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With the sad news of the passing of Shirley Temple (Black) in today’s New York Times<\/em>,<\/a> I thought it would be appropriate to remember some of her contributions to film costume, fashion, and popular culture.<\/p>\n Shirley Temple was the most famous child star of the 1930s. She made her film debut at the age of five in 1934 and by the following year she was making $1,000 a week from merchandising tie-ins alone (Cook 2004 and Ewing 1977). Mothers everywhere dressed their children in Temple-imitating clothing.<\/p>\n Temple merchandise included dresses, coats, snow suits, raincoats, toys and accessories (Cook 2004). Sears and Roebuck featured a line of Shirley Temple fashions inspired by her film costumes, including short dresses with matching panties and\u00a0 bolero-style dresses, winter snow suits, hats and accessories.\u00a0 As the 1935-36 Sears catalog copy stated:\u00a0 \u201cShirley and her cute clothes have stolen everyone\u2019s heart; no wonder every little girl wants to wear the same styles.\u201d The earned royalties from Temple\u2019s licensed merchandise exceeded $100,000 in 1935; and exceeded\u00a0 $200,000 in 1936.<\/p>\n However, it was the Shirley Temple \u201clook\u201d that most mothers were after. Her iconic hairstyle of all-over-ringlets was imitated everywhere and is still recognized today. Her style of dress, frequently identified with toddler-hood, included simple frocks made to accentuate a toddler\u2019s belly, with puffed sleeves and hemlines that were consistently 19 inches from the floor (Cook 2004). These were trimmed with simple and unobtrusive decorative elements, such as embroidered or appliqu\u00e9d, and lace edged hemlines and collars. Interestingly, conflicting fan magazines reports suggest that Temple was both disinterested in her film costumes and insistent that they be of a consistent design.<\/p>\n In an issue of Hollywood<\/em> from 1936, writer Sally Martin explains the challenges of costuming the child star:<\/p>\n One day, a long time ago when Shirley\u2019s career was in its infancy, Rene Hubert, then 20th<\/sup> Century-Fox designer, was discussing Shirley\u2019s clothes with Mrs. Temple. He made the remark that clothes for small girls should reach just to their fingertips. Shirley overheard and to this day insists that her dresses reach the specified length and not vary a sixteenth of an inch one way or the other. Costuming Shirley Temple presents a real problem to the studio designers. Accustomed to competing and excelling the world\u2019s greatest modistes in creating styles for stars on the screen, the stylists never, before the advent of Shirley, had tackled the problem of clothes for a child star.\u201d (Martin. 1936, 40)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Yet, according to Marion Blackford, writer for Screenplay<\/em> in an article that same year:<\/p>\n In Shirley Temple\u2019s home, in the wardrobes and clothes-closets of her own room, there hang well over a hundred<\/em> different dresses and outfits! They\u2019re all hers. . . Shirley could go a quarter of a year wearing a different outfit every day from her own wardrobe, and never once in that length of time would she wear the same dress twice! Yet\u2014and here\u2019s one of the strangest things of all about this most amazing little girl in the world today!\u2014Shirley Temple is probably the most UN-\u2018clothes-conscious\u2019 child in all Hollywood. To her, clothes are just \u2018part of the job.\u2019 With stoic patience, she stands hour after hour in the studio fitting rooms, enduring the interminable putting-on-and-taking-off, squeeking faintly now and then at a mis-aimed pinthrust that punctures her chubby legs, turning this way and that, when and as bidden, co-operating with all the clothes-knowledge of a trained actress. But as for enjoying those clothes herself? \u2013 why it\u2019s a fact that Shirley doesn\u2019t even look at herself in the mirror when she\u2019s trying on new things.\u201d (33)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The article goes on to provide details from William Lambert, 20th Century-Fox’s house costume designer at the time, who \u201cfitted\u00a0 Shirley\u2019s clothes for her when she first became a screen actress” (54):<\/p>\n \u2018I never,\u2019 says Lambert, \u2018seen an actress, of any age, so utterly uninterested in clothes as Shirley! And that, especially for a child, is unusual. From the very outset, her interest in what we were preparing for her to wear was purely perfunctory, mechanical. She\u2019d come into the fitting room willingly enough, and she\u2019d stand and be fitted with admirable patience, for a child. But do you think she ever took a look at herself in the mirror? NO, sir\u2014not one glimpse!! She\u2019d stand there in her little pink undies, with her chubby legs straight and firm. She\u2019d let us twist her and dress her and stick pins in her. When we had the dress on, she\u2019d still stand there, and never once look into the glass. . . Still without a look in the glass, she\u2019d hurry back and out of the dress; would get into her own things\u2014and make a bee-line for my drawing board and the colors I use when designing clothes. That was what she was patiently waiting for all the time. Being fitted was work\u2014but drawing pictures was play, and that was what was on her mind. She\u2019d grab my paints (oh, how I loved<\/em> that!) and she\u2019d draw picture after picture of Jimmy Durante. Funny part of it was, it looked like Jimmy. And she\u2019d paint his big nose all nice and pink and then she\u2019d be happy. Clothes?\u2014they were forgotten. And say, let me tell you you couldn\u2019t tell her anything about drawing, either. I\u2019d try to make a suggestion or two. She\u2019d just hold up her pink-nosed Jimmy Durante beside one of my style sketches. . .\u201d (54)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The article goes on to explain, that while she may seem disinterested, she still has her opinion on her look in a film, and that she had definite preferences:<\/p>\n Don\u2019t understand from Shirley\u2019s fitting-room attitude that she doesn\u2019t know what\u2019s going on. Far from that! For instance: All her dresses are made 19 inches from the floor. Shirley has learned to feel the length. She knows by hanging her arms and leaning over just where the right length comes. She never has to look in a mirror\u2014when they fit a dress, she hangs her arms and leans. \u2018No\u2014too long,\u2019 she says. And Snip, off must come an inch or so. . . . She has one definite clothes-quirk: Everything has to match in color in whatever ensemble she\u2019s wearing. It may make no difference to the camera, but even her socktops must match, precisely, the hue and shade of the dress she\u2019s wearing. No sloppy work for Shirley. Everything has to be just so-so, too. IF there\u2019s a bow on her dress, not a camera may turn on her until the ends and the loops are exactly even, to the quarter-inch.\u201d (54)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Regardless, of her level of involvement in the creation of her image, Shirley Temple’s iconic style left a imprint on children\u2019s fashion of the 1930.<\/p>\n In the 1940s, Temple helped to define the new “teenager” demographic, and portrayed an impressionable teenage girl in the film, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer<\/em> (1947), among others. More than that, her iconic look has remained one often imitated in popular culture.<\/p>\n Below is an absolutely perfect video of Temple from the 1934 film, Baby Take a Bow <\/em>(costumes by Royer), which exemplifies both Temple’s sartorial and film styles. Enjoy – and thank you Ms. Black for leaving with such a voluminous collection of films to enjoy:<\/p>\n<\/a>
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