On the Cultural Impact of Edith Head: A Study

She Thinks She's Edith Head by They Might Be Giants, examined as a peer-reviewed study on fashion, identity, and also Helen Gurley Brown.

Proceedings of the Mink Car Center for the Study of American Iconoclasm

On the Cultural Impact to Fashion, Celebrity, and Iconoclasty of Edith Head, with a Comparative Analysis of the Parallel Influence of Helen Gurley Brown, and a Brief Examination of the Psychological Phenomenon Wherein an Individual Comes to Believe, That She Is One or the Other

Chase Roper

Mink Car Center for the Study of American Iconoclasm, Tacoma, Washington

Vol. XIV, No. 2 · Received March 1999 · Accepted (provisionally) April 1999

Abstract

This paper examines the lasting cultural footprint of Edith Head (1897–1981), eight-time Academy Award–winning costume designer, and Helen Gurley Brown (1922–2012), editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine (1965–1997), with particular attention to the conditions under which a civilian subject (here designated “the New Wave fan”) might come to identify so completely with either figure as to adopt their speech patterns, mannerisms, and general worldview. The accent in her speech she did not have growing up? We propose that this is significant.

Keywords: fashion iconoclasm, celebrity identity, accent acquisition, Helen Gurley Brown, Edith Head, costuming, self-reinvention, New Wave

I. Back in High School I Knew a Girl: A Literature Review

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The phenomenon of “normies” identifying with cultural icons is not new. The history of Western celebrity has always produced its apostles. Individuals who, through sustained exposure to a sufficiently compelling public persona, begin to internalize that persona as their own.¹ What distinguishes the case under present examination is the specificity of the figures selected for emulation, and the degree to which the subject commits.

Edith Head requires little introduction to scholars of this newsletter, though she will receive one anyway, as is customary. Born Edith Claire Posener in 1897 in San Bernardino, California, Head rose to become the most decorated costume designer in the history of the Academy Awards, earning eight Oscars across a career that spanned five decades and encompassed work on films ranging from She Done Him Wrong (1933) to Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982).² Her signature aesthetic consisting of severe bun, oversized tinted glasses, and precise tailoring was itself a kind of costume. A public-facing persona maintained with the same rigor she applied to the wardrobes of Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, and Barbara Stanwyck.

Helen Gurley Brown is, in the estimation of this author, some other cultural figure we don't know a lot about.³

II. Not Too Simple and Not Too Kind: A Character Study of the Subject

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The subject of this analysis (referred to hereafter as "the New Wave fan," in deference to her origin story) was observed over a period of years by a male peer who knew her in high school and subsequently lost track of her, as peers do. She is described in the available literature as "not too simple and not too kind," a characterization that the present author finds admirably precise and declines to elaborate upon, as it requires no elaboration.⁴

What the historical record establishes is as follows: the subject underwent a transition. From what to what is the animating question of this paper. The peer's report notes only that she changed, and that the change was of a categorical nature. She moved, in the parlance of the literature, "from a new wave fan to another kind."

She was talking to herself. Not too simple and not too kind. I walked on by, it was complicated, and it stuck in my mind.

We observe that it stuck in his mind. This is the entire basis for the present inquiry.

III. The Accent in Her Speech She Didn't Have Growing Up: Phonological Evidence of Persona Adoption

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Of all the behavioral markers associated with the subject's transformation, the most clinically interesting is the acquisition of an accent. Specifically, an accent she did not possess in her formative years and therefore could not have developed through conventional geographic exposure.

This finding has significant implications for the field of voluntary accent acquisition, a subfield that remains, regrettably, undertheorized.⁵ The subject's case suggests that sufficiently deep identification with a cultural icon can produce not merely attitudinal or sartorial changes but measurable phonological ones. The subject does not merely dress like Edith Head. She sounds like Edith Head.

Whether Edith Head had a distinctive accent is a matter of some scholarly debate. The present author notes that Edith Head did, in fact, have a distinctive, old-timey-Hollywood way of speaking, and that this is precisely the sort of thing one picks up when one loses one's mind on the subject of a person.

IV. Or Helen Gurley Brown: On the Problem of Interchangeable Icons

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A complicating factor in the present analysis is the apparent ambiguity at the center of the subject's self-conception. The available evidence suggests she believes herself to be Edith Head. It also allows for the possibility that she believes herself to be Helen Gurley Brown. The informant who reported these findings was not, by his own admission, entirely certain which.

This uncertainty is itself illuminating. That two figures as distinct (in profession, temperament, and public image) as Edith Head and Helen Gurley Brown might be conflated in the mind of an observer, suggests something important about the phenomenology of iconoclasty: what matters is not the specific icon but the quality of absolute self-reinvention they represent. Head remade herself through tailoring. Brown remade herself through prose.⁶ The subject has remade herself through stolen mannerisms and style.

V. She's Lost Her Mind: Toward a Diagnostic Framework

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The question of whether the subject has, in fact, lost her mind is one this paper approaches with appropriate academic caution, while acknowledging that the primary source material is unambiguous on this point.⁷

Clinical literature on erotomania and de Clérambault’s syndrome describes conditions in which a subject believes themselves to be in a reciprocal relationship with a public figure. The present case differs in a structurally interesting way: the subject does not believe Edith Head is in love with her. She Thinks SHE’S Edith Head. This is either more or less alarming, depending on one’s theoretical proclivities.

What seems clear is that the subject encountered, at some point between high school and the present, a figure whose mode of being in the world was so compelling, so fully realized, so costumed in the deepest sense, that the subject elected to try it on, and then forgot to take it off.

There are worse fates. Edith Head dressed Grace Kelly. Helen Gurley Brown told a generation of women they were allowed to want things. The subject, talking to herself in the window’s reflection of a store, is arguably in good company.

Whether she knows that is another matter entirely.

VI. Conclusion: Some Other Cultural Figure We Don't Know a Lot About

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This paper has argued that the subject's transformation (from New Wave fan to cultural icon, real or imagined) represents a case study in the extremity of self-reinvention made possible by sustained exposure to a sufficiently powerful public persona. The accent she acquired without geographic justification. The identity she acquired without apparent permission. The mind she may or may not have lost.

We (the Mink Car Center) do not know a lot about Helen Gurley Brown. We know somewhat more about Edith Head. We know almost nothing about the subject, because we walked on by, and it stuck in our mind, and we wrote this paper instead of crossing the street and asking her how she was doing.

Future research is warranted. The subject is presumably still out there.

Further Research Suggested

Have you ever reinvented yourself so completely that you lost track of where you ended and the bit began? Or: is there a public figure whose mode of being in the world is so compelling that you have, at any point, tried to quietly absorb it? The editors invite correspondence.

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1. See virtually all of celebrity studies as a discipline, 1970–present. The literature is extensive and, the present author will confess, not fully reviewed prior to submission.

2. Head was nominated for thirty-five Academy Awards across her career, a record that stands today and will likely continue standing, as the role of costume designer in contemporary Hollywood has shifted in ways that are interesting to no one at a party.

3. Brown edited Cosmopolitan for thirty-two years and authored Sex and the Single Girl (1962), a book that is extremely well-known and which this author has heard of.

4. Peer report, undated. Available in the archive of this journal upon request, which will not be honored.

5. This footnote was intentionally left blank.

6. Brown’s Having It All (1982) represents perhaps the apotheosis of her reinvention thesis. Whether the subject has read it is unknown. Whether the subject would admit to having read it is a separate question.

7. The primary source, in full: "SHE'S LOST HER MIND!" Source considered reliable. Shouted, but reliable.