Gilbert Adrian for Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Silk Velvet Evening Gown. 1931.
Worn by Greta Garbo in Inspiration (1931)

This transparent black silk velvet evening gown with jeweled yoke and sleeves represents the conjunction of two of Hollywood’s luminaries: costume designer Gilbert Adrian and actress Greta Garbo. The early 1930s, during the Great Depression, were Hollywood’s Golden Age. For 10 cents anyone could escape into the exhilarating silver screen of parties and supper clubs where everyone wore fabulous evening garb, stylish offices of businesses that had somehow escaped the crash, and boudoirs of ladies in luxe loungewear and gentlemen in smoking jackets (1). Adrian began designing for Garbo in 1928 soon after he left New York and his career as a designer for Broadway musicals to become chief designer for MGM. Their alliance lasted until they both left MGM in 1941 (2). Adrian designed this gown for Garbo to wear in the 1931 film Inspiration, co-starring Robert Montgomery and directed by Clarence Brown (Fig. 1).
https://www.youtube.com/%20watch?v=xAWF1u_sXCo

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Figure 1. Greta Garbo publicity still for Inspiration, 1931. Photo by Sunset Boulevard. Corbis Historical. https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news- photo/swedish-actress-greta-garbo-news-photo/607399878

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Adrian, born Adrian Adolph Greenburg, in Connecticut, 1903, was the son of a furrier and a hat designer. The couple owned a millinery shop, making motoring hats for the wealthy to wear inside those symbols of social and geographical mobility, automobiles (2). Adrian was sent to art school in New York City and spent 5 months studying in Paris. His early drawings show the strong influence of the aestheticism of the Art Nouveau style artist Aubrey Beardsley and Erte and later the modernism and Orientalism of Leon Bakst. Adrian returned to New York when Irving Berlin offered him a job designing for the Music Box Revue. His work was seen by visionary designer-director Natacha Rambova who called him west to design for the movies of her husband, matinee idol Rudolph Valentino.

Figure 2. Adrian sketch for Kay Johnson’s costume, created for the film Madam Satan (1930). Fashion and Film: A Biography of MGM Designer Gilbert Adrian. https://whatgrandmawore.com/ 2020/01/25/fashion-and-film-a-biography-of-mgm-designer-gilbert-adrian/ Right, Kay Johnson wearing the costume in Madam Satan directed by Cecil B. De Mille,1930. https://www.cecilbdemille.com/innovators-in-film/costumers/

Adrian took the next call from director Cecil B. DeMille. According to Richard Griffith and Arthur Mayer in The Movies, DeMille instructed designers “to exaggerate the mode and told them that the sky was the limit” (3). Adrian responded by using expensive fabrics like the transparent black silk velvet of our gown to amplify his sinuous, elegant lines; velvet and silk providing the blackest of blacks to contrast with the dazzling jeweled yoke and sleeves. He also understood how his fabrics and embellishments would react with the ‘pearlant’ lighting of Oscar-winning director of photography William Daniels, bringing energy and depth to the silver screen (4). Daniels worked with him on Inspiration, along with many other Garbo films.

Figure 3. Still from the film Inspiration, Directed by Clarence Brown, USA, 1931. Film Production: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Photo by Ullstein Bild.

Greta Garbo’s slim, athletic, boyish body was the perfect mannequin for Adrian’s linear columns, bias cut silk slips and barely there transparent silhouettes. The androgynous body, combined with an angelic face, created an erotic tension that captivated the designer. That body was created by lots of exercise and the diet her Swedish Pygmalion, director Mauritz Stiller, put her on when he discovered her in Sweden in 1922 when she was 17. He made her lose 20 pounds when he brought her with him to Hollywood in 1925. As part of her contract, MGM made her lose an additional 20 pounds. Stiller remarked, “Don’t treat her like a human creature, because she isn’t. Treat her like Plasticine (7).” In 1928 Stiller returned to Sweden. Garbo remained in Hollywood where she used the strength and power of her personality to develop her craft until she left film in 1941. 

Figure 4. Still from the film Inspiration, Directed by Clarence Brown, USA, 1931. Film Production: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Photo by Ullstein Bild.
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news- photo/garbo-greta-actress-sweden-in-the-film-inspiration-news-photo/541061517?

Women were captivated by the onscreen glamour the union of costume designers and actresses like Adrian and Garbo produced. Film studios capitalized on this consumer group by producing mass marketed, commercial adaptations of the gowns in less expensive, newly developed fabrics from fibers like rayon, a regenerated cellulose (6). Kevin Jones, Curator of the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, Los Angeles, was ferreting out these ‘fakes’ in 2005, when he visited the Drexel Historic Costume Collection. He determined, by the construction from the luxe silk velvet fabric and the hand embellishment of our gown, that our gown is indeed the original (7).

Figure 5. Hollywood Memorabilia.
https://www.hollywood-memorabilia.com/mgm-auction-1970- costumes-props/

The donation of the gown to the Drexel Historic Costume Collection, now the Robert and Penny Fox Historic Costume Collection, was made by Philadelphia socialite Mrs. Thomas E. Burns, Jr. Since the donation was made in 1976, it could be surmised that Mrs. Burns purchased the gown from one of the 6000 antique dealers and collectors who attended the 1970 MGM studios auction of the “350,000 plus costumes, furniture and decorative-art related items, automobiles, busses, trains, tanks, boats, ships, airplanes and space capsules that were previously incorporated into studio productions” (8). MGM needed both the space and the money. The prices were right and the fans, including some of Hollywood’s stars, were eager to see and purchase iconic objects of movies history. The auction and ensuing publicity spawned a new market for collectible movie memorabilia (Fig. 5).

But what became of the separate sleeves and belt of the original? Losing unattached pieces of an ensemble can be a problem in a retail environment and especially so amid the crowds of an auction. We can assume somewhere in the handoffs of the gown before Mrs. Burns purchase, the belt and sleeves were lost. The train, evident in the studio shot in Figure 1 and in the party scene early in the film, has been removed later when Garbo and Montgomery go to her apartment (Fig.6). Another unattached piece on the loose.

Figure 6. Frames from the film Inspiration, Directed by Clarence Brown, USA, 1931. Film Production: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM).

Adrian’s artistic sensibility and an unlimited budget combined to give us glamour at its most fully realized. In 2010, our gown traveled to Florence to the Museo Salvatore Ferragamo to be part of their exhibition Greta Garbo, The Mystery of Style, and is included in the eponymous book that accompanied the exhibition.

Historic fashion can hold the collective story of our cultural heritage. This gown illustrates how, together, Adrian and Garbo rewrote the rules of glamour through their elegant style and dedication to their craft.

Figure 7. Greta Garbo. Inspiration. Photo by Clarence Bull. 1931

References

1. Farrell-Beck, Jane and Jean Parsons. 20th-Century Dress in the United States. New York: Fairchild Publications, Inc., 2007: 90.
2. Jacob, Laura. “Glamour by Adrian.” Vanity Fair Magazine, June, 2000. https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2000/6/glamour-by-adrian
3. Griffith, Richard, Arthur Mayer, and Eileen Bowser. The Movies. Simon & Shuster, New York, N.Y. 1981.
4. Hopwood, Jon C.- William H. Daniels. IMDb Mini Biography https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0200125/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm
5. Cannova, Gianni. “Of Flesh and of Snow. Greta Garbo, Cinema and Films.” In Greta Garbo The Mystery of Style. Edited by Stephani Ricci, 42. Museo Salvatore Ferragamo, Florence: Skira, 2010.
6. Reyer, Celia. “When Hollywood Glamour Was Sold at the Local Department Stores.” Smithsonian Magazine, February 23, 2017.  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-hollywood-glamour-was-sold- local-department-store-180962262/
7. Kevin Jones, conversation, September, 2005. 8 – Torgerson, Dial. “Dreams Auctioned”. LA Times, MAY 4, 1970. https://www.hollywoodgoldenguy.com/1970_MGM_Auction.html

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