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The work of costume designers in film is essentially that of dressing actors to look like (and more fully become) their characters. This is not simple work. They design and sometimes sketch clothing, select fabrics, choose colors, negotiate the needs of actors, and, most importantly, work with a director's vision of the overall design of the film.
In the United States, costume designers for film gained significant importance during the Hollywood studio era when head designers enjoyed celebrity and fashioned an era of couture gowns, ravishing daywear, and period costume. They dressed the stars and worked in a realm somewhere between reality and sensational spectacle; they designed a "magical realism." After several decades of bravura and unlimited budgets, the art of costume design changed with the decline of the studio system and the emergence of a new independence in filmmaking. Costume design would move to a new level of authenticity.
Wardrobe and the Studio Era
For the first decade-and-one-half of the movie industry, as motion pictures moved from novelty to full-scale entertainment, actors working in films requiring contemporary dress were obliged to wear their own clothes and actresses with better-stocked wardrobes were better able to win parts. However, costume choices were evident in early cinema. Edwin S. Porter dressed his masked bandits as threatening types in The Great Train Robbery (1903) and George Méliès used costume to help create his wide range of characters, fanciful or ordinary. By 1912, before the movie industry concentrated in Southern California, the Western Costume Company was founded and prospered as a costume rental business initially supplying wardrobes for westerns and later biblical epics and other types of films with a large cast of extras. Once new directions in filmmaking practices, particularly the move toward narrative feature length films, took hold by the end of the first decade, filmmakers recognized that clothing was integral to the story and needed to be thought out or designed.
In the same year Western Costume got its start, Adolph Zukor helped to found Famous Players Motion Picture Company (Famous Players-Lasky by 1916 and eventually Paramount Pictures), a company that aimed to convert successful stage plays into feature films. It became the American distribution company for the French film production of Les Amours de...