Sara Ezzat – April 2021

“It’s this darn corset, it binds” this is the first line spoken by Jimmy Stewart’s character Scottie Ferguson in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). There are many corsets in the film, some seen, some present but unseen, and some notable in their absence. This is a film deeply concerned with constructions of gender, tight constricting constructions of gender, which constrict and contain the protagonist and the women in his life. Constriction is a theme through the film which frequently contrasts wide vistas with narrow alleys or tightly framed shots. Gender and social constrictions are explored throughout the film through the costuming of the characters, particularly the female characters’ clothing and also in Scottie’s costuming choices. Judy, Midge, and “Madeline” each have a distinct style moving from unstructured to highly structured and tightly cinched, from unbound to heavily corseted. With each woman Scottie has interactions based around clothing which reflects his attitude to that woman. It is my contention that structured garments in Vertigo act as a signifier for the binding, constructed gender norms of the period. I intend to show this by looking at the costumes worn by Scottie, the women and at Scottie’s interactions with the women’s clothing.

In his article A Fall from Grace: The Fragmentation of Masculine Subjectivity and the Impossibility of Femininity in Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”, Garry Leonard zeros in on one interaction between Scottie and Midge Wood in their first scene together. Midge, a fashion illustrator, is sketching a brassier. Scottie asks her what this “doohickey” is, and she explains it is a new design intended to provide uplift with no visible means of support. She goes on to say it was designed by a male engineer and Scottie is intrigued. For Leonard the significance of Scottie’s interest in a woman’s undergarment designed by a man is indicative of his fascination with the presentation of womanhood as construct or a masquerade. However, he needs to believe that masquerade is genuine, he wants it to have no visible means of support, just like the brassier (Leonard 278-279). Thus, in one piece of clothing we begin to see the contrast of 1950s female clothing, it required a highly constructed femininity and yet must appear natural. The construction must be unseen.

Pam Cook argues the reasons for this heavily constructed femininity lie in the changing ever shifting social and gender norms in the post war period. Heavily constructed looks requiring support garments and crinolines were part of an attempt to reimpose ridged gender mores that had loosened during the war years in order to reassure returning servicemen of a return to normality (205-208). Another influence Cook cites is the Kinsey reports on the American male in 1948 and female in 1953 which exposed that many women were not sexually satisfied, leading to a crisis of insecurity in men (210). 

We can see these insecurities at play in Scottie; he is not returning from war, but he is recovering from an injury sustained in his job as a policeman, an apt allegory for a returning vet. He is suffering a crisis of insecurity because of his incapacitating acrophobia which prevents him from working and taking full agency in the world. He is further emasculated in the first scene with Midge by the unseen, binding presence of his medically prescribed corset. Midge’s teasing response that the garment has “no two way stretch? How unchic” furthers the already feminizing implications of the corset by comparing it to the popular two way stretch girdles (Says et al ¶11). In this one scene we have two corsets; unseen binding, emasculating one Scottie is forced to wear and the seen one which presents an idea of womanhood as constructed by a man which fascinates him and foreshadows his obsession with Madeline.

Scottie is not alone in this scene however, and it before looking at the woman who comes to obsess him it is worth looking at the woman he has rejected. Midge is not an unfeminine woman by 1950s standards, but her femininity is more domestic than that presented by Madeline. She wears simple cotton button up blouses and either an A line or a pencil skirt. She is an independent, working woman and her wardrobe is stylish, but practical. Her looks have some structure but not to the extent that we see with the Madeline persona. For example, is her grey coat which is a similar shade to the grey suit which will define Madeline, but it is a trapeze cut. This style which was on trend in 1958 (Tortora & Eubank 444), but one which deemphasises the expected feminine silhouette which the grey suit highlights. Midge is positioned as a motherly presence in Scottie’s life, frequently speaking to him in a motherly or scolding tone. She says he “is a big boy” when he asks what the corset she is drawing does, and holds him when he falls. Her motherly nature is hinted at in her costuming with mother of pearl buttons on her blouse. There is another subtle reminder of Midge’s matronliness, when Scottie meets the old landlady of Carlotta Valdes’s apartment, she has the same hair style and glasses as Midge. Thus, Midge is constructed as feminine but not the ideal Scottie craves. Not only that but she is surrounded by images of fashion, of the industry and artistry that produces the image of femininity he needs to believe is natural and unproduced (Cook 215).

The construction of Madeline that Scottie is presented with does appear to be that natural perfection. Hitchcock wanted her to look as if she had stepped out of a fog (Fawell 275). She does look ghostlike with her blonde up do and grey suit. All of designer Edith Head’s colour choices for Madeline enhance the paleness of her complexion adding to this ghostlike quality (Laverty ¶5). The suit is grey wool with a knife pleat pencil skirt and single-breasted jacket. The suit is extremely fitted to actress Kim Novak’s body indicating the unseen presences of constricting undergarments. Madeline is therefore constructed in the image of feminine beauty and the mechanisms of that construction are hidden.

While Scottie may have been insecure in Midge’s self-assured presence, he shows little insecurity with Madeline Elster. After rescuing her from apparent drowning he takes the liberty of bringing her to his own home and removing her clothes. The clothing removal is unseen but indicates that he must have confronted the support garments that construct the artifice of her perfection. In the scene that follows he appears less insecure than he has previously, and it is notable that this is the first time the audience sees him out of suit. Until this point Scottie has been dressed in well fitted two-piece suits with his tie held perfectly in place with a tie pin and a pin at his collar. Thus, it is not only the women who are constricted in their clothing, but the men too. Scotties is comfortable shedding some of his constraints when he has first removed all of hers including the pins securing her hair. In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey discusses how cinema of the time presented female characters as passive objects and males as active subjects (Mulvey 272). In this scene we see Scottie as a comfortable subject when the woman has been reduced to a passive object he can disrobe. He can remove his suit, a constructed icon of masculinity, only when she is virtually naked. Scottie again loses his suit after Madeline’s death when he is incapacitated in the hospital. Just as he was feminized at the beginning of film by the presence of his binding corset, he is now emasculated by the lack of his suit and has become the passive object.

When Scottie is restored to his suit and his active agency, he meets Judy Barton who the audience soon learns had been masquerading as Madeline. Judy’s wardrobe is unlike Midge’ or Madeline’s. We are introduced to her in a green sweater dress with a polka dot Peter Pan collar. The polka dots and collar present a youthful appearance which is enhanced by brunette curls and brassy jewelry. Not only is this look unstructured, but Novak went braless when filming (Laverty ¶12). We have moved from Scottie’s unseen binding corset, to Midge’s corset with invisible support, to Madeline’s unseen but necessary underpinnings, and now Judy without any figure constructing garments at all. Judy does not behave like the expected ideal of 1950s womanhood. She is brash and brassy and makes no pretense of being innocent and pure as she did as Madeline. The contrast between Judy and Madeline is further illustrated in one small piece of jewellery worn when presented to the audience. Judy wears a gold and green rabbit pin as herself and in the role of Madeline she wears a silver and white hummingbird pin. The rabbit has associations with the earth, with youth, and embodied sexuality. The hummingbird is a creature of the air, one that is barely glimpsed and cannot be caught. Judy presents an earth, sensual look like her animal counterpart, it is feminine, but not in the passive, ghostlike way Madeline presented which fascinated Scottie.

There are a series of scenes in which the unstructured Judy is made over into Scottie’s image of Madeline. At each store it is Scottie who chooses the garments and orders exactly what he wants. Judy resists but allows him to talk her round. With each piece of the reconstruction of Madeline Scottie appears to become secure. He begins wearing his tie pins again, adding to the structure of his own look. The final piece for Judy to become Madeline is for her to pin her now blonde hair into a chignon at her neck like the painting of Carlotta Valdes. The spiral chignon is a defining image of the film a highly constrained and constructed look, a woman’s long blond hair wound tight at the base of her neck. Without it, Judy’s Madeline costume would not be complete, but with is Scottie is satisfied. He has successfully moulded the unbound, unstructured Judy into the passive object of his ideal of Madeline and in doing so asserted himself as the active subject.

It is a costume piece that undoes his security as he is confronted with Judy wearing a necklace which had belonged to Madeline. In their final costumes, Scottie is in a suit but has lost his tie pins. His tie is askew, and his collar is coming undone as he loses his composure. Judy wears a black chiffon dress that is heavily cinched at the waist with a sweetheart neckline. The bodice is heavily constructed, but the fabric is loose and flowing, if give the appearance of looseness while being in reality as binding as the corset Scottie complained of at the beginning of the film.

Vertigo is a film about trapped people, trapped in spaces, in their own minds, and in societal and gender roles. That trapped feeling is illustrated throughout the film through the use of constrictive clothing and undergarments. Each character has a specific costume look that illustrates their own relationship to the gender norms of the period and their roles in the story. There is Midge with her mother of pearl buttons and big, matronly glasses, trying to be both her own woman and what Scottie needs. There is Judy in her sweater dresses, who took Madeline’s grey suited role twice, once for money and once for love. Hoping she can retain herself in Madeline’s clothes and win Scottie’s love. Finally, there is Scottie, caught in a frantic, fruitless attempt to get out of that binding corset by imposing it on the women in his life. 

Works Cited

Cook, P. (2004). “Fashion and sexual display in 1950s Hollywood.” Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/10.4324/9780203337820

Fawell, John. “Fashion Dreams: Hitchcock, Women, and Lisa Fremont.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 4, 2000, pp. 274-283. ProQuest, http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/scholarly-journals/fashion-dreams-hitchcock-women-lisa-fremont/docview/226991808/se-2?accountid=14846.

Hitchcock, Alfred, director. Vertigo. Paramount Pictures Corp., 1958.

Leonard, Garry M. “A Fall from Grace: The Fragmentation of Masculine Subjectivity and the Impossibility of Femininity in Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”.” American Imago, vol. 47, no. 3, 1990, pp. 271. ProQuest, http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/scholarly-journals/fall-grace-fragmentation-masculine-subjectivity/docview/1289752603/se-2?accountid=14846

Laverty, Christopher. “Costume & Identity in Hitchcock’s Vertigo.” Clothes on Film, 10 Apr. 2012, clothesonfilm.com/costume-identity-in-hitchcocks-vertigo/

Says, Claudia, et al. “1950s Lingerie History – Bras, Girdles, Slips, Panties, Garters.” Vintage Dancer, vintagedancer.com/1950s/1950s-lingerie/.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema.” The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance, edited by Lizbeth Goodman and De Jane Gay, Routledge, London, 1998, pp. 270–275.

Tortora, Phyllis G., and Keith Eubank. Survey of Historic Costume: a History of Western Dress. Fairchild Publications, 2008.