On screen, the character who best represents the fashion spirit of our moment is not a woman of our time or even the recent past but the mid-century aesthetic conservative Felicia Montealegre Bernstein, portrayed by Carey Mulligan in Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic, “Maestro.”
“She is always pulled together, well tailored,” says Mark Bridges, the film’s costume designer (who also won Academy Awards for costuming two other 20th-century period films, 2011’s “The Artist” and 2017’s “Phantom Thread”). Every pair of shoes was dyed to match each of her ensembles: “That’s how she lived.” Bridges mixed genuine vintage pieces such as an Adolfo jacket with items designed by him, like a caped blue gown, with the throughline that “they all have the pedigree of the woman.”
That sense of pedigree — not about breeding, per se, but her standing as a public figure and partner to an artistic celebrity — is what defines the character’s style, and perhaps many of the heroines from that era, from Hitchcock blondes to Betty Draper to the socialites who once populated Women’s Wear Daily. “It is clothing as armor,” Bridges says. “I always think, I couldn’t possibly get any bad news if I look like a million bucks!” (Spoiler alert: Mrs. Bernstein does, indeed, get quite a lot of bad news.)
During the pandemic, the appetite for mid-century gustatory pleasures such as martinis and caviar served in old-fashioned bars spiked. Now, the lust for the glamour of the 1950s and ’60s, and even its remaining wisps in the ’70s, has moved to fashion and style.
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Pictures from the set of “Maria,” in which Angelina Jolie dons square granny glasses to play the mercurial opera singer Maria Callas complete with glorious pompadour, have inspired buzz and virality, although the film does not yet have a release date.
More immediately, “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,” which debuts Jan. 31 on FX, focuses on writer Truman Capote’s dazzling courtship of — and then expulsion from — his “Swans,” society women such as Babe Paley and Lee Radziwill who lunched weekly throughout the ’60s and ’70s in a style of elegance honed in the 1950s. (They were also regular clients of Kenneth, who really was the Svengali of the era — he also made Montealegre Bernstein a wig when she was ill with cancer, Bridges says).
That show, featuring Naomi Watts, Diane Lane, Chloë Sevigny and others gasping and fuming over “the Verdura!” (an American luxury jewelry company known for its chunky gold chain bracelets) and emeralds procured by cheating husbands seeking forgiveness, is like Old Money TikTok on a “Valley of the Dolls”-inspired cocktail of drugs. Town & Country magazine put the stars on the cover of its October issue, months before the show even had a release date.
Like smoke in a crowded hotel lobby bar, it seems Kenneth, divas and other mid-century mores are in the atmosphere. Pantone proclaimed the color of the year Peach Fuzz — a tone that “captures our desire to nurture ourselves and others,” the company said, but which was also a popular color for bathrooms and kitchen appliances in the 1950s and 1960s, intended as a sweet note of domestic optimism after the traumas of wartime. Trend forecasters aren’t the only ones nostalgic for the days of PTSD: AMC Networks says it has seen a healthy uptick in viewers of “Mad Men,” Matthew Weiner’s Hitchcockian drama about advertising executives in the 1960s, since July of 2023.
This isn’t to say that everyone is going to put boxy handbags in the crooks of their arms and gloves on their hands (although brands from the Row to Simone Rocha are churning out just such accessories).
But Jalil Johnson might. Johnson, a 25-year-old fashion coordinator at Saks, has knowledge of all the many splendors runway fashion cooks up, but lately he’s gravitated toward Jackie O as his primary style inspiration, wearing kitten heels, boxy jackets and hats. He describes his style as “ladies-who-lunch garb.”
Why would a Gen Z fashion influencer embrace an era of such conformity? “Glamour originates with an idea of magic,” he says. “It’s like a magical thing. Glamour is like a facade. So yes, Jackie was able to wear herself, wear beautiful, beautiful dresses and carry herself in a certain way, but she’s also created a myth that’s stood the test of time. She elevated the idea of the American myth, and she held it in such a sincere way.”
Sounds Freudian. “Oui, oui,” he concurs.
These days, history is often viewed as an opportunity to either rewrite through rose-colored glasses — make American “great” “again,” whatever great or again mean to you — or to explore what and who has been left out or misunderstood. The resurgence of glamour, that of Mrs. Kennedy, Capote’s Swans and various mid-century divas is just as ambitious in execution and yet feels much less contentious.
Of course, while designers are doing so many things at once these days, it’s hard to glean anything from their output. But at Prada, whose co-creative director Miuccia Prada is basically the only designer who still sends things down the runway that coalesce into actual real-world trends, the kaleidoscopic strings of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” provided the soundtrack for the Spring 2024 collection trickling into stores now. (The brand also used the music in its ad campaign.) That collection — like many of Prada’s best — mish-mashed styles and attitudes from the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, but the feeling was an overwhelming sense of poise mixed with anxiety, even paranoia. (Sound familiar?)
Mrs. Prada and her co-creative director, Raf Simons, insisted backstage that this collection was about nothing more than beautiful clothes, with no intellectual underpinning. But while this cigar may indeed be just a cigar, it’s hard not to see the lust for real clothes — for shapes and fabrics that are sturdy and present, far from the fleeting polyesters of fast fashion — as a snarl against the modern world. Back when the sounds of a daily life well lived were the crisp hiss of a sharp wool skirt suit, the husky swish of a taffeta cocktail dress — so foreign to the noise and mania of today.
That period of conservatism and conformity seems like a balm now — not merely as escapism or fantasy but a means to make sense of what seems irrational. That era’s obsession with theories and mythologies is a way to create meaning where it seems there is little.
“I love the way people used to dress,” as Bridges says. “I love that there used to be rules.”