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Above: Calendar Girl (1947) / Pearl of the South Pacific (1955) / Frontier Marshal (1939)

Last October, my co-editor David Phelps and I released our first self-published e-book out into the world. It was entitled William A. Wellman: A Dossier, and after the somewhat life-changing experience we had discovering Wellman's films during his Film Forum retrospective, we were happy to have discovered a format that would allow us to curate, create, and share an anthology of criticism centered on Wellman's work.

After the release, David and I found ourselves contemplating what to do next, and our thoughts soon brought us back to a night when we screened Allan Dwan's Cattle Queen of Montana (1954), a Western unlike any Western we had seen. A movie that on paper is a simple genre exercise about a vengeful woman trying to regain her land and cattle but in practice is about how different people and events fill...

In light of Prada, Tiffany & Co., and Brooks Brothers, all producing Great Gatsby inspired lines and the much publicised drama between fashion and costume designers, we should consider the influence that costume has over fashion. The alliance between costume and fashion designers has been both beneficial and contentious. Fashion does have a much longer history than film costume design, but since the beginning of moving pictures, both industries have nurtured an intimate relationship.

In the advent of cinema, fashion was placed centre stage in filmed fashion shows. These fashion shorts slowly evolved from runway shows via the introduction of a stories surrounding the garments (Bruzzi, 4). Early costume design was influenced by current runway fashions, such as Vionnet’s signature bias cut gowns hugging actress’ bodies on the big screen. Starting in the 1930s, costume design and current fashion slowly began to pull away from each other. This changed when MGM...