Joseph Jefferson Rapf (1883-1939) was a younger brother of Harry Rapf. He apparently worked on costume design for The Hollywood Revue of 1929.
Category: Costume Designers
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Joe Rapf
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Erté
Romain de Tirtoff (1892-1990) was a Russian-born French exponent of Art Deco in many forms, including clothing, interior decoration and jewellery. He also worked in the theatre, designing costumes and sets for, for example, the Folies Bergère in Paris and George White’s Scandals on Broadway.
Erté first worked for MGM in 1924-25, designing gowns and costumes for The Mystic and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (both 1925). He continued in films, mostly in costume design, throughout the 1920s, culminating in costumes and sets for The Hollywood Revue of 1929. See, for example, the art deco arch in the opening number.
Erté was still working at the age of 95, two years before his death.
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David Cox
Little seems to be known about David Cox (1906-19??), who designed costumes at MGM before moving to work with Dolly Tree at Fox in 1932. He is, nonetheless, a featured artist at the Victoria & Albert Museum, where a costume designed for Bessie Love to wear in The Broadway Melody is among the exhibits.
Cox also designed for The Hollywood Revue of 1929, It’s a Great Life, Chasing Rainbows, Call of the Flesh, Good News and Love in the Rough.
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Henrietta Frazer
Henrietta Frazer (1889-1966, née Henriette Gant) is not one of the big names of costume design. The only reference to her in Dressed A Century of Hollywood Costume Design is for helping Marion Davies spend $52,000 a year on clothes for her pictures.
It is a reasonable assumption that Frazer designed Davies’s military-style costume for The Hollywood Revue of 1929. Her other musical credits are for Hallelujah and So This Is College.
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Adrian
The costumes he designed for The Wizard of Oz, which included the iconic ruby slippers, were unquestionably the high point of the career of Adrian Adolph Greenburg (1903-59), known simply as Adrian. But his designs were included in hundreds of MGM features, mostly between 1928 and 1941, including 34 other musicals. These included eleven Jeanette MacDonald pictures: The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, San Francisco, Maytime, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, New Moon and Bitter Sweet.
Adrian was very active during 1929-31, designing for Marianne, Devil-May-Care,The Rogue Song, Montana Moon, In Gay Madrid, Madam Satan, New Moon andThe Cuban Love Song.
Dancing Lady reunited Adrian with Joan Crawford a year after the white mousseline de soie dress he created for her in Letty Linton (1932) was copied commercially and sold over 500,000 units.
Going Hollywood, Hollywood Party, Reckless, Broadway Melody of 1936, The Great Ziegfeld, Born to Dance, Broadway Melody of 1938, The Great Waltz and Honolulu led up to the triumph ofThe Wizard of Oz. Adrian then worked on Balalaika, Broadway Melody of 1940, Ziegfeld Girl andThe Chocolate Soldier before leaving MGM in 1941 to open his own fashion business.
He continued to freelance for a variety of studios and returned to Metro for a final musical, the aptly-named Lovely to Look At.
