More than any other film industry, the Hollywood dream factory equated its illusory world of luxury and wealth with great clothes worn by beautiful people. As early as the teens, a relationship emerged between the film and fashion industries. Hollywood producers quickly learned that film fashion could sell movie tickets; publicity departments capitalized on the number and cost of the stars' garments. In Hollywood's Golden Age, not only were famous European couturiers brought over by the American studios, but staff designers who headed up the studios' costume departments became "names" in themselves; many dressed their stars off screen as well as on, and some left the movie business to open their own fashion houses. Tie-ins were made between Hollywood and Seventh Ave (the garment industry which had, in fact, spawned several studio heads) encouraging the adaptation of film costumes to ready-to-wear and pattern books for rich and poor alike. The Modern Merchandising Bureau, founded in 1930 in New York, manufactured and distributed styles adapted from movies to over a thousand Cinema Shops, the first of these at Macy's.Movie plots found every opportunity to incorporate a fashion show: in the twenties it was typically the decisive moment of discovery in the narrative when a plain Jane goes from rags to riches, finds true love-and ends up with a splendid wardrobe. Scenarios centering on the fashion industry and its behind-the-scenes stories were easily adapted to romances, comedies, and musicals. Hollywood's fashion shows could be more lavish than the real thing, choreographed spectacles, even surreal fantasies, sometimes the only color sequence in an otherwise black-and-white film. (Eventually the fashion industry was to emulate the movies.) But movies themselves functioned as fashion shows by the number of costume changes from scene to scene and the sheer inventiveness of the designers, which sustained audiences' interest as much as plot. "By making fashion part of the visual cinematic vocabulary, filmmakers have created a history of fashion in the twentieth century," Matthew Yokobosky wrote for The Whitney Museum of American Art. Our two-month series explores the many sides of this symbiotic relationship between fashion and cinema-the way we watched translated into the way we wore, over eight decades. We wish you good viewing, and good looking.Edith Kramer DirectorFor their assistance and input we wish to thank Lee Amazonas; Mark Betts, Programmer, George Eastman House; Amy Holberg; Russell Merritt; and Matthew Yokobosky, Film and Video Curator, The Whitney Museum of American Art. Thanks also to our guest writers, Lee Amazonas, Juliet Clark, Amy Holberg, and Sally Syberg. The title of our series is borrowed from the book The Way We Wore: Styles of the 1930s and '40s and Our World Since Then by Marsha Hunt. We are pleased to have as our guest speakers for the series Russell Merritt and Amy Holberg. Russell Merritt is a film historian who has taught at UC Berkeley and Stanford University. Amy Holberg is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Rhetoric and Film, and taught The Rhetoric of Fashion at Cal. Saturday July 11, 1998