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The nerve to create success

Designer Edith Head Holding Up Material, Working on Costume for a Movie

What happens when you have a big dream but no education or experience to support it? Does that mean you have to give up your ambitions—or at least put them on hold until you can collect the prerequisites?

Not necessarily. How’s your supply of chutzpah?

Edith Head was an educated woman. She had a B.A. in French from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.A. in Romance Languages from Stanford. But she didn’t have the education necessary to get the job she really wanted.

So it’s a good thing she had all the nerve in the world. 

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In 1923, the 24-year-old schoolteacher had just begun a course at Chouinard Art School in Los Angeles when she spotted an ad for a sketch artist to work for famed Hollywood costume designer Howard Greer. Head desperately wanted to apply for the job at Paramount Studios, but she didn’t have any design experience.

So … she fudged a bit. She borrowed sketches from other people to fill her portfolio, then used the interview to talk her way into the job.

No, faking a portfolio is not the recommended path for success, and Head eventually confessed. Fortunately for her, Greer had a sense of humor about falling hook, line, and sinker for a fast-talking teacher. He wound up making her his protégée.

She started out designing costumes for little-known actors in little-known pictures. It didn’t seem to be the path to fame and fortune. But Head excelled at her art, and in 1941 she got her break. She was assigned to create the wardrobe for Barbara Stanwyck’s starring role in The Lady Eve. The long-torsoed actress was a challenge, but Head found a way to flatter her unusual figure. The film was a hit—and so were her designs. Head became Stanwyck’s favorite designer, also producing the costumes for the star’s most famous role in the film noir classic Double Indemnity.

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Edith Head went on to become the most sought-after costume designer in Hollywood. When the Academy Awards added the category of Best Costume Design in 1948, she was among the first nominees. She was nominated each consecutive year through 1966 and received 34 nominations in all. She took home eight Oscars—her last in 1973 for The Sting.

In an interview with the American Film Institute before her death in 1981, she described her profession as a cross between magic and camouflage. “We create the illusion of changing actors into what they are not,” she said.

To get her career off the ground, she created the illusion of changing herself into what she was not. Then she changed that illusion into reality.






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