Vera West

Vera West (28 June 1898 or 28 June 1900 - 29 June 1947) was an American fashion designer and film costume designer. From 1928 to 1947 she was the chief costume designer for Universal Pictures.

Life

The details of West's early life are unclear. Some sources put her birthdate as 28 June 1898, others as 28 June 1900, and her birthplace is variously given as Philadelphia or New York. She attended the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. After graduation, West designed dresses for a high-end fashion salon on Fifth Avenue in New York. In the mid-1920s, she was forced to leave New York for unknown personal reasons. She eventually went to Hollywood, where she found a job with Universal Pictures and rose to become chief costume designer for the film studio in 1928.[1]

Ava Gardner wearing a gown designed by West in The Killers (1946)

The first production for which she made costumes based on her own designs was the film The Man Who Laughs (1928) by German director Paul Leni, based on the Victor Hugo novel of the same name. According to IMDb, West has at least 393 film credits. She specialised in gowns, and was not only responsible for dressing the actors, but also saw to their off-film personal styling.[2]

One of West's best-known designs is the gown worn by Ava Gardner in the 1946 film The Killers.

In early 1947 West left Universal to work on a spring fashion collection for a salon in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

Vera West was married twice, first to Stephen D. Kille in 1924, and by 1930 to businessman Jack/Jacques C. West. On 29 June 1947, she was found dead in the swimming pool of her Los Angeles home. Based on two notes she had left that suggested that she had been blackmailed for years, the police assumed she committed suicide by drowning. The exact circumstances of her death were never fully established. West is buried in the Western Great Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale.

Legacy

West is considered one of the early female pioneers of costume design in the Hollywood industry, in that she was one of the first women to be a studio's chief designer.

West was inducted in to the Costume Designers Guild Hall of Fame in 2005.[3]

A rare survival of West's early work is a costumed mannequin of Frankenstein's Monster from the 1935 movie The Bride of Frankenstein.[4] This was featured in the BBC1 programme Secrets of the Museum in March 2020, where it was being treated by the Victoria & Albert Museum's conservators.[5]

Filmography (selection)
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References
  1. "West, Vera", in Costume Design in the Movies: An Illustrated Guide to the Work of 157 Great Designers by Elizabeth Leese, Dover Publications, 1991, ISBN 0-486-26548-X , p. 124
  2. Creating the Illusion: A Fashionable History of Hollywood Costume Designers by Jay Jorgensen and Donald L. Scoggins, 2015, https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=J2g4DgAAQBAJ&pg=PT219&lpg=PT219&dq=vera+west+universal&source=bl&ots=dlsG9fgUmA&sig=ACfU3U0wqJNp3cpdU9-227hNoG2jeiUfig&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjb7v_yt4joAhWVFMAKHWrVDQU4ChDoATAFegQIChAB#v=onepage&q=vera%20west%20universal&f=false
  3. https://costumedesignersguild.com/awards/awards-archive/awards2005/
  4. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1314760/the-bride-of-frankenstein-prop-west-vera/
  5. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000g1rv/secrets-of-the-museum-series-1-episode-5
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