Robert Redford, Ralph Lauren and The Great Gatsby: Dressing the American Dream

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel of 1925, Jay Gatsby is a man who has invented himself, and his clothes are part of the invention. When Paramount released its film of the book in the spring of 1974, with Robert Redford as Gatsby, the question of who had dressed him became a small story of its own, and one that tells us much about how film costume and fashion were beginning to meet.

The production

The film was directed by Jack Clayton from a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and produced by David Merrick. Redford played Gatsby, with Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan, Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway, Bruce Dern as Tom Buchanan, and Karen Black and Lois Chiles among the cast. It opened at the end of March 1974. Reviewers were cool about the drama, but the design was widely admired, and the film's two Academy Awards went to its costumes and to Nelson Riddle's music.

Two names on the wardrobe

The costume designer of record was Theoni V. Aldredge, a Greek-born designer celebrated on Broadway. She received the Academy Award for costume design for the film at the ceremony of 1975, and a BAFTA as well.

Ralph Lauren's part was different and is more often misunderstood. Lauren had founded his business in 1967 with wide neckties, and in 1968 launched Polo menswear; by 1970 he had his own shop within Bloomingdale's and a Coty Award. His collections at the time drew on the tailoring of the 1920s and 1930s. For the film he supplied clothes for the male cast, largely from his current line of suits and sweaters, and accounts agree that he made at least one piece specifically for Redford, the pink suit that Fitzgerald gives Gatsby in the novel. Some sources describe further custom tailoring for Redford.

The division of credit caused friction. Later accounts report that Aldredge felt Lauren was receiving undue attention, and that she did not mention him in her Oscar speech. The surviving record supports both claims at once: Aldredge designed the film's costumes as a whole, and Lauren's clothes made up a significant part of what the men wore on screen.

A fashion designer on set

The episode marked a change. Lauren was not a costume designer. He was a fashion designer whose ready-to-wear collections happened to suit a period film, and the film presented his clothes to an audience far wider than his customers. It was an early instance of what would become a familiar exchange, in which a film borrows a designer's authority and the designer borrows the film's.

It also suited Lauren's own subject. His work has always been concerned with a version of American and Anglo-American life made out of tailoring, sport and country houses, a world that Fitzgerald's novel both describes and questions. In Gatsby, that world is aspired to by a man who was not born into it, which is part of why the clothes matter so much in the story.

Redford as Gatsby

Redford came to the part after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, and the costumes were seen above all on him, from pale summer suits to the pink suit. The images of 1974 fixed a picture of 1920s menswear for a generation of viewers, even though it was refracted through the tailoring and taste of the early 1970s.