One January morning in 2012, Deborah Nadoolman Landis waited at the Temple Tube station in London with her passport in her hand and no idea where she was going.
Landis, a costume designer who was curating a show for London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, had received a mysterious call from a collector about a special piece, with instructions. A representative for the collector met Landis and led her into the belly of a private bank, where guards provided a pair of purple latex gloves and a cardboard box tied with a string.
“I felt like Howard Carter at the tomb of King Tut,” said Landis, who created the costumes for “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Coming to America” and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video.
Inside the box, she found an unassuming cotton garment from the most celebrated couture workroom in Hollywood history — the white and blue gingham pinafore that MGM costume designer Adrian created for Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz.”
“I wasn’t really affected until I turned it inside out, that’s when the tears started flowing,” Landis said, recalling the moment. “The dress validated everything in my life, everything I understood about costuming, what our role is.”
Dorothy’s pinafore would become a key part of “Hollywood Costume,” a show exploring the central role of costume design in film that went on to break attendance records at the V&A, drawing 251,000 people to the design museum in a 12-week period in 2012 and 2013.
An expanded version of the exhibition, including five pieces from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences’ own collection, opened Thursday at the site of the future Academy Museum in Los Angeles’ historic Wilshire May Co. building and will run until March 2. It’s the first exhibit at the new academy museum site — and the subject is surprisingly provocative and involved.
The exhibition, which features 150 costumes, including Marilyn Monroe’s billowy dress from “The Seven Year Itch,” John Wayne’s leather holster from “The Searchers” and Darth Vader’s black cape from “The Empire Strikes Back,” is unusual in its scale — not since a 1974 show Diana Vreeland curated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has such a collection been assembled.
“The exhibit is not just about pretty clothes,” said costume designer Deborah Scott, who has two pieces in the show, the cream-colored suit and purple hat Kate Winslet wore in “Titanic” and a woven necklace worn by a Na’vi character in “Avatar.” “It’s about how we as designers make a film character become a real person.”
“Hollywood Costume” takes up most of the ground floor of the Art Deco building; with architect Renzo Piano soon to break ground on an ambitious and somewhat controversial addition for the museum, the show’s designers had the freedom to break walls and create them as needed. Visitors enter from a plaza that is shared with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and step into a theaterlike experience, with curtains and an overture playing on speakers.
With a three-act narrative structure, prodigious use of video projection and a specially commissioned score, the show is cinematic not just in its roots but also in its presentation. Instead of traditional object labels, the text around the costumes is presented on screenplay pages. Costumes from classic films are mixed with items from newer ones, even — gasp! — comic book movies. The exhibition is meant to be much more than just an exercise in nostalgia.
It was the V&A that organized and put up the initial budget for “Hollywood Costume,” but the expanded show is a peek into the kind of exhibition the long-gestating Academy Museum might mount when it finally opens in 2017.
Some of the most valuable pieces in the show include Monroe’s “Seven Year Itch” dress, which sold at auction for $4.6 million in 2011, and Dorothy’s ruby slippers, which the film academy purchased for an undisclosed price but which are believed to be worth $2 million to $3 million.
The academy, which has raised more than two-thirds of the $300 million needed for its museum, is using the exhibition as a fundraising carrot, offering perks like a curator-led private tour and tickets to the opening reception in exchange for large gifts. (Though the new film museum is part of the larger LACMA campus, the costume exhibit is purely an academy show.)
