What Will the Men Wear? Programme Notes

What Will the Men Wear? explores the star power of three of Hollywood’s most subversive female stars of the 1930s. Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Katharine Hepburn were trailblazing screen presences who raised eyebrows by adopting typically “male” attire on and off screen. All three stars challenged the traditional heteronormative roles, behaviour, dress and expressions of women at the time and faced an ominous backlash as the Hay’s Code, which aimed to censor what was seen as Hollywood’s vices, crept into place in 1934. A panic swept across the nation. If women wear trousers, what will the men wear?

Inspired by the glamour of these stars, women wearing trousers enjoyed a brief trend associated with European chicness and sophistication in the early 1930s before a moral panic and increasing censorship in Hollywood caused the idea of women in suits and trousers to be regarded as a threat, a sexual deviation, and an un-American act. Jack Warner of Warner Bros went as far as issuing a statement in to the Los Angeles Times in 1933 declaring that they had always refrained from showing their female stars in “male” clothing and that their female stars had been “warned” that they must “stay feminine”.

In 1930 when Marlene Dietrich stepped onto the stage as cabaret performer Amy Jolly wearing a tuxedo in Morocco, she ushered a new kind of European glamour and exoticism into Hollywood talkies. At the time, the publicity for the film favoured stills that showed off her bare legs rather than the tuxedo and there is no mention of the kiss she plants on the mouth of a bashful woman in the audience. But critics, historians and film fans have focused on the queer significance of Dietrich’s suits and swagger for years since. Similarly, Queen Christina, a film where Garbo plays a self-declared bachelor who sports men’s clothes and has a female lover, has a significant place in the queer film canon.

In the early 30s, when fan magazines and trade journals wrote about Garbo, Dietrich, and Hepburn, a mention of their choice of clothing was never far away. Magazines were full of speculation about the way the stars dressed, often using coded language which fuelled rumours about their sexualities which endured throughout each of their careers. What once made the stars unique, exotic, and glamourous was soon after scorned as “mannish”, unnatural, and othering.

To save their box office value, both Garbo and Dietrich were subject to changes in their star personas after 1933. One article in Photoplay displays a publicity still from The Song of Songs (1933) in which Dietrich wears a more typically feminine costume with the caption “Miss Dietrich seems to be enjoying those feminine frills after her famous orgy of trousers”. Likewise, a “new” Greta Garbo was branded in the fan magazine Motion Picture ahead of her starring role in Anna Karenina (1935). A before and after shot emphasised her delicately styled hair in favour of a bob and 19th century dress in line with the period setting of the film. Both stars had careers after this (although Garbo’s was cut the shortest with her retiring in 1941), but neither of them were allowed the same degree of expression that has become so iconic to queer film viewers after these earlier performances.

Around the same time Katharine Hepburn fuelled outrage with performances in films such as Sylvia Scarlett (1935), where she appears in full drag, disguised as a boy for much of the film. The film was a financial and critical failure at the time but viewed through a contemporary lens deals with gender identity and dress in a fascinating way. After this flop, The Philadelphia Story (1941) was one of several comebacks that Hepburn made in her acting career.

Although less obviously queer (Morocco and Queen Christina both famously show a lesbian kiss), The Philadelphia Story is nonetheless an example of a Hollywood film which invites a

reading between its campy lines. Director George Cukor, was a frequent collaborator with Katharine Hepburn and one of classical Hollywood’s most well-known gay directors. His often camp aesthetic and tone comes through in The Philadelphia Story which depicts a comedic romp between its three stars (Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart) whose sexualities have all been subject to close speculation over the years. Despite being made under the full enforcement of the Hay’s code (unlike the earlier Morocco and Queen Christina), The Philadelphia Story subtly deviates away from traditional heteronormative and monogamous structures in Hepburn’s performance of gender and the character dynamics (as long as there is heterosexual marriage at the end!).

Dress has always been a way to express individual identities and as a form of communication. The image of women wearing trousers, suits and tuxedos endures as a code of defiance towards sexual and gendered norms. Even at a time when there is more overt queer representation in film, there is much delight to be had in revisiting these classical films to find hints through gestures and dress that there were always people like us.