looked crummy through the whole thing.”