Edith Head

Edith Head was born in San Bernardino, California, in 1897 and trained not as a designer but as a teacher, earning degrees in languages and taking a post instructing French and art. When she answered a Paramount advertisement for a sketch artist in 1924, she reportedly padded her portfolio with other students' drawings to land the job. What she lacked in formal fashion training she made up for with relentless ambition and an unmatched gift for reading exactly what a star, a character and a director each needed.

She rose through the department in the shadow of the great Travis Banton, absorbing his craft, and when he departed in 1938 she became Paramount's head designer—one of the first women to run a major studio's costume operation. For decades she was the most powerful figure in her field, her round dark glasses and severe bangs as recognizable as any actress she dressed.

Head's genius was collaboration. She listened, flattered, problem-solved, and made performers feel the clothes were theirs. She shaped Barbara Stanwyck's slinky glamour, gave Grace Kelly her cool patrician elegance in a run of Hitchcock films, and created enduring images from A Place in the Sun to Roman Holiday, Sabrina, Rear Window and Vertigo. When she moved to Universal in 1967, she carried her authority with her.

Across her career she was nominated for the costume Oscar thirty-five times and won eight—including for The Heiress, All About Eve, A Place in the Sun, Roman Holiday, Sabrina and, late in life, the 1973 caper The Sting. No woman has ever won more competitive Academy Awards.

She remained working to the very end, designing costumes for the affectionate noir spoof Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, and died in 1981 shortly before its release. Widely imitated—the fussy studio costumer of a hundred later parodies owes something to her image—Edith Head was in truth a shrewd, disciplined artist who understood that the best costume is the one the audience never notices working.