Judy - The Girl Who Became
"The World's Best-Dressed Woman"
from Photoplay, November 1945
by Adela Rogers St. Johns
It knocked her silly, and that's a fact. When the French Congress of Fashions, composed of the most famous and exclusive desginers, met in Paris and selected Judy Garland as the smartest woman in the world in the matter of clothes in the year 1945, nobody was as completely surprised as Judy Garland.
In the first place it's only about a year ago - apparently about the time she fell in love with the gentleman who is now her husband, Vincente Minnelli - that Judy Garland ever began to think of clothes as anything except what you have to wear to keep from getting arrested.
And in the second place, Judy does not regard herself as the fashion type, being little and young and not allowed to have the sophisticated type of garments for which she really yearns.
But there it was, in black and white, with a Paris date line. Judy Garland's name, first in the list of ten which included Lily Pons of the Metropolitan Opera, Mrs. Paul Getty, wife of one of Oklahoma's oil millionaires, Polina Semyonovna Zhemchugina, wife of Foreign Commisar Molotov of Russia, Mrs. Anthony Eden, whose husband as of course you know was the British Foreign Secretary, Mrs. T.V. Soong, wife of the Chinese Foreign Minister and a sister of Madame Chiang Kaishek, Mrs. Eduardo Villasenor of Mexico City and Mrs. Victor Borge of Denmark.
"It's - certainly a very international list, isn't it?" said Judy weakly.
She thought about it for a while and then added, "Well, if I am the best-dressed woman in the world, so is every other American girl!"
Her explanation of that was simple. "I don't really have any clothes that aren't - well, just about what every other American girl likes and wants. I can't see that I look any different. None of my things are - spectacular and theatrical or anything like that. I'd call them all - plain! I'm pleased, of course, but - I couldn't be more surprised, and that's the truth."
Judy Garland has not been considered as a leader of fashion before this. Since the tastes, shopping habits, likes and dislikes, wardrobe and clothes philosophy of the girl the Paris leaders of design call the best-dressed of our time right now are news to every American woman interested in clothes, I decided to find out about them.
The Garland philosophy about clothes is simple. For instance, there's this from her mother:
"When Judy was little", she said, "I bought her a dress to go to a party. She was a - a pretty little thing, and you know how mothers are. But Judy burst into tears when she saw it and after a while, begging and pleading, I got her to tell me what was the matter with it. Finally, through her tears she said, "Oh, Mama, it has ruffles!"
"She's been about like that ever since. No ruffles. As far as clothes are concerned I should say that was her pet dislike."
"The way Judy feels about clothes - what you call her philosophy on clothes - I think she put to me herself one night after she had been to a Hollywood party. She said, 'Mother, it's wonderful when people say you looked nice - or they never saw you look better. But I don't think it's so good when they say you are wearing a lovely dress.'"
Judy doesn't want anybody to notice what she has on before they notice her.
A girl's suits and gowns and dresses and sports wear should be a background, should be a part of her, a "help" as she puts it, but by no means have star billing. She thinks Judy Garland and every other girl should look "nice" (her own word) and well groomed and well dressed and becomingly garbed, but nobody should separate her costume from herself.
Perhaps that is why Judy isn't a designer's dream by any means. She always has ideas of her own and they are usually still on the "plain" side. She has never been known to add anything to a design or a dress, but she very often takes things off, modifies a drape, erases a trick neckline, refuses an extreme shoulder.
The world of fashion seemed to open up - or maybe burst would be a better word - to Judy all of a sudden. For years while she was a chubby little thing with a great big voice, she hankered after long, slinky, sophisticated black dresses - but she always had the common sense to know she couldn't wear them. So she took what the studio provided for her picture wardrobe and just bought anything for herself. The plainer and simpler the better. Half the time her mother or her sister or her secretary bought her clothes.
Then she fell in love - and that did it. Vincente Minnelli - of New York - of the New York theater - a man who had traveled everwhere in Europe and seen all the famous best-dressed women of the world - Vincente was a man who made her think of clothes and she started in from there.
Now, for all evening gowns and afternoon (cocktail) dresses, Judy has sketches made first, examines them carefully, makes her own alterations, and has things made.
Right here, it occurs to me that I had to stop and think quite a while in order to remember what Judy Garland had on one day when I went to lunch with her and Mr. Minnelli - about the time they announced their engagement. I remembered I thought she looked charming, and chic and sort of smooth. But it was an hour before I could get it definite in my mind that she wore a simple black skirt and a tailored white blouse.
Donn of Donn Ltd. - who also designs Lana Turner's clothes - says that probably Judy Garland was named as best-dressed woman in the world by the experts of Paris because her clothes are more completely her own, more a part of her and her personality than those of anyone else. A tall, skinny blond lad with freckles, who thinks he knows how girls ought to look, Donn gets a little wistful about Judy.
"I used to wish she'd let me make her just one dress completely the way I wanted to make it," he says, "and sometimes I come close. The two-piece wool suit in gray that she had in her trousseau as her 'going away' costume - that was almost exactly the way I did it originally - only she changed the way the sleeves were set a little." Naturally, he was excited over having designed so many of the gowns for the girl who was named the best-dressed of them all, and he said, "She is awfully right about what she wants. She usually makes the suggestions about the kind of thing she needs and wants - and we stay within her ideas. She isn't exactly easy to dress because she is so little and she won't ever let you do anything - well, sensational. She says that's never good taste, and of course she's right. But she has a perfect figure and that helps."
Judy's first rule about clothes is - they must fit. Even when she bought them just anywhere and often took them home and had her mother pin up the skirt and hemmed it herself, the main thing was that everything should fit properly. Often, especially on a suit, even the simplest little suit, she has anywhere from three to seven fittings - and that's tough on her because Judy works so hard and has so very little time. But she manages to work it in somehow. She isn't cranky, but she just keeps at it, patiently, determinedly, pleasantly and sweetly, continuing to say "No - that's not exactly right, is it?" to the most experienced tailors until they get it the way she wants it.
"Oh, yes, that's very nice," she will say, "but you see - for me - I like the sleeves a little tighter, like this" - or looser, or the skirt shorter or longer. They tell me she is practically downright fussy about how a skirt hangs and sets over the hips. She calls it taking pains.
"If you're really going to try to look nice," she says, "you have to take a lot of pains with your fittings. It doesn't matter so much about the material or even the style - almost everything has pretty good style nowadays except the fantastic crazy things - but no girl can be well dressed unless she really takes pains about the fit. That's what - in a way - makes a thing your own.
Two or three things are distinctive about Judy's taste.
In the daytime, on the street or in a car, she invariably wears a suit. This isn't as common as you might think, though I notice it more and more in Hollywood of late. I don't mean tricked-up, dressy suits, but very simple tailored suits with plain tailored blouses. Judy's are all almost exactly alike. Either soft wook or gabardine - she's too little to wear anything in heavy tweeds - simply made, and she buys most of them ready made at Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills.
The blouses to go with them are another matter! The blouses and the accessories - but especially the blouses. Or shirts.
Her secretary, Evelyn Powers, who has been with her for years and is her close and devoted friend, is chief blouse-hunter and custodian of the blouse supply. Over the years, Evie has become an expert on the Garland taste in blouses and it is said she can window-shop for them from a car. Some of Judy's favorites she has located in small shops or large department stores and lots of them are very expensive.
They must be simple, they must be a little different and, if possible, white - the only exception to that is very gay and unusual prints, no solid colors.
But the main thing in blouses - and Judy wears an awful lot of them because she wears her simple little suits so much and sometimes in the summer just skirts and blouses - is the neckline. That, in Judy's opinion, is the important and essential thing - a becoming and well turned neckline. She doesn't like ordinary V necks and hardly ever wears them, and while she likes severe effects they mustn't be mannish or look like shirts. A round neckline is her favorite, square or necklines with simple collars or with ties of the same material are okay.
At home, she usually wears slacks. Often she comes to the studio in them. "They are so comfortable," is her explanation for her fairly comprehensive collection of slacks and she doesn't think they will ever disappear from the feminine wardrobe again, no matter what anybody says. With them she wears sweaters of all kinds and colors - with one exception. She doesn't like the oversize sloppy collegiate sweater. As a matter of fact, Judy is a very neat dresser.
Until she was married to Mr. Minnelli and selected her trousseau, she didn't own a housecoat. Tailored flannel robes and over-sized tailored pajamas suited her best. But her trousseau contains one of the most beautiful housecoats I have ever seen - designed for her by Donn. In a marvelous shade of blue, a color she seldom wears, it has a full skirt and soft top with long sleeves and little plaited frills of deep cream Czechoslovakian lace at neck and wrists and a deep lace cuff going almost to the elbow.
Speaking of colors, her favorite is brown - all shades and kinds of brown, beige, tan and cream. The majority of her suits are brown, but this year she is wearing a good deal of black.
Irene, the famous M-G-M designer, who makes Judy's clothes for pictures, says that the childish love Judy had for sophisticated black dresses still persists, but Judy has adapted them to her own style, size and personality.
"I made he one such dress for 'Presenting Lily Mars,'" Irene told me. "The director said, 'Irene, the sequence is almost a dream - when she dances with this man she hardly believes it's real, and she looks as she has always dreamed she would look. See what you can do and it must be sophisticated, the kind of a dress a young girl dreams about and in which she thinks she will look grown-up and elegant and like Gertrude Lawrence.
"So - I shut my eyes and designed a gown Judy's size for Gertrude Lawrence - and to my amazement, Judy looked too wonderful for words in it. That's quite a long time ago - but you'll see another Gertrude Lawrence gown on Judy in 'Ziegfeld Follies' this time - and somehow she was exquisite in them."
Irene, who is herself a beauty and looks like the Duchess of Windsor, did Judy's wedding dress. She does not design "personal and private lives" clothes for the stars - she has too much to do as it is with the pictures. But Mr. Mayer made Judy a present of her wedding gown from the studio where she has worked so long - even if she is only twenty-two.
"Judy likes a long waistline," Irene said, "and is right there - it's very becoming to her. The gown was soft blue - with very delicate pink beads. You see, Judy's engagement ring - did you see it? - is a large pink pearl, exquisitely set in black onyx. One of the daintiest and loveliest things I've ever seen. We tried to tie that and the wedding dress together with the pink pearl beads - and it was lovely, it really was."
For the first time, Irene will probably soon have a chance to design some really "Irene" clothes for Judy - who wants to make at least one picture, she says pathetically, where she can wear something modern and nice.
But the little blue suit which Judy wore in so many sequences in "The Clock" and which is one of Irene's creations, has been hailed by fashion experts aas a real and unique and altogether smart Judy Garland number. Simple and plain as it is, it has all the Judy Garland touches - the perfect fit, the youth, the smooth look and has been one of the most popular costumes worn in a picture in a long time.
Judy never plans - or at least she hasn't up to now - a whole wardrobe. She picks up what she likes when she sees it - and when she needs something she either goes shopping or has Donn Ltd. or Billy Gordon, another designer known to New York but new out here in Hollywood, bring her some sketches.
In her trousseau was a plain black satin-backed crepe, with a little pink bead effect and Judy's favorite draped skirt. All her "dress-up" dresses have draped skirts which she adores - either in front or on the sides. Billy Gordon made her one for her wedding garments of brown crepe with a soft cream top and little bugle beads which was draped at the side and which is one of Judy's special favorites. And a black sequin cocktail dress - very simply made.
What Judy said as a kid about her party dress, "no ruffles", still goes. Nobody can find a single ruffle in the Garland closet.
All her accessories Evie Powers buys - except when Judy is shopping and sees something that catches her fancy. And here the rule is the same - as plain and simple as possible. Plain handbags and pocketbooks, perfectly plain gloves and very plain little hats. I haven't said much about hats because Judy doesn't wear many of them. With suits or slacks in the daytime she often goes hatless, and practically never in California does she wear a hat with her cocktail dresses. When she goes to New York, however, she buys simple matching hats - no egg beater effects - to wear in the afternoon.
When you come right down to it, it would seem that the rules of fashion laid down for herself by the best-dressed woman of 1945, according to the French Congress, are pretty few and simple:
No Ruffles.
Find your own type and stick to it no matter what the prevailing mode, or rather combine your personal taste and idea of becomingness with the prevailing mode.
Take pains with your fittings.
Select your blouses for the neckline.
Wear suits, if possible, at all times on the street in the daytime.
Try to insure that your friends say, "Doesn't Judy look nice" rather than, "What a stunning dress Judy has on."
Accept expert advice from your own designer, store, or pattern department, but modify it to your own taste and personality so that it is yours.
If you have a choice, go plain always rather than fancy.
Be underdressed always rather than overdressed.
And, to quote Judy, "Aren't clothes fun?"
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