The Style of 42nd Street
Finding Feminist Subversion in The Unhinged Ridiculousness of the Film’s Costume Design
When we talk about old Hollywood glamour, it is often an amalgamation of trends which spanned decades — Finger waved hair, fur shawls, red lips, delicate feathers. But the musical film fashion of the early 1930s seemed to transcend this notion of elegance. Rather, it’s grotesquely beautiful, absorbing the textures of luxury in contrasting and dramatic ways — The fur coats, the draping sheen of silk, perfectly pinned hats. Practicality seemed less important than aesthetic dominance.
This construction of glamour was of course in direct contrast to the profound struggles of everyday Americans during the Great Depression. This context makes the already over-the-top costume design of this era’s musicals appear even more out of touch, doubling down on the campiness. This leaves us with the fashion of 42nd Street (1933), a movie whose costumes I’ve recently obsessed over for how they constructed a lampooned femininity.
42nd Street was actress Ruby Keeler’s film debut. Keeler defined the ingenue aesthetic. Her face carried a bashful roundness, and her voice was innocent. And as the star of 42nd Street, her costumes were delightfully extravagant.
She first appears in a tailored but otherwise ordinary blazer. But, my favorite outfit of Keeler’s comes during the first day of the show’s rehearsals. She shows up resembling Alpine Yodeler. The V-neckline of her top swerves in ruffles, with sleeves so absurdly round they look inflated with helium. The cutesy-buttoned lederhosen border naivety and coquettishness.
Later in the film’s title song, Keeler’s puff sleeve silhouette becomes even more outrageous. The sleeves are polka-dotted tule donuts attached to a black shiny-satin bodysuit. The tearaway skirt is embellished with Minnie Mouse size buttons. Her hat again seems to draw inspiration from the alpine with a feather-festooned fedora. Together, the textures and patterns create a visual cacophony that somehow works.
When Ginger Rodgers as Annie first enters in 42nd Street, her curled hair is tucked under a felt hat. She is cocooned in plaid tweed and a bow tie. It feels like a Sherlock Holmes cosplay, replacing the magnifying glass with a monocle and the pipe with Pekingese puppy.
Every fashion decision in 42nd Street is charmingly over-the-top, even the short scenes. Una Merkel’s character first appears in a perfectly coordinated plaid ensemble. Merkel and Roger’s silk pajamas dotted with lace ooze a feminine luxury made casual by half-eaten bananas and apples. The ruffles of Keeler’s gown she wears to a party resemble a lampshade. The fur bikini costumes in “I’m Young and Healthy” look like the precursor to Bjork’s infamous swan dress at the 2001 Academy Awards.
Much of the costume design in 42nd Street, and in any Busby Berkeley film, was designed with the male gaze in mind. Berkley’s kaleidoscopic choreography made labyrinths out of legs and collages out of costumes. As film critic Laura Mulvey has theorized, women in early film are portrayed with “voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent her threat.”
Orry Kelly was the costume designer for 42nd Street. Kelly, whose IMDb picture features him in a pin-striped suit holding the leash of a fully grown cheetah, would work on the sets of a number for Hollywood classics from Casablanca (1942) to Some Like It Hot (1959). He was also a gay man.
His work in 42nd Street, though seemingly promiscuous in the costuming of women, also demonstrates the role camp as a strategy of subversion. As Susan Sontag has written in her classic essay Notes on Camp, “Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste…The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating.”
The style of 42nd Street seems to parody heteronormative attraction and the male gaze towards women. Keeler, Rodgers and the other actresses of 42nd Street become a sexualized display. But it’s exactly these attempts to relegate the woman to spectacle and drown her in the poofs of unnecessary tool and the constant exposure of legs, that make her even more powerful. Their costuming becomes part of a subversive joke of what defines the ideal and attractive woman, a joke that cisgender, heterosexual men of the era weren’t invited to understand.
