With the stars currently gathering in Venice, we've found ourselves thinking about a rather more private part of the cinematic world: the dressing room.

Before the red carpets, before the flashbulbs, before the gowns and jewels, there is always a room where the transformation begins.

A mirror. A beautiful chair. A cloud of perfume. Jewellery waiting in a little dish. Perhaps a rack of extraordinary clothes.

The dressing room has always been somewhere between reality and theatre, a place where, for a little while, you can decide exactly who you would like to be.

And really, shouldn't we all have a little of that?

 

Three worlds of glamour

For this edition, we're stepping inside the dressing rooms of three very different Hollywood legends: Marlene Dietrich, Hedy Lamarr and Elizabeth Taylor.

Each had a style entirely her own, and each created a private world around herself that was every bit as distinctive as the woman herself. From Dietrich's sophisticated elegance to Lamarr's home away from home and Taylor's extraordinary art of collecting, their dressing rooms became more than places to get ready. They were expressions of personality, filled with the clothes, jewels and beautiful objects that helped make each woman unmistakably herself.

 

MARLENE DIETRICH

Sophistication

Marlene Dietrich understood that glamour was in the details.

Born in Berlin in 1901, Dietrich became one of Hollywood's most distinctive stars, celebrated not only for her extraordinary beauty but for a style that could be elegant, masculine, theatrical and entirely her own. She treated clothing as part of the performance, understanding the extraordinary power of a perfectly chosen suit, a dramatic gown or a single piece of jewellery.

Her dressing room was where much of that transformation began.

A contemporary description from the 1930s paints a rather lovely picture: pale wood, blue, glass-topped tables and cushions covered in pink satin. It sounds surprisingly delicate for a woman whose public image could be so striking and severe.

A photograph from 1944 gives us an even more intimate glimpse. Dietrich sits at her MGM dressing table, surrounded by bottles and cosmetics, her reflection caught in the mirror. Among the objects on the table is a distinctive Guerlain perfume bottle, a tiny detail, but one that reminds us that even Hollywood glamour was made up of very ordinary rituals: perfume, powder, lipstick and the few minutes spent in front of a mirror before stepping onto a soundstage.

Perhaps that is what makes the dressing room so fascinating. It is the space between the private person and the public image.

Beyond the studio, Dietrich's surroundings reflected the same instinct for drama and refinement. The Beverly Hills house she inhabited in the 1930s featured mirrored surfaces, chinoiserie and gilded details, creating an environment as theatrical and carefully composed as the woman who lived there.

Nothing about Dietrich's style seemed accidental.

She understood that a room, like an outfit, could tell a story.

And perhaps that is the real allure of her dressing room. It wasn't simply where Marlene Dietrich got ready.

It was where Marlene Dietrich was assembled.

 

HEDY LAMARR

A World of Her Own

Hedy Lamarr was fascinated by beautiful surroundings. She decorated and redecorated her homes, collected objects she loved and took great pleasure in creating spaces that felt entirely her own.

So perhaps it is no surprise that her MGM dressing room was rather different from the usual Hollywood vanity. While working on The Heavenly Body in 1943, Lamarr had the room transformed into an exact duplicate of her bedroom at home.

It is a wonderfully revealing detail. For Hedy, the dressing room was not simply a place to sit before the cameras. It was a private retreat within the machinery of Hollywood, a familiar little world brought with her to the studio.

The photographs of her rooms give us a glimpse of that world: an elegant dressing table, flowers, personal objects and the quiet sense that someone actually lived there. It feels less like a backstage space and more like a bedroom that happens to be inside a film studio.

And perhaps that was precisely the point.

For a woman whose public image was so carefully constructed, Hedy's dressing room offered somewhere that belonged to her.

 

ELIZABETH TAYLOR

Collecting

Elizabeth Taylor did not simply wear beautiful things. She collected them.

Jewellery, perfume bottles, photographs, little objects with stories attached to them, her surroundings became a reflection of a woman who was drawn to beauty in all its forms. And nowhere was that more apparent than in the rooms where she dressed.

Her dressing table was less a place for getting ready than a small cabinet of curiosities. Bottles and brushes sat alongside photographs, flowers and treasured possessions, while the jewels for which she became legendary were never far away. There was something wonderfully unrestrained about it all: beauty upon beauty, gathered together simply because she loved it.

Of course, there were the diamonds. The famous ones. The extraordinary jewels that became almost as closely associated with Taylor as her violet eyes. But it was the smaller, more personal things that made her dressing room feel like hers.

This was a woman who understood that objects become more beautiful when they have a story.

Perhaps that is why Elizabeth Taylor makes such a fitting end to our little tour. Marlene Dietrich used her dressing room to perfect an image; Hedy Lamarr brought a piece of home into hers. Elizabeth Taylor filled hers with the things she loved.

And what could be more glamorous than that?

 

DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK

The Room That Was a Jewel Box

Hidden away inside New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is a room that feels almost too extravagant to have ever been someone’s dressing room.

Created in the early 1880s for Arabella Worsham’s Manhattan townhouse, the Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room was designed as an entire little world devoted to the ritual of getting ready. Mirrored walls, carved wood, mother-of-pearl, intricate marquetry and gilded details turn every surface into something to look at.

Even the decoration knows what the room is for. Combs, scissors, hand mirrors and other objects associated with a woman’s toilette appear among the elaborate patterns, while tiny carved details and garlands seem to spill across the walls.

It is wonderfully excessive.

And perhaps the most extraordinary part is that the room outlived the house it was made for. When the townhouse was demolished in 1938, the dressing room was carefully dismantled and eventually found a new home at the Met.

A whole room, rescued from a vanished house.

We rather like the idea that somewhere in New York there is still a dressing room waiting to be discovered, a little jewel box from another age, where even getting ready was considered an occasion worth making beautiful.

 

 

WHAT'S NEW

Vintage, Reimagined

With the focus on dressing rooms, the beautiful things we keep, the pieces we treasure, and the joy of putting them together in unexpected ways.

So, naturally, we've been making a little jewellery of our own.

We've paired vintage brooches with modern chains to create a collection of entirely new pieces, each one assembled by us and designed to let these beautiful old treasures be worn in a completely different way.

Some are delicate, some wonderfully extravagant, and all have that rather lovely quality of looking as though they've just been discovered in the bottom of an old jewellery box.

Vintage pieces. New combinations. A little Fable & Mirth magic.