Adrian's method of designing was closer to that of the ragpicker's, who scavenged

the nineteenth-century city for remnants of history, than to the assembly-line worker's. In

a recent essay, Caroline Evans compares the roles of the ragpicker and the fashion

designer, arguing that "the historian/designer's method is akin to that of the ragpicker

who moves through the city gathering scraps for recycling" (108). However, she makes

this analogy only in relation to postmodern designers, who deliberately rummage through

fashion history in order to create a pastiche by quoting previous eras. I find the

inadvertent scavenging within Hollywood's vertically-integrated, controlled system much

more compelling. In Talking Pictures, an insider's account of Classic Hollywood written

in 1937, Barrett Kiesling observed that the design departments at major studios like

MGM were quite impressive, often set up "in an enormous twelve-story building, [where]

some thirty thousand different costumes of every known historical period are stored"

(33).20 That kind of raw material enabled designers to stroll up and down the vertical

promenade of fashions, creating startling juxtapositions of sartorial articles, as if by

chance.

 Consider, for instance, the most often cited dress in Hollywood fashion history: the

Letty Lynton dress. In 1932, Joan Crawford signed on to make Clarence Brown's film

about a wealthy New York socialite who goes unpunished for killing her playboy lover.

Crawford had been a fashion icon since her flapper days. She often played a rags-to-

riches factory worker or shopgirl,21 but the image of the "Letty Lynton" dress has

outlived that narrative. Indeed, the white chiffon organdy dress with built-up shoulders

and puffed sleeves has persisted like a still from Gilbert Adair's album of "flickers." It

became popular immediately upon the film's release, so much so that Macy's claimed