Sunday, March 2, 2014

That Dress!!!! Unforgettable Movie Dresses: Scarlett's Love Bird Dress

I think this will become a regular post here (as regular as irregular posts go) - unforgettable movie dresses.

My absolute number 1 movie dress obsession is Scarlett's Love Bird Dress from GONE WITH THE WIND.

Vivien Leigh as Scarlett in her beautiful Love Bird Dress


Seen only briefly and from the waist up, this is the dress Scarlett is wearing in the New Orleans honeymoon scene.

Designer Walter Plunkett designed a true fashion work of art for Scarlett and the dress was seen for just a few seconds.


Plunkett's original sketch

I have not been able to find any full length photos of Vivien Leigh in this dress. However, its beauty is not forgotten, as it appears again, years later, on the Red Carpet celebrating great cinematic costume design. (Thanks for the photo, Inge!)

There it is again!!!


I have not been able to track down what actually happened to the original. I'd love to know the fate of this beautiful dress.

7 comments:

  1. Incredible dress, practically wasted in the film -- by the way, I know the fate of this dress. I bought it and wear it to Kroger for my shopping every week! I thought it was better than my signature outfit, bathrobe and fuzzy slippers...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Aha! Can you please send a selfie of you in the dress?? Becky - you are just too funny! Thanks for stopping by to the blog that nobody knows abut!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Gorgeous! Part of the problem was that in the scene, it was about Scarlett not getting enough to eat on her honeymoon, (as you show in the clip), than the dress.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Two stories about what happened to this dress

    1. After production was completed for Gone With The Wind all of the costumes, with very few exceptions, were returned to Western Costume Company. David O. Selznick personally chose several of Scarlett's Costumes to be given as gifts...including the "New Orleans Restaurant" Costume which was given to a private girls school in Los Angeles. For years, the costume languished on a storeroom shelf, uninventoried, forgotten, and in a plain cardboard box.

    Several years passed until a student, researching the school's history, came upon an article detailing Selznick's gift of Scarlett's Costume, and many of the school's older staff and teachers were able to verify that the costume did, in fact, exist and had been put into storage for protection. But, when the storeroom was opened, and the box located, the costume was gone.


    2. It was lent to the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art and was lost twenty years after its arrival. Apparently they had it up until the 70s, and was in poor condition then. Conflicting stories with this one i guess.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi there- where is the photo from with the red carpet?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Wow - I posted that ages ago! But, it was from the 2013 Academy Award Ceremony that paid homage to fashion designers of the past.

    ReplyDelete