The Dress Doctor

Edith Head was perhaps the most famous Hollywood costume designer of all time. Long before Rachel Zoe, Andrea Leibermann, Estee Stanley, and Nicole Chavez were styling Hollywood celebrities, eight-time Oscar Award-winning Edith Head was the sartorial sensation behind the silver screen’s most high-profile stars and starlets. The Dress Doctor, adapted from her 1959 autobiography and enhanced with lavish illustrations of her most famous dresses by artist Bill Donovan, revisits the Golden Age of Hollywood with entertaining anecdotes about dressing some of the town’s biggest legends—Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Cary Grant, and Marlene Dietrich, to name a few. In her lifetime, Head was also a sought-after authority by everyday women for her invaluable tips on dressing well: The Dress Doctor includes her witty observations and dispenses the no-nonsense timeless advice for which she was legendary.

Against the bright colors and even brighter lights of Hollywood was an icon whose fashion sense and dazzling couture rocked celebrity circles for half a century and earned her eight Academy Awards. Small in stature but super-sized in confidence, costume designer Edith Head's rise through the ranks of Paramount and Universal made her a favorite of the film industry's most beautiful women and most dashing men. Just like her creations for the silver screen, Edith embraced the belief that classics never go out of style, a belief reflected in her personal fondness for tailored suits in black, white, brown and beige-a diminutive dove amidst the plumage of star-studded peacocks. This one-act play, set in 1977, imagines an encounter between the intrepid designer and a young woman sorely in need of some wardrobe advice.