There are many Marlenes. Marlene the mother, Marlene the antifascist, Marlene the actress, Marlene the insatiable woman- and maneater, Marlene the fangirl, Marlene the homewrecker and so on. And honestly, I would say that the most groundbreaking and underrated is Marlene the fashion-icon. I know. Hot take! After Vogue magazine and diverse other fashion magazines voted Marlene to the Queen of textile for the umpteenth time, various other publications heralded her as a feminist icon, I might appear a bit late to the party with my cutting edge revolutionary point of view! How many times have you heard about Marlene the fashion icon and saw her in her little garter belt or her suit and the little top hat? Sure, but you are also looking at a picture of an actress whose image was not personally curated by a team of PR/branding specialists and a highly skilled glam team. It might be one of the realest pictures in pop culture out there!
Immortal pictures
Just like her idol Henny Porten, she picked out the outfits for The blue angel herself. And hey that image is so iconic, ubiquitous and second nature to even the post-postmodern environment, that I watched 9 seasons of Seinfeld for 3 times and only at my 3rd rewatch well into season 9 did I recognize that the Bar Jerry Seinfeld hangs out in, sports a blue angel poster with a young Marlene on the wall. But even as big a production as The blue angel which was meant to be exported to the United states did not have a budget for costume design. Marlene put a lot of thought into creating the look of Lola Lola in The blue angel. A lot of the inspiration she took was from the sexworkers she saw strolling around Nollendorfplatz in her native Schöneberg (which only in the 1920s became part of Berlin) and one particular “transvestite-prostitute” (quotation marks because that was the term back in the day) specifically inspired her to add the garter belt. Because well you know art imitates life and life imitates art. And yes, I would say that fashion had a lot more to do with art back in the day than it does now.
The role of fashion
The plot of The blue angel, the movie that was basically Marlene´s entry ticket to Hollywood is largely driven by fashion items. And I do not mean that in a Mad Men/Gossip girl kind of way were the gorgeous styling and flawless job of the costume design excuses the weak story, nope I mean you could literally not tell the story without the white ruffled panties that is landing on Professor Unraths shoulders and that is subsequently hidden in the professor´s jacket pocket which gives him an excuse to revisit Lola Lola. There the panty drops to the floor and Lola Lola frees him of his cane and his cylinder and by now classic roles have been reversed. All by the means of fashion!
Next thing we see is Lola Lola sitting on a barrel, but we only see her famous legs in a garter belt. Now who wears a visible garter belt? Only prostitutes do!
Marlene knew that Lola Lola had to wear a visible garter belt. She was right. But even later, when she became a Hollywood A-lister, she would at the very least work with the team of the costume design department and most of the times she did the bulk of the work. Never would she delegate costume design completely. That would have been beneath her. Instead, she brought her own designs and pattern samples to meetings. Many times, she also did her own make-up, because very soon she knew more about make-up than the leading makeup artists of the time, Max Factor and Elizabeth Arden aka Florence Nightingale. In Donald Spoto´s biography he painstakingly describes how “she held a saucer over a candle a black carbon smudge would form on the underside and that if a few drops of lanolin or mineral oil were warmed and mixed with the soot, this could be affectively applied to the eyelids. She used this concoction throughout the 1930s, heavier at the lashline, then fading towards the eyebrow.”[1]
Body autonomy in Hollywood? No so much.
One way to look at it is that Marlene was obsessed about her looks and image and you could interpret this as vanity but you could also say that Marlene did not let anyone take control of her image which extended to not letting anyone control her life, her body, her beliefs, her morals -nothing. Marlene did Marlene. Hollywood wanted her to hide her daughter because Milfs were not yet one of the most successful porn categories and openly admitting that you had a kid would destroy the Diva fantasy they wanted to sell. Not only did MGM have all kinds of penalty clauses for stars to have children, but stars like Jean Harlow also had clauses in their contracts that would forbid them to marry. The Mexican actress Lupe Velez, who had a bit of a rivalry with Marlene when our girl fell for her boyfriend, killed herself in 1944 because she could not stomach to kill her unborn child. Judy Garland was forced to get an abortion, put on amphetamines when she failed to control her weight and became the first public victim of stardom, but we all know countless stories even about contemporary celebrities who basically had no body autonomy nor any saying in their image, despite the fact that they are not owned by film studios anymore. Marlene was married and never bother to hide her countless affairs with men or women. Her career in show business lasted 50 years.
You might ask yourself what that has to do with fashion but bear with me!
Trailblazing like there is no tomorrow
Not only did Marlene have an eye for colors, patterns, and fabrics she was also a trailblazer in many things. Marlene simply loved fashion and fashion loved Marlene. Looking at some of Frau Dietrichs pictures, a lot of her looks are either timeless or ahead of her time. She styled boyfriend Jeans a good 80 years before Cosmo gave you 10 ideas to style boyfriend Jeans. And btw, the fact that boyfriend jeans came on to the scene in the first place was due to the fact that you could not buy pants for women. It has nothing to do with Gangsta Rap´s oversized prison look, that would make a 13 year old small town Kyria Sobrinho spend hours adjusting a sponge and shoelaces into my two sizes to big Vans in order to get that open slipper prison look.
The Costume design-perfectionist
And after soaking up everything I can about this girl, I am having the feeling that she enjoyed costume design a lot more than acting itself. Some film scripts such as Boleslawski´s The Garden of Allah she downright disliked but agreed to act in for the paycheck and subsequently decided that the pleasure she would squeeze out of that experience would come from picking out the costumes.
In her last collaboration with Joseph von Sternberg The devil is a woman, she was playing Concha Perez, a seductive Spanish factory girl, aka her usual role of the sexy temptress only in Spanish.Hey, it’s not as bad as Ben Kingsley spraying himself brown to play Gandhi or Scarlett Johannson playing an AsianMotoko Kusanagi but well intersectional sensitivity was not a thing in lily-white Hollywood or society in general and don´t be fooled just because Marlene took a strong antifascist stance, does not mean she was not racist or antisemitic, but that will be subject for another blogpost. Anyway Marlene “Concha Perez” Dietrich went to great length to look like a Spanish siren. Apart from the meticulous costume design, the carnation hair style, she also decided she needed dark eyes. Colored contact lenses were not a thing yet so how to change eye color? In the biography about her mother Maria Siva, describes a hilarious scene in which Marlene crashed into various items on the film set, lamps, a big mirror because she self-administered eye drops she got from an eye doctor to dilate eyes. Needless to say, Von Sternberg, the lighting virtuoso managed to make her eyes look dark by manipulating the key light, tearing a paper off his large memo pad and taping it along the top edge of the little lamp but how should she have known? Creating looks was what she saw as her job.
The same was true for Edith Head, the women who would later become Hollywood´s most awarded costume designer describes a scene where she and Mrs. Dietrich searched for a hat. That included trying on dozens of hats, changing them, putting them on in different areas of her head, taking of the feathers of one head and putting them on another one, cutting off the veil, cutting around the brim of the hat, exchanging ribbons and so on…for 36 hours straight interrupted by only 3 hours of sleep.
I could mention a dozen more of those scenarios, where Marlene put a lot more effort into creating her look than acting. And in part 3 of this series of blog post I will tell you about the influence Marlene and her looks had on women´s fashion from the 30s on.
Marlene 2.0
In my brain I have an alternative universe for Marlene where she did not do the Vegas residence and dropped out of the limelight to become a fashion designer/stylist. Remember those times when Madonna was not yet the botoxed into oblivion, ridiculous person she is now and everything she did became a trend? I love 80s Madonna and stopped listening to her music in the 2000s but when her Music Video got out, damn it did I want to get a cowboy hat. Turns out I was not the only one. Say what you want about Madonna but up until a certain point she had a knack for trends. And before her was Marylin and before Marylin there was Marlene. And afterwards there would be Lady Gaga and a suit wearing dancing Britney Spears ripping of the suit and subsequently writing pop culture history in a diamond studded two piece and yes until recently pop culture was that white, but we can squeeze in a gorgeous suit wearing Janelle Monáe.
And as I previously stated, in the end everything circles back to Marlene, because it was actually our girl who inspired Billy Wilder to direct the iconic scene in the Seven Year Itch where the wind blew Marilyn Monroe´s dress suggestively above her knee. He had seen that happening to Marlene during a concert because OF COURSE.
In part 2 I am going to talk about the history of pants and what role Marlene plays in the history.
And for your pleasure: Another suit-rocking powerhouse of a woman: Annie Lennox
Sources:
Bianco Marcie (2016) Classic Hollywood’s Secret: Studios Wanted Their Stars to Have Abortions. Vaniy fair. July 15, 2016 https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/07/classic-hollywood-abortion
Katz, Gabriele (2021) Marlene Dietrich: Die Kleider ihres Lebens, Langenmüller Verlag, München.
Riva, Maria (2017) Marlene Dietrich: The life, Pegasus Books , New York, London Kindle edition
[1] Spoto, Donald (1992) The life of Marlene Dietrich, Cooper Square press, New York, NewYork, p.115
Super entertaining!And no, it is never too late to talk abt the fashonista that was the girl Marlene