Lecture: Fashion Speak Fridays; Hollywood Before Glamour

Prior to the establishment of well-stocked wardrobe departments with in-house costume designers, it was important for budding starlets who usually wore their own clothing for films, to strike the right balance of fashionability, charisma and potential on-screen presence.

Step behind the scenes of the silent film era with Michelle Tolini Finamore, author of Hollywood Before Glamour:Fashion in American Silent Film (Palgrave Macmillan) for a fresh perspective on the evolution of Hollywood’s distinctive brand of glamour followed by a screening of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer silent film Our Dancing Daughters, with live musical accompaniment by Donald Sosin.

Michelle Tolini Finamore is Curator of Fashion Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston where she has curated Hollywood Glamour and Think Pink in addition to Cocktail Culture at the Norton Museum of Art, and assisted Hamish Bowles with Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is the co-author of Gaetano Savini: The Man Who Was Brioni (Assouline) and Jewelry by Artists: In the Studio, 1940-2000 (MFA Publications).

Donald Sosin has composed chamber, symphonic, choral, theater, dance and television music, and is one of the foremost silent film composers in the world. His commissions include the Chicago Symphony Chorus, Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Turner Classic Movies, MoMA, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This month he will receive the Career Achievement Award from the Denver Silent Film Festival.

In Our Dancing Daughters (1928), a flapper who’s secretly a good girl and a gold digging floozy masquerading as an ingénue both vie for the hand of a millionaire. Directed by Harry Beaumont and produced by Hunt Stromberg, the film stars Joan Crawford and John Mack Brown.

Silent Film Style is highly encouraged!

FREE

RSVP: rsvpfashion@thenationalartsclub.org