HEAD, EDITH

HEAD, EDITH (1897–1981), U.S. costume designer. Head was born Edith Claire Posener to Max and Anna Posener (née Levy) in San Bernardino, California. When her mother divorced and remarried, Edith took her stepfather's surname, Spare, and adopted his Roman Catholic faith. The family moved to Los Angeles when Head was 12. She received an undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley and a master's degree in French from Stanford University in 1920. She returned to Southern California to teach at the Hollywood School for Girls. When asked to teach an art course at the school, Head signed up for night classes at the Otis Art Institute and then the Chouinard School of Art. In 1923, she married Charles Head, but the couple divorced in 1938; however, Head would use his surname for the rest of her life. Head responded to an advertisement from Paramount for a costume design artist in 1923 and won the position by borrowing designs from art school students at Chouinard. In 1927, she was appointed assistant to Travis Banton, Paramounts chief costume designer. Her first film credit as a   costume designer was for the Mae West film She Done Him Wrong (1933). In 1938, Head became the first woman to lead a studio's costume department. Barabara Stanwyck even had Head written into her contract after her deft handling of the numerous costume changes in The Lady Eve (1941). In 1945 she started making regular appearances on Art Linkletter's House Party to give fashion advice to women, which was followed by her advice books The Dress Doctor (1959) and How to Dress for Success (1967) and later a syndicated advice column. In 1946, she worked on the film Notorious, which began a 30-year collaboration with director Alfred Hitchcock. Head received her first Oscar nomination for costume design in 1948 for The Emperor Waltz; she was nominated a total of 34 times in her career, winning Oscars for The Heiress (1949), Samson and Delilah (1949), All About Eve (1950), A Place in the Sun (1951), Roman Holiday (1953), Sabrina (1954), The Facts of Life (1960), and The Sting (1973). When Paramount failed to renew her contract in 1967, Head went to Universal, where her six-decade career finally came to an end in 1981 with her 1,131st film, the Steve Martin comedy noir Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982). (Adam Wills (2nd ed.)