Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1926)

21 Picture? Corinne Griffith, Hope with fashion films. Klumph you insist. But motion pictures have reached such an extravagant stage that another fifty thousand dollars or so, put into a production, has no appreciable effect on the finished product. The industry is so prosperous that productions have been all but choked with luxury. The struggle to achieve the most dazzling fashion film has resolved itself into a fight to capture the cleverest designers, instead of merely spending money with a lavish hand. "What clothes will photograph effectively is the most puzzling thing in the world," Corinne Griffith told me one day, as we dashed from shop to shop — or, in justice to the amounts spent, I should say from atelier to atelier. "Nine times out of ten, a really welldressed woman looks like nothing at all on the screen. That's why we started wearing spectacular things, and have all looked like " chandeliers or Christmas trees. When we first learned that simple, tasteful clothes did not photograph effectively, we went to the other extreme and brought on a deluge of sequins and pearls and feathers. Now we are convinced that is wrong, too, and we are trying to find a sort of middle ground — trying to find clothes that are spectacular enough to pick up in photographs and yet are not overdecorated. The solution lies in getting things of distinctive design. It takes an artist to make them. But when you find an artist capable of doing it, everybody else finds him about the same time. And your clothes are not going to impress any one particularly if similar frocks have already been seen on four, or five other players." The situation that confronts the girls, who are striving for fashion supremacy in the films, looks to the average woman like a lazy paradise. All the money the}' can spend, at their command — the foremost designers of Europe and America, eager to create fashions for them. And yet they find it hard ! Each of these girls who have been making pictures that feature fashion displays has solved her problem in a different way. It will be interesting to see who makes the greatest impression when the pictures are released. Hope Hampton went to Paris and spent weeks looking at the creations of the foremost dress designers in the world. She selected one thing here, another there, and when exquisite colorings caught her fancy, she had the assurance that her pictures were to be filmed by a color Colleen Moore, shown here as she appears in "Irene," put an expert designer under contract to do nothing but design clothes for that fashionable production. process that catches nuances of shading. She was shopping for clothes to wear, not in dramatic pictures, but in strictly fashion films, so she was not hampered by any requirements of characterization. Sheer beauty of line and color and fabric was what she sought — and that she succeeded in finding it, you will know when her fashion films come to your local theater. Colleen Moore, despairing of finding anything in shops that would not be copied and exploited before she could wear it in a picture, found an expert designer and put her under contract to do nothing but design clothes for the picture "Irene." The designer is Cora McGeachy, a woman of long experience in the theater, a woman who knows that clothes, as well as players, must be dramatic in order to be effective on the screen. Just as a dramatist, in selecting his material from life, tries to avoid all the commonplaces that go to make up uneventful days, so does Cora McGeachv focus attention on the striking and unusual features of dress. Not only the fashion show, but the method of presenting it, is one of the features of "Irene." It was photographed in natural colors. The dress pageant Continued on page 112