Picturegoer (1922)

22 THE PICTU R E-GOE-R JUNE 1922 her admirers. Yet there are few feminine picturegoers who could face the huge cost of these lavish costumes. Several hundreds of pounds were involved in the creation of one dress alone that Corinne Griffith wore in What's Your Reputation Worth? It was made almost entirely of pearls, ten thousand of these jewels being threaded on silk to reproduce the necessary effect for the cameras. Only a few years ago such expensive assets to screen production would have been greeted with a storm of protest of similar nature to that levelled against Griffith when he startled impecunious film financiers by wasting a few hundreds of feet of film in his earliest pictures. Clara Kimball Young recently wore a ijooo chinchilla coat in front of the cameras. Not so very long ago, when her salary for film acting was five pounds a week, she wore ball dresses made from coloured cheese cloth at a few shillings a yard. Nowadays the screen spendthrift is accepted as a natural development of the demand for realism on the film, and to the feminine artiste realism inevitably represents Paris creations. Most big studios have a highly-paid mistress of the wardrobe who caters for the lavish demands 1 > Alice Lake in search of " something to' wear." before a film eventually is shown to the public, screendress designers are faced with the problem of anticipating fashions. In many pictures the leading artistes wear creations that, it is anticipated, will be the dernier cri in months that lay ahead. Paquin and Worth, and similar European dress kings, may run up huge studio dress bills, but these are nothing compared with the cost of providing raiment for period plays. Not an insignificant part of the two hundred thousand pounds that represented the cost of the Queen oj Sheba was due to the lavish dressing of this screen spectacle. Thousands of costumes had to be created from information laboriously gleaned from historical books. Thousands of pounds' worth of jewellery glitters on the slim fingers and shapely arms of film " stars " when they are acting before the cameras ; but it is not always provided by " Fairy Godfather " producers. Much of the jewellery worn in the studios represents the artiste's personal property. If it does not, trinkets of the artificial variety are generally supplied by the wardrobe mistress. For this is one direction in which the eye of the camera can be deceived. The diamond of cleverly constructed paste glitters beneath the arc lamps with most of the brilliance of the genuine stone. And studio lighting caresses artificial pearls with convincing light that the oyster-produced variety cannot improve upon. Bebe Daniels in a recent picture wore a superb ringwatch Anita Stewart is another star who prefers sports clothes to the confections she wears on the screen. / The Pauline Frederick (left) would dress as the Pauline Frederick (above) if she had her choice. of " stars." The Famous-T-asky dress-designer has a seat provided for her in the Grand Stand at Ascot, she walks the lawns at Henley with best-dressed women in Society. Thus keeps in touch with the latest developments in the sartorial world. Because films carry date, and owing to the length of time that stars and their dresses remain embalmed in celluloid Elsie Ferguson, one of the screen's best-dressed women. made in the seventeenth century. Despite its diminutive size, it was embellished with fifty -six pearls and eight diamonds. I )ressing the movies is producing bills that outrival the extravagance of Ninon de Lenclos, the fair spendthrift of history. But it is creating a new appreciation of alluring feminine charm, as reflected by beautifully dressed women on the screens of the world.