Screen-to-measure: An Interdisciplinary and Embodied Approach to the Investigation of Film Noir Costumes Informed by Lady in the Dark (Mitchell Leisen, USA, 1944) and Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, USA, 1944)

Although film noir has been the subject of a significant amount of film scholarship, there is very little work that focuses on the costume design of classic Hollywood film noir. There is no scholarship on the making process of costumes in the studio system. Yet over three decades (1990-2020), the study of film costume design has become a burgeoning field that focusses on cinematic costume as a key element in the construction of cinematic identities and its relationship with female audiences. However, as it appears that film scholars have seldom looked at or worked with the actual garments, little academic scholarship addresses cinematic costume as an embodied practice or as material culture.

The thesis develops the practice-informed research method of performative pattern drawing and argues for an interdisciplinary methodology which enables the theorization of film costumes in the Hollywood studio system through the embodied practices of viewing and making. As an embodied researcher, I analyse the cinematic costume through my own embodied experience. This is complemented by my embodied practice as a maker, considering the performativity of the material costume object as well as the collaborative work of costume designers and makers. This thesis specifically looks at two costumes designed in and made at the Paramount Film Studios in Hollywood: the hybrid film noir musical Lady in the Dark (Mitchell Leisen, USA, 1944) and the classic film noir Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, USA, 1944), and it maps the film-specific expertise and (co)authorship of Edith Head as Paramount’s supervising costume.

Using an interdisciplinary methodology and operating within a framework of recent approaches in feminist film theory, the agency of women through costume, as well as the agency of costume through film, is problematised in this thesis. As this thesis will show, through the development of the notions of the ‘costume of attractions’, the complicity of costume in discourses of excess, distraction, and attraction can also impact on public consciousness through the experience of the female audience. This methodological framework enables a feminist analysis that encompasses the complexities of the connections between the costumes as material performative objects, the wearers, and the (female) spectators, and helps to (re-)define these concepts in the field of film costume design. Through this methodology, I argue for the embodied experience of the costume from multiple perspectives to establishing more cogently its place within fashion and film cultures through distance, proximity and immersion in the act. As such, the thesis addresses film costume from both the outside in (in terms of its readings from a historical distance) but also, more critically, from the inside outward, developing a creatively generative way of engaging with filmic and archival costumes through performative pattern drawing.