Laura opens as if a romance, with David Raskin’s lush musical score playing as the credits appear over a portrait of a beautiful woman. Suddenly, the screen goes black and a man’s voice begins, “I shall never forget the weekend Laura died.”
With one line, the audience is drawn into the mystery of this film noir. Ethereal Gene Tierney plays the intrigante Laura Hunt, a young career woman who first appears to be the victim of murder and then eventually becomes the main suspect. Producer and director Otto Preminger so loved the twists and turns in Vera Caspary’s 1943 book, Laura, that he pressed 20th Century Fox head Darryl Zanuck to acquire it for the screen. In those twists and turns, Laura’s life is revealed through three men and their obsession with her: newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), playboy Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), and Detective Lt. Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews). The romantic score and high style of the film disguise the darkness within. Laura’s circle of New York high society may have a veneer of sophistication, but evil lurks underneath. Style is always important in a movie, especially in film noir, but it’s central to Laura. Tierney’s costumes by Bonnie Cashin communicate the evolution of the character and give new meaning to the concept of fashion in film.
Gene Tierney was perfect for the role of Laura Hunt. She grew up in a wealthy family on the east coast, living in New York and Connecticut, and was educated in boarding schools as well as a finishing school in Switzerland. She circulated among the upper crust and exuded the “innate breeding” Lydecker attributed to Laura in the movie. And like Laura, Gene was accustomed to being controlled by men. Her father, Howard Tierney, had directed every aspect of her early life and when her acting career began served as her agent and manager. It was a relationship that would rot. His authority over her finances allowed him to steal everything she made during her first two years in Hollywood, as Gene would disclose in her 1978 memoir, Self-Portrait. As if that weren’t enough, he then sued her for $50,000 more.
Tierney’s father objected to the next important man in her life—young Paramount costume designer Oleg Cassini. Like the men in the movie who fixate on Laura’s portrait, Cassini found himself in awe of Gene’s beauty. She captivated him when they worked together on The Shanghai Gesture. They married not long afterward, but Gene had already felt his influence from the beginning of their relationship when he controlled what she wore. Tierney had always been passionate about fashion and thoughtful about her ensembles, even designing many herself. Yet she recalled of their first date: “Oleg strode in the door, took one look at [my outfit] and almost passed out. ‘I won’t take you out dressed like that!’ he bellowed. ‘First, take off the hat and cape and then go get a navy bag. Forget the gloves, if you don’t have any navy ones.’”
In his autobiography Cassini would admit to a similar affront when he and Gene were going to a black-tie event. When he arrived at Gene’s door, he disliked a dress of her own design. He recalled, “She was not perfect for me…. I said to her, ‘Now, we’re going to start everything right. The most important thing is not to lie to each other. I don’t like your dress. I want you to go change.’”
The episode is suggestive of Waldo Lydecker’s attitude and sway toward Laura in the film. An entire sequence in the picture itemizes all he did to “improve” her.
“She deferred to my judgment and taste,” Waldo tells McPherson after Laura’s alleged death. “I selected a more attractive hair dress for her. I taught her what clothes were more becoming to her.”
Lydecker’s objectification of Laura creates a sense that Laura’s life is not her own. He considers her a possession, an accessory, an extension of his greatness. He says, speaking of himself in the third person, “She became as famous as Waldo Lydecker’s walking stick and his white carnation.”
As Laura’s on-screen style evolves in the film, 20th Century Fox costume designer Bonnie Cashin demonstrates her talent for capturing character in costume and also gives the audience a view of her innovations as a fashion designer.
As the world began to move away from couture and to democratize fashion, Cashin helped transform ready-to-wear by making even casual clothes glamorous. She is perhaps best known as one of the founders of the fashion house Coach, but she also designed and produced collections for several other companies, including her own. She won many awards and honors, including induction into the prestigious Coty American Fashion Critics Hall of Fame. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is but one of many institutions that have hosted exhibitions of her work, and her influence lives on through other designers, including Donna Karan and Ralph Lauren. Cashin’s origins, however, were in costume design and it remained a passion in her life.
Cashin was born in Oakland, California, and grew up inspired by the San Francisco area, from the unpredictable climate to the exotic mix of cultures. Both had an impact on her designs. She knew how to sew thanks to her mother, a talented dressmaker who opened a shop in every town where the family lived. Eventually, they moved to Los Angeles, and Bonnie became a professional designer while still a teen. Attending Hollywood High School, she made costumes for the live stage acts of producers Fanchon and Marco, whose shows accompanied movie screenings in theaters. Working with those dancers, Cashin developed a talent for “designing clothes that moved well with the body.”
In 1934 she moved to the east coast to study at the Art Students League of New York. While attending that school, she became “the youngest designer ever to hit Broadway” when she created costumes for the famed chorus line Roxyettes, as the Rockettes were originally dubbed. It was there at the Roxy Theater that her work was admired by Harper’s Bazaar editor Carmel Snow and resulted in Cashin’s first job in fashion at Adler & Adler.
By 1943 Cashin sought a return to California and costume design. “I felt more at home with dancers, actors, artists, musicians, writers—people like that—than I did with most of the businessmen I’d met in the clothing industry,” she said.
Producer William Perlberg became the matchmaker between Bonnie and 20th Century Fox; she eventually designed costumes for approximately sixty of the studio’s films. Not long into her contract, Preminger specifically chose her to design what she would consider a dream project: Laura. Her team had two months before filming began to work on the costumes. While Cashin claimed “the budget was kept tight,” Preminger fought the studio to allow $15,000 for costumes, an amount so extravagant for the time it was reported by the media. He even rented real diamonds and pearls from jewelers rather than use costume jewelry. “His Laura would not be wearing fake jewelry,” Tierney’s biographer Michelle Vogel declared. Everything was custom-made for her wardrobe, right down to her black lace lingerie trimmed with baby-blue ribbon.
Laura’s wardrobe changes with each man in her life. Waldo heightens her glamour to match his own; much of his style stems from New York City and its high society. He first meets Laura when she is an ambitious advertising associate at the Algonquin Hotel. and then starts to dress her for fancy evenings out at Sardi’s and El Morocco and for Broadway plays once their relationship is under way. Lydecker’s apartment, by his own description, is lavish; he writes his newspaper column in an enormous bathroom with a marble tub, and the rest of his home is filled with priceless possessions. Laura’s apartment seems styled by the same hand, and he even claims ownership over several items in it.
In a remarkable makeover montage that captures Waldo’s ownership of Laura, Gene dons a dozen costumes that range from a sweeping strapless floral gown to orchid-pink pajamas embellished with sequins. One incredible haute couture moment is her fireside ensemble of a creamy cardigan paired with a belted skirt of gray and white squirrel. This is pure Cashin, as she was among the first in fashion to use leather and furs from leopard to raccoon in basics like dresses and skirts.
Laura dons the final costume in Lydecker’s transformation of her at a black-tie party given by her aunt, Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson). She wears a white cowl-neck, bias-cut goddess gown accessorized with a brooch over her left shoulder. The breathtaking dress echoes Adrian’s designs for Jean Harlow.
“We fitted the clothes on naked bodies,” Cashin commented. “It’s the movement of a slim body underneath clothes that is sex personified.” She added a little extra fabric around the derriere in the dress to make sure the costume did not provoke objections from the Production Code.
In this gown Laura meets Vincent Price’s Shelby Carpenter, and the audience starts to see a subtle shift in her wardrobe. At this point in her journey, she has become successful as an advertising executive. Serving up a rare compliment, Lydecker says, “I gave her her start, but it was her own talent and imagination that enabled her to rise to the top of her profession … and stay there.”
Laura’s position allows her to give Shelby the job he says he craves. However, his ambition seems solely to get close to her and her money rather than to pursue a career. Laura’s work wardrobe includes a skirt suit, a matching knit sweater and skirt set, and a sweater and pencil skirt paired with a collarless jacket with tie closures. This last ensemble is topped with a hat that was the debut of one of Cashin’s own styles: the “Spaniel’s Ears” hat. Shelby even compliments her: “I approve of that hat. And the girl in it, too.” The style appears again when Laura returns to her apartment after a trip to the mountains. In that hat and a slicker coat soaked from the rain, she finds Dana Andrews as Detective Mark McPherson waiting for her.
When Mark (trench coat and all) moves into the plot with Laura, she adopts a more modern style, even fashion-forward for the early 1940s. It’s as if she is finding her own voice, which proves an example of the costume designer’s voice as well. Cashin always loved the style of the Far East, and the Los Angeles Times reported, “The Japanese kimono was her inspiration for layering and detail such as wide sleeves.” Both design features can be seen in the belted, striped wrap top and palazzo pants Laura wears the morning after her return from the “dead.”
Bonnie Cashin favored loose-fitting designs that can also be seen in the peasant blouse and matching skirt Laura wears at her party. At this point in the picture, she’s falling for Mark and positioning herself as a potential wife, even assuring him of her ability to cook—an attempt to separate herself in Mark’s mind from the spoiled people who surround her.
“For the first time in ages, I know what I’m doing,” she says as she pushes Waldo away while wearing a costume that has hints of a cheongsam dress. The look suggests that Laura is finally coming into her own as a woman.
The public response to Cashin’s collection of costumes was immediate and overwhelming. Columnist Marian Christy recounted, “The public relations man blew into her office one day and told Bonnie he had just weighed the press clippings and they added up to ten pounds.”
Cashin’s spectacular wardrobe for Gene Tierney in Laura showcases some of the Cashin signature style as well as communicating so much about the character. “It was exciting work,” she said about her time at Fox. “I wasn’t designing for fashion, but for characteristics, which is the way I still like to design clothes for daily wear. I like to design clothes for a woman who plays a particular role in life, not simply to design clothes that follow a certain trend.”
Among all of its beautiful style is an ominous feeling within Laura. It’s like a bad dream, as Mark says, with so much stirring beneath the surface. The horror doesn’t just concern the murder, but also the discovery that everyone in Laura’s life seems capable of that murder.
One reviewer described Laura as the “dazzling glamor girl so many people wanted to kill.” Gene Tierney played her like an apparition. She was perhaps at her most beautiful in this film noir, her face luminous under Oscar-winner Joseph LaShelle’s lights.
“Laura was a woman of mystery and glamour, unattainable,” Gene recalled, “the kind of woman I admired in the pages of Vogue as a young girl.”
Whether in the portrait or in person, Laura is the result of what men project upon her. Her costumes reflect the roles she plays in each of her relationships. They also allow the audience to sense some new-found strength at the end of the picture. Cashin astutely understood what was needed in those costumes. She inspired audiences with her signature style expressed in a squirrel-fur skirt, a kimono jacket, and a Spaniel’s Ears hat. Her draped goddess gown influenced designs in both fashion and film, including one of Ava Gardner’s costumes a decade later in The Barefoot Contessa (1954).
In a film where the audience questions what is real and what is fantasy, Cashin includes both in costumes that are clues to the character of Laura as well as fashion inspiration for the war years.
