FROM Scarlett O’Hara to Carrie Bradshaw, over the years my fashion choices have been hugely influenced by my movie watching habits with varying degrees of success (where would you wear a dress like Scarlett’s exactly?).
I am hardly alone in this. After all, the film world feeds the fashion world, the fashion world feeds film, and round and round the circle goes.
Which explains the current deluge of pencil skirts, twin sets, pearls and pastel engulfing the high street.
This onset of ladylike dressing is down to Hollywood’s latest celluloid obsession: Alfred Hitchcock.
Well not actually HItch himself – that would be weird. Coming in at 5’7 and somewhat rotund to say the least, the director was no David Beckham.
No, designers have turned (or should that be returned?) to the wardrobes of his actresses for inspiration in the wake of not one but two biopics about the Master of Suspense: BBC’s The Girl starring Sienna Miller as Tippi Hedren and Hitchcock – out this week – which has Scarlett Johansson as Psycho shower victim Janet Leigh and Helen Mirren as his wife Alma.
Personally I don’t think Scarlett is anywhere near cool enough to play an icy Hitchcock blonde but I digress...
As style influences go, the Hitchcock heroine must be one of the most enduring. Close to 40 years after his last movie, the images of his leading ladies live long in the memory.
Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren, Janet Leigh – he booked some of the most beautiful blondes in history to murder and be murdered.
And boy did they look good doing it.
Hitchcock himself famously said that “blondes make the best victims” but in his movies they also made fabulous clotheshorses. The late Grace Kelly is for many the favourite, having starred in three of his films, but for me it is Kim Novak bottom with James Stewart.
I had no clue what was going on in Vertigo but I knew I wanted to look like her.
The hair, the skirt suits, THAT WHITE COAT! James Stewart was obsessed with her and so was I. It is not for nothing that 55 years later Alexander McQueen named a handbag after Novak just as Hermes had done for Grace Kelly decades earlier.
On and off screen these actresses had killer style and, while I may have long since grown out of dying my hair platinum, this is one fashion trend I am more than happy to revisit.
Until The Great Gatsby comes out at least...
TO America now where the much awaited prequel to Sex and the City has been getting a bit of a mauling from critics.
Matt Zoller Seitz from New York Magazine's Vulture site called The Carrie Diaries “an inept spin-off that dishonours its source” and accused it of trying to cash in on Sex and the City.
Ever since it was first mooted, I struggled to understand how a show charting Carrie’s teen years could ever measure up to the original show itself – 16-year-old schoolgirls discussing their sex lives would be hideously inappropriate and probably illegal in most states.
From the pictures I have so far seen of Anna Sophia Robb awho stars as the young Carrie, my biggest bugbear with the show is that the clothes are too pretty to be truly eighties.
But, having only recently realised that I am now older than Carrie and co were when the original SATC series aired, it may be time to concede that The Carrie Diaries is not for me...
