Marion Davies — Beating the Cost of Clothes (1921) 🇺🇸

Clothes — the eternal question. Ask any woman in any station of life, of any profession — from the dark-skinned, white-toothed African with rings through her nose to the smartest tailored woman stepping out of her brougham on any boulevard. Ask her her ideas of dress and she will respond.

by Marion Davies

The problem today, however, among civilized nations in regard to women’s clothes is not so much the kind but the cost. And how to dress and still eat and sleep is among the paramount questions of the hour.

No one in the world today has to buy or to wear so many clothes as the motion picture actress. In the making of a picture it is almost as big an element as the story itself, or the direction or the supporting cast. And for each picture, the cost of the star’s clothes goes way up in the thousands.

How do I lower this figure? By designing and making myself fully one-half of the clothes I wear not only in pictures but also in my private life.

I’ve always had a love for designing so I plan every costume, even those I don’t have time to make. I actually do all the work on the simplest of these as well as the more simple of my frocks for home and street wear. Evenings after my day’s work at the studio, one usually can find me in my little sewing room in my home in Riverside Drive, cutting cloth, laying patterns or with my head buried in the latest fashion magazines or some book on ancient costumes which I have borrowed from the library.

Kneeling before the dummy I don’t believe I make a very pretty picture. For one thing my mouth, usually, is stuffed with pins.

So many letters have been sent me about mv dresses — I just love to dress up, don’t you — that this season I’ve made a series of twelve original designs for which I drew the sketches myself, mapped the patterns and wrote the instructions. These have been published in 150 newspapers throughout the country and I’ve gotten thousands of letters from persons who have followed my instructions and made the dresses. So they can’t be so bad, can they?

If you’d like, I’ll be glad to send you some of my designs. Just write to the editor of this magazine, and he’ll see that my own representative sends you several — And you’re very welcome to them. Clothes cost us girls too much. We’ve just got to get together and do something about it.

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• To the left is Marion at work
• Here’s Marion in a dress she made

Collection: Pantomime Magazine, September 1921