Adrian

Gilbert Adrian - always credited simply as "Adrian" - spent the 1930s as MGM's chief costume designer, dressing Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Jean Harlow, and above all Joan Crawford. By the time this decade opens, he's arguably the most influential fashion designer in America, even though he'd never had a label of his own. Millions of women had seen his clothes on screen, and department stores had been selling copies of them for years.

His most lasting contribution was the broad, padded shoulder. The usual story is that he built up Crawford's shoulders to balance her proportions, and it became her signature and then everyone's - it's a slightly neat origin tale, but his influence on the square-shouldered silhouette of the war years is real. When Adrian left MGM in 1941 and opened Adrian Ltd. in Beverly Hills the following year, that shoulder came with him, set into sharply cut suits that are some of the best American tailoring of the period. His suits play with the rules rather than against them: asymmetric closures, diagonal seaming, contrasting inset panels, and bold stripes cut and pieced at angles. That's a lot of visual interest from very little extra fabric, which suited the wartime restrictions perfectly.

I think Adrian is the clearest example in the whole decade of Hollywood and fashion stopping being separate worlds. He didn't adapt costume ideas for the street - he simply moved his costume sensibility into a retail salon and sold it direct. Alongside McCardell's sportswear, his work is a big part of why American fashion could stand on its own feet during the years Paris was cut off, as the rise of American fashion entry explores. He kept the business going until a heart attack in 1952 made him close it.