The Looks of Love: 50 Moments in Fashion that Inspired Romance

By Hal Rubenstein

Hal Rubenstein, fashion authority, consultant, and author of the bestselling 100 Unforgettable Dresses, presents fifty of the most influential romantic moments in style from the 1930s to today, in this full-color collection that reveals each item's indelible place in the pantheons of fashion and popular culture.

In The Looks of Love, Hal Rubenstein showcases seminal moments and events in television and film, on the runway and red carpet, and in social media that have changed the way we look at love, fashion, passion, romance, marriage, beauty, and style. From Alexander McQueen’s stunning dance marathon collection inspired by the film They Shoot Horses Don’t They? to shoulder-pad-clad Krystle and Alexis Carrington’s jealous catfights; from all eight of Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding ensembles to Angelina Jolie’s singular Versace wedding gown with a veil embroidered with her children’s drawings, Rubenstein brings his impeccable eye, compelling voice, and impressive depth of knowledge to these iconic moments. Here, too are anecdotes and first-person commentary from more than a dozen world-class designers that offer fascinating insight into each “look.”

Spanning eras and media, combining more than 225 images and essays, The Looks of Love includes such innovative trendsetters as Humphrey Bogart’s trench coat in Casablanca; Marc Jacobs’s spectacularly romantic show for Louis Vuitton that featured models disembarking from a vintage steam train; Beyoncé’s “All the Single Ladies” video; Versace’s “Miami” collection; The romantic world of Ralph Lauren; the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor—Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson; The Summer of Love—Woodstock; Gene Kelly’s sportswear in Singing in the Rain; DKNY advertising; and much more.

Playful and profound, trendy and timeless, stylish and sophisticated, The Looks of Love illuminates our evolving culture and couture in fresh and startling way. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9780062279705

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Years ago, my parents and I were together at a family wedding. I hadn’t seen my father in a few weeks and though we talked every day, he wanted to hear about everything I was doing, face-to-face. It didn’t matter that my sideburns had already turned partially silver. To him, I would always be that kid on the tricycle, and to be honest, I kind of liked it that way. Plus, his ever-fervent interest never failed to make me happy and feel loved. As we were speaking, my mother walked by, wearing an organza gown with an impressive neckline for a woman in her early sixties, and a bell skirt that attracted attention in a lush, vintage gold, blue, and brown floral print. She looked lovely, and I wasn’t the only one who thought so. My father gazed at her the way he continuously had for more than fifty years, as if he couldn’t believe how he had wound up the luckiest guy on earth. He remained staring, straining his neck for one last glimpse, as if she were leaving on an extended trip, until finally she disappeared into a gathering of guests. When he turned back toward me, his smile was shy and his eyes were both glittering and searching, because in looking at her he’d completely lost his train of thought. What the hell were we talking about? he asked as he blushed in embarrassment. I was delighted, and I was used to it. Because it happened all the time.

I am my father’s son, and that makes me a fool for love in all its forms and guises—whether directed toward a person, a city, a movement, or even an ideal—because of the unmatchable power romance possesses to engage us, to make us go to extremes, and to alter our reality.

The Looks of Love: 50 Moments in Fashion That Inspired Romance is a cavalcade of grand passions that opened our eyes; jump-started our senses; threw us way off the rails; shocked, teased, titillated, amused, horrified, or dazzled us enough to generate shifts in our social interactions; irrevocably modified our dating habits, even influenced how and whom we chose to marry. The book delves into films that offer embraces and entrances we won’t ever forget, highlights others that remind us how ardor can be one heartbreak away from insanity, and celebrates those that surprised us with bold approaches toward sex, the power of women, the vulnerability of men, and other fresh stances for each gender to try on for size. Of course, some movies are here simply because they’re meant to be swooned over, since at some point, everyone has dreamed of falling in love the way they do in the movies.

Courtesy Hal Rubenstein.

Television may now have an even greater influence on affecting morals and behavior in everyday life, so in this book there are some of the shows and series that became appointment television, either because the relationships portrayed operated at a level of such heightened reality and mercurial lust that we could relish them as primers of inappropriate conduct, or because they were as enlightening as they were entertaining in revealing an acute awareness of the challenges and expectations we now encounter in facing marriage, friendship, separation, or loss.

Naturally, how can you thrill to a first date, a first kiss, a wedding, a midnight tryst, or a hot seduction on a dance floor if you don’t dress the part? The clothes actors wore to cast their spells on and off the screen, the garments advertisers chose to outfit models in so we’d crave their products, the dresses veiled brides donned to walk down the aisle, and best of all, the looks brilliantly inspired designers sent down runways to offer us new visions of beauty are literally the uncommon threads that are woven through The Looks of Love. Here are the women who were courted wearing smart berets paired with maxi skirts or the soigné swirl of a bias-cut dress. Others unleashed tempestuous emotions accented by piles of teased tresses atop buttress-padded shoulders or to the syncopated rhythm of beaded, blond cornrows. There are men we adored who were oh-so-preppy, and some of the sharpest were natty, thanks to Savile Row. One man only selected suits from a Milanese designer who changed menswear forever, and then there’s a singular star who wore a leather jacket men and women just keep right on buying because no one has ever looked cooler than he did.

Courtesy Hal Rubenstein.

I know how ridiculously blessed I am to have had the parents I did, to witness and learn firsthand how much richer life becomes when feelings aren’t suppressed, when humor and intelligence are sources of sexual attraction, if constant agreement isn’t a requirement for happiness, and when you know looking your best for someone else isn’t superficial at all—it’s a total rush. But my folks were just one couple. Recognizing the rarity of their relationship is what’s always stoked my curiosity to seek other sources and discover whom, what, and where people have turned to become activated, elevated, or decimated by their emotions and urges. Evidently I’m not alone, because it’s remarkable how intimately so many of us have been affected by the moments chronicled and remembered in this book.

My hope is that The Looks of Love educates and excites you, makes you smile as you recall the past, and allows you to go forward just a wee bit more aware of why we love, how we love, and whom we love. I’d be proud if you find something in these pages that will nudge you, whether it’s today or sometime in the near future, into gazing upon the person with whom you’ve chosen to share a life with a look something akin to the way my father used to look at my mother. Life offers many choices, but when in doubt, I’ll take romance every time. —H.R.

WHERE DO YOU BEGIN?

Love Story, 1970

Cheaply produced, poorly shot, and badly edited, Love Story’s plot stumbles along so devoid of pace or grace you can’t help suspecting that Yale classics professor-turned-screenwriter Erich Segal pitched his novel of doomed young love to Paramount Pictures executives using flash cards written in Magic Marker. Compared to the sparkling banter between the magnetic screen couplings of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy or Doris Day and Rock Hudson, the initial flirtations between trust-fund hockey jock Oliver Barrett IV and poor but headstrong Jenny Cavilleri are so hampered by chips on every shoulder and defensive sarcasm masquerading as wit you can’t imagine these two kids taking a stroll across campus, let alone giving up everything to be together.

Then why and how did Love Story leave millions of moviegoers eagerly sobbing hysterically into a puddle of soaked tissues? Made for a mere two million dollars, the film earned fifty times that to become the highest-grossing film of 1971, its tear-stained success due to the rare alignment of brilliant marketing, fortuitous timing, savvy casting, a reassuring return to overlooked attire, a single rhapsodic production element, and one rapturous plug from a famous fan.

Courtesy Everett Collection.

Courtesy Everett Collection.

Though first conceived as a screenplay, Segal’s agent suggested he publish a novelization of an actual romance he had heard about as an undergrad at Harvard. The slender 132-page book with its eye-catching red, green, and blue cover graphic proclaiming its all-capitalized title, LOVE STORY (a riff on pop artist Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture) was published on Valentine’s Day 1970. That morning, on television’s most popular rise-and-shine program, Today, cohost Barbara Walters announced, I was up most of the night reading a book I couldn’t put down, and when I finished it, I was sobbing. I cried and cried. Later, she introduced the unknown author by anointing his tender, romantic, and lovely novel as the book of the year. Segal, who had earned a reputation at Yale for his effusively theatrical lectures, responded with a charming balance of blushing self-satisfaction and this is my best side showmanship. By day’s end, heart-shaped boxes of candy were the fallback gift if you couldn’t procure one of the first printing’s seventy-five hundred now-sold-out copies. Within several months, the personable author had appeared on every noteworthy national radio and talk show (Johnny Carson had him on The Tonight Show four times in one month); the novel that Kurt Vonnegut called as hard to put down as a chocolate éclair was cemented onto the bestseller list, where it remained for forty-one weeks; and on a trajectory to sell nearly twenty-one million copies in hardcover and paperback in more than twenty languages. According to a Gallup poll, one in five Americans had read Love Story. The movie was released that same year, one week before Christmas.

Love Story begins with a piano gently plinking out the movie’s now immediately recognizable theme. In fact, Francis Lai’s Oscar-winning score may have been the film’s single most successful marketing tool. The constant ramping of its inescapable melody from plaintive to full orchestral anguish was so effective in generating tears, whether you heard it in the theater, your car, the elevator, or everywhere else it seemed to play in 1970 that film footage seemed almost unnecessary.

That is, until you saw them. Heralded by harpsichords and violins and initially framed against snow-blanketed backdrops, it is physiologically impossible not to marvel at the frosty-cheeked, genetically blessed loveliness of Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal. MacGraw’s striking looks had already been confirmed by both her career as a successful teen cover girl and her notable screen debut as the shiksa goddess in the film version of Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus. She had recently married Paramount’s executive vice president Robert Evans. Friends with Segal for more than a decade, MacGraw championed the script, and Evans wanted to make his new wife happy.

O’Neal also came with preordained golden-boy status thanks to six years of playing Rodney Harrington, the tousle-haired heartthrob on television’s first primetime soap opera, Peyton Place, adapted from Grace Metalious’s once scandalous novel. O’Neal’s tumbling golden locks, crooked smile, woefully earnest gaze, and varsity-jock gait made his handsomeness appear accessible to women yet unthreatening to men. To be honest, both actors give performances that offer less depth than an angora sweater. However, it didn’t matter. Audiences had already committed Segal’s clunky dialogue to memory. You couldn’t find two more perfectly realized vessels to deliver the words.

Another reason for its popular embrace is Love Story’s release during the ascendency of the collective consciousness known as Woodstock Nation. Its headbanded participants regarded their bleached bell-bottoms, Indian-inspired embroidered tunics, Moroccan-inspired flowing djellabas, Jamaican-inspired beaded necklaces, and Asian-inspired water buffalo sandals as standard daywear, whether attending class or antiwar rallies. In addition, fashion was still riding the final waves of the British Invasion and its reliance on the neon hues and angular silhouettes of pop and op art. After all, Jenny loved the Beatles almost as much as she loved Ollie.

For the millions unseduced by and uncomfortable with such obvious flamboyance, there was cozy reassurance in gazing at MacGraw walking on a protest-free campus in a black turtleneck with a yellow tartan plaid skirt and matching scarf, going to a hockey game in a navy peacoat, and walking arm in arm with Ollie in her camel-hair wrap coat with red turtleneck or a smashing white wool trench—not bad for a girl on financial aid. As for Ollie, he was as unequivocally preppy as Jenny claimed, wearing Harris Tweed blazers over Shetland sweaters, blue oxford cloth shirts with the collars out, and a shearling coat. If his odious father didn’t keep bringing up his family’s wealth, you might surmise that Oliver had been raised by the sales staff at Brooks Brothers. Looking at Ollie and Jenny together you can’t help but come to the conclusion that as long as there are private schools, the New England coastline, Palm Beach, and people who want unassailable assurance of the appropriateness of their wardrobe, preppiness is now and forever. Abercrombie & Fitch, Tommy Hilfiger, J.Crew, and Ralph Lauren may serve as the shrines of this perpetually appropriate style, but its patron saints should be Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Barrett IV.

Courtesy Everett Collection.

In the movie, we never learn what actual disease was killing Jenny, which could be why MacGraw looks no worse at her demise than someone who has just tolerated an overly aggressive cleanse. But did we really want to see MacGraw wasting away from leukemia? Love Story’s enduring success is the promise that love lost can be remembered as gloriously as love in bloom, and if you believe in this reality, you will never really be alone.

But as for love meaning never having to say you’re sorry, that’s pure fantasy. . . .

GRUNGE’S ROYAL COUPLE

Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, 1992

Marc Jacobs would be the first to admit he didn’t create the grunge trend or claim his clothes were the real thing. As he stated in my book 100 Unforgettable Dresses, I was adjusting these beautiful silk plaids I had woven in factories in Lake Como whose patterns were copied from shirts I had bought for three dollars on Saint Mark’s Place. It was the fashion press that stamped Jacobs’s formative spring/summer 1992 ready-to-wear collection for Perry Ellis grunge, both prodding its influence and ensuring his failure at the company. With most innovative fashion concepts, it takes several seasons for its signature elements to start bobbing into the retail mainstream, which is when the mall-shopping public either embraces or rejects it.

But the grunge staples of knit hats, plaid flannels, shapeless cardigans, dark striped T-shirts, and torn denim defied the natural order of merchandising. Casually adopted as the unofficial uniform of bands like Pearl Jam, Sonic Youth, and the Stone Temple Pilots, whose raw vocals, dissonant harmonies, jagged guitar riffs, and joy-free lyrics defined alternative music in the early 1990s, its source of origin were the clothing racks at Walmart, K-Mart, army-navy stores, and thrift shops. Jacobs was fired despite the reams of press—good and bad—that his collection generated. From a corporate point of view, the label couldn’t make any money on their collection when Generation Xers were well aware of how to put together the look at a fraction of the runway version’s price. I know I was asking for it, said Jacobs. But the attitude was so awkward and imperfect and available. And I loved it.

Guzman for stocklandmartel.com.

The sound had its own kingdom, the Pacific Northwest, and the look its own fashion capital—Seattle, Washington. And for the too-brief time they were a couple, the realm’s reigning monarchs were Courtney Love, lead singer for the band Hole, and her husband, Kurt Cobain, front man of Nirvana and cowriter of what came to be Generation X’s anthem, Smells Like Teen Spirit, a title taken from the name of a deodorant Cobain wore.

Though their union turned out to be similarly star-crossed and, depending on your musical tastes, nearly as memorable, Cobain and Love’s courtship played out a little differently than that of Romeo and Juliet. We were peers on the same festival circuit before Nirvana clicked, recalls Love. And we enjoyed a sense of competition, you know, that my band will kick your band’s ass. Though Love was dating another alternative rocker (Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins), she had a crush on Kurt right away. He was so damn pretty, except he didn’t know it because he was small and thin and raised in a town [Grays Harbor, Washington] where the burly look of a longshoreman is what passed for handsome. So he was tentative around me for months. With us, it was more like me chasing him around the office, except our desks were stages in Amsterdam, London, and Seattle.

Initially, Love’s tepid response to Nirvana’s music made it easier for her to handle Cobain’s reticence. At first, I thought they sucked, says Love. That was until I listened to their song ‘Sliver’ and then thought, ‘Wow, this guy knows how to write a hook. I’m going to get him.’ So she walked up to Cobain and told him to dump all those other bitches hanging out in the back of the Nirvana van. He didn’t argue. Yeah, I was pretty aggressive, she says, but I had the stuff to back it up.

Love also had a hell of a look that was hard to miss amid mosh pits filled with plaid shapelessness. In the early 1980s, Love had worked in the wardrobe department of Paramount Pictures under the tutelage of Bernadene C. Mann, who had supervised the clothes worn in such conspicuously style-savvy films as American Gigolo, Eyes of Laura Mars, and Mommie Dearest. Because of Bernadene, I knew about fabric, the cut of clothes, and how they could help you make a statement, recalls Love. I wasn’t making any money as an actress, but I wanted to be noticed, so I hit the thrift shops and bought all these nighties, especially ones made of crepe because they would hang the best and not shrink when washed. Then I cut them down and had someone on the staff sew them into baby-doll dresses. And that’s what I wore 24/7. Even Love’s wedding dress was a variation on the baby-doll theme. (Kurt wore pajamas.)

But as for the male side of grunge, it was nowhere near as calculated or aimed at starting trends. The garb was cheap and utilitarian, because in 1992, Seattle, like the rest of the United States, was in the midst of a severe economic recession that grunge bands had yet to cash in on. Love adds, The idea was dress with no dependency on fashion or the outside world’s opinion. Kurt often piled on the layers and hid his face behind his long blond hair because he had a certain naïveté about his physicality, says Love. Dysmorphia really.

The New York Times in its just-launched Styles section acknowledged the growing influence of the music but dismissed the requisite attire with hostile sarcasm. This generation of greasy Caucasian youths in ripped jeans, untucked flannel, and stomping boots spent their formative years watching television, inhaling beer or pot, listening to old Black Sabbath albums, and dreaming of the day they would trade in their air guitars for the real thing so that they, too, could become famous rock-and-roll heroes. Not surprisingly, author Rick Marin missed the point of grunge. As fashion editor James Truman observed, Punk was anti-fashion. Grunge is not about making a statement, which is why it’s crazy for it to become a fashion statement.

By 1993, Nirvana’s second album, Nevermind, was on its way to selling thirty million copies, while the New York Times dubbed Jacobs the guru of grunge, even though he’d never set foot in Seattle. But the words success and alternative was not the kind of dissonance Cobain, now a rock idol whose look was being copied head to toe by fans world wide, felt was music to his ears. When they started calling Kurt ‘beautiful,’ he did whatever he could do make himself look even more unattractive, recalls Love. "That’s when he started dyeing his hair red and green. He didn’t understand that people were dressing like him because they wanted to be like him. And because they liked him."

Love didn’t react the same way. Upon walking into Patricia Field’s boutique in New York City (Field, who was also the costume designer for HBO’s Sex and the City, owns the most reasonably priced, irreverently choose-it-or-lose-it clothing store in town), and seeing rows upon rows of baby-doll dresses, Love thought to herself, Shit! I am the center of the universe. This won’t go on forever, but right now I feel amazing.

Kevin Cummins/Getty.

Frank Micelotta/Getty.

Unfortunately, Love’s delight wasn’t contagious. The combination of drug addiction, chronic stomach pain, and overbearing guilt that fame was synonymous with selling out was too much for Cobain. After several unsuccessful attempts, during