| 21st December 2006 07:43 AM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Original 'Dreamgirls' created their glamour
By Ruth La Ferla
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
12/21/2006
Mary Wilson was 13 and an aspiring pop diva with little cash to spare and even fewer role models. But she had a notion of what a star should look like.
"I used to think I was Doris Day," Wilson said. "She was cute and perky, and that was me. For a while, in our group, I was the blonde."
Her group, the Supremes, and its rags-to-riches story from the streets of Detroit in the 1960s to the top of the Billboard charts, was the inspiration for "Dreamgirls," a hit 1981 Broadway musical and a new film, which opens Monday in St. Louis.
Wilson's gilded coif predated the bottle-blond hairstyles adopted by modern performers like Mary J. Blige. For a young black woman in those days, the choice was audacious. And that was the point.
"In those days, rock 'n' roll singers were not really glamorous," she said. "We were totally into glamour, and we did it all ourselves."
Long before fashion stylists commandeered the red carpet, the Primettes, as the Supremes were then known, routinely foraged at the five and dime for jewelry and spiky false eyelashes, and stitched up their fancy gowns at home. The aim, radical in its day, was to inject a little sophistication into the raw world of rhythm and blues, Wilson said. That standard of sophistication, she added pointedly, was defined by white society.
The group's evolution, as mimicked in "Dreamgirls," may make audiences ooh and ahh when it opens nationally Christmas Day. But the transformation narrative is real: Ambitious girls from the projects, tricked out in bad wigs and decorously tatty dresses, turn into soignée birds of paradise, eclipsing most of their black and white female counterparts on the concert stage.
"We definitely started that trend of glamour, of girl groups getting dressed up," Wilson said. "Just like in the 'Dreamgirls' movie, when they were trying to make us into a classier kind of group that could play the clubs. We did that."
Wilson, 62, who still performs in a solo act and who lives in Las Vegas, said the group's style was the amalgam of self-will, lofty visions, and the well-meaning advice of hairdressers, friends and television advisers. But much of it was strictly their own.
Under the dictatorial watch of Berry Gordy, the legendary hitmaker and chief of Motown Records, the group polished its image, setting a standard for sophistication and dazzle that still holds up, even among all the overly handled, hyperinvented stars of today. To this day, it is rarely rivaled on the concert stage.
Gordy's objective "was to transcend what every other previous girl group had been," by conceiving a signature style for the group, said Howard Kramer, the curatorial director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, which did a retrospective of Supremes costumes two years ago.
'Cocktail classy'
"Before the Supremes, the look was smart and simple, like the Shirelles. Sassy and sexy, like the Ronettes. Or tomboyish and provocative, like the Shangri-Las," Kramer said. "But no one had ever done cocktail classy or set out to utilize certain visual signifiers that made them palatable to a white audience."
At the time, there were few models a young black woman could emulate.
"A lot of times black faces couldn't be on album covers, and you didn't know who was in a group," said Sharen Davis, costume designer for the movie version of "Dreamgirls" and herself a member of a girl group in the 1970s.
Apart from Lena Horne or Diahann Carroll, "there were few black women on TV," she said. "There were no African-American role models, really."
Wilson said her style icons included Sophia Loren and the McGuire Sisters.
Some have suggested that Martha (Reeves) and the Vandellas, another highly successful black girl group in the '60s, was an early fashion influence. Not so, Wilson insisted.
"They had the hit records first," she said. "We would have loved to be as soulful. But they would have loved to have our glamour."
Costume caravan
Wilson still owns most of the gowns, earrings and corsets she wore playing clubs like the Copacabana in New York and the Eden Roc in Miami. She treasures a crystal-spattered, white-satin mermaid showstopper she wore at the Palladium in London for a command performance for the Queen Mother. When they are not on exhibit at museums like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or the Metropolitan in New York, the dresses are kept sealed inside a steamer trunk, she said.
Among the most memorable, she said, are the orange and beige balloon-shape cocktail dresses the group wore early in its career.
"Diana and I made them ourselves," she recalled, referring to Diana Ross, the lead singer.
Wilson said they clearly were inspirations for a few of the movie Dreamettes' looks.
They may even have inspired the orange sherbet-color cocktail dresses the Dreamettes wore at their Detroit debut, an early scene in "Dreamgirls" when they perform "Move" in pert-looking frocks with box pleats and genteelly scooped necklines.
"The idea at the beginning was that they had to look like their mothers made their dresses," costume designer Davis said. "The concept is, it's almost a church dress. Their parents would not have been into spending money on something they could wear just to perform."
By the mid-1960s, the Supremes had traded up, shopping at Hudson's, then the top department store in Detroit. With early hits like "Where Did Our Love Go" and "Baby Love," "we could afford to buy really high end gowns," Wilson said. "Saks Fifth Avenue was the shop we put all our money in. I put all my money on clothes."
From club dates, the group moved to television, on shows like "Hullabaloo" and "The Ed Sullivan Show," their costumes designed by Michael Travis, a former apprentice of Bob Mackie. The array of colors and the beading in those days were spectacular, Wilson recalled.
"Some of those gown weighed 35 pounds," she said.
"As Diane used to say," she said, using Ross' original first name, "and a lot of people got angry — 'I know a lot of little old ladies went blind beading those dresses.' "
Cher's influence
In designing for the Dreamettes, Davis said, she also looked to Ross and Cher.
"Those women were always very sexy, very sleek and never trashy," she said. "Cher's beautiful long hair and eyelashes just mesmerized me."
For the film, the hair and makeup team scoured a handful of discount stores in Los Angeles to try to replicate the fantastically sculptured wigs that became a Supremes hallmark.
The makeup — triple rows of false eyelashes, feline liner, searing coral-tone lips — was trickier. Tym Buacharern, the chief makeup artist for "Dreamgirls." leafed through countless old issues of Ebony, Jet and Playboy, and viewed grainy footage of "The Sonny and Cher Show," only to learn that, by contemporary standards, "the colors were off."
"The cosmetic industry didn't really cater to women of color," he said. "In making the movie, we could actually correct that, finding just the right orange to match the skin tone of African-American women."
[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels] |
| 21st December 2006 11:30 AM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels] |
| 21st December 2006 11:39 AM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
BIO
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Supremes |
| 21st December 2006 11:41 AM |
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| TampabayStone |
I will watch Mahogany every time it comes on just to see D's boobs! |
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