During her fifty-year career, Renié Conley designed simple clothes for blue-collar families, splendid robes for royalty, and everything in between.
And although she attired hundreds of stars in contemporary American styles too, her lifelong passion was what Conley called “ethnic” costumes—designs based on clothes from different lands and different times.
Her foray into ethnic design began in 1944 at RKO. “It started as a means of doing research for the films,” Conley said. “During World War II, it was the Carmen Miranda era, and like every Hollywood designer, I was doing cute and not-at-all authentic Mexican and South American costumes for the musicals we were making.” But that would change when Conley was assigned to Pan-Americana (1945), in which Eve Arden’s character travels throughout South America. “The producer wanted me to dress all the natives correctly so viewers would notice the difference as Eve went from place to place,” Conley explained. “Well, I did the best I could with the research I could find, but a lot of it I had to fake.”
Although Conley was nominated for five Academy Awards during her career, her one Oscar win came, appropriately, for her stunning ethnic costumes in Cleopatra (1963). “It was a fascinating project,” Conley said years later, “because there were so many ancient ethnic groups involved.” While Irene Sharaff designed for Elizabeth Taylor, Conley designed for the other women, and Vittorio Nino Novarese designed for the men. “Cleopatra was Macedonian,” Conley said, “so the lines of the gowns Irene Sharaff designed for her differed from those of her Greek and Egyptian handmaidens, which I designed. Francesca Annis, who portrayed a Greek girl, wore diaphanous, draped gowns exactly like the draped evening gowns we are seeing today. That is a true classic line.”
Conley’s interest in art and film started early. She was born Irene Rae Brouillet on July 31, 1903, in Republic, Washington, the oldest child of traveling salesman Ray P. Brouillet and his wife, Irene Belle Porter. Conley and her little sister, Helen, spent their early years in the Seattle area, where Conley helped design scenery for the drama club her sophomore year at Lincoln High School. The next year, her father moved the family south for his work, first to San Francisco and then to Los Angeles. Both Brouillet girls pursued postsecondary education in Los Angeles. Helen became a nurse. Conley attended the University of California and studied design at L.A.’s Chouinard Art Institute. Following graduation, she apprenticed as a theatrical set designer for Fanchon and Marco.
Renié Conley
On May 18, 1927, Conley married silent film star Truman Van Dyke. Their son, Truman Jr., arrived seven months later. By the time Conley married Van Dyke, his film career was largely over. Having been raised in his native Mississippi, Van Dyke spoke with a heavy Southern drawl that ended his ability to land roles following the advent of “talkies.” His marriage to the future designer was short-lived. Within two years of their son’s birth, the Van Dykes split.
Conley landed her first costuming position, doing sketches along with Edward Stevenson for André-Ani, at MGM. She soon moved to Paramount, where she met Adele Balkan. “We weren’t assistants, we were just sketch artists,” Balkan said years later. “We did things for Mitchell Leisen, for this musical, and for that. She sketched very nicely, and she was an attractive woman. She dressed well. She had a wonderful sense of humor. Everybody liked her tremendously. And the two of us lasted for quite a while. Everybody else disappeared and we were there, we became bosom buddies.” The two would work together again at RKO.
Costume designs reflect the multiple personalities of Eve (Joanne Woodward) in The Three Faces of Eve (1957).
Conley made the switch to RKO in 1936. The following year, she married Leland H. Conley, a career manager for a public storage chain in Los Angeles. That union lasted for fifty-five years, ending with Conley’s death in 1992. She would stay at RKO for thirteen years, designing for both B-movie serials and big-budget blockbusters. She regularly designed for Ginger Rogers, dressing her in five films. “Ginger Rogers had the most perfect figure imaginable for clothes of the late ’30s and early ’40s,” Conley recalled. “The fan magazines were always writing about her perfect legs and feet,” she said. “Ginger had a tiny derriere, narrow hips, and very broad shoulders. Her back was broad too, and yet it didn’t look muscular.” Conley was also careful to use small shoulder pads just to square the edges, not to add any more width.
“I remember when we were fitting the costumes for Kitty Foyle (1940), I gave Ginger a pair of sling pumps to try on,” Conley said. “She kept walking back and forth across the room, becoming more and more upset. Finally she said, ‘This is horrible. My heel bulges over the edge of the shoe.’ I said, ‘Everybody’s feet do that. You have the best figure in Hollywood and you’re not going to get any sympathy out of me!’”
While Rogers’s movies usually required Conley to strive for elegance, her assignment in The Long Night (1947) required her to invent shop-girl chic. Conley had to design what was to look like a work dress for Barbara Bel Geddes, who starred opposite Henry Fonda as a florist’s helper. Bel Geddes had to look like an underpaid salesgirl. But she had to look attractive enough to make Fonda fall in love with her. Renie shopped Los Angeles stores for the dress. “But Anatole Litvak, the director, said no to every dress,” Conley said. “Barbara either looked too expensive or too cheap in store clothes. What Mr. Litvak had in mind, we finally discovered, was the effect of a peasant girl in a dirndl. Of course, he didn’t know to say that. What man would? So we had to present Bel Geddes in a new dress every day for two weeks before we managed what he wanted. We had to design and make the $18 shop girl dress. It cost us $250.”
Renié Conley (second from left) consults with Jeanne Crain for The Model and the Marriage Broker (1951).
Renié Conley with a costume for Shipstead & Johnson’s Ice Follies.
In 1950, Charles Le Maire of 20th Century-Fox hired Conley. In her first year at Fox, Renie designed for Marilyn Monroe three times, for Love Nest (1951), As Young as You Feel (1951), and Let’s Make It Legal (1951). Le Maire found Conley to be competent and dependable to do a good job, so much so that he was perfectly willing to take credit for her work before the Academy. Conley shared the Oscar nomination with Le Maire for The Model and the Marriage Broker (1951), even though Le Maire had done none of the designs. “He didn’t do a darn thing,” Conley said. “People said I should take his name off of the nomination.” She did not. And she was savvy not to. Le Maire continued to assign films to Conley, including The President’s Lady (1953), which led to another Oscar nomination for Conley.
By 1954, Conley left Fox to become a freelance designer. For her first assignment, Walt Disney hired her to create 10,000 costumes worn by park personnel for the opening of Disneyland in 1955. “It’s one of the wonders,” Conley said, “because at times I wondered how it was going to be accomplished.” Conley and her staff began making the costumes a year before the park opened, spending hundreds of hours on research for the conductors, boat captains, and cashiers that populated Fantasyland and Frontierland. “The personnel wasn’t even hired yet to fit the costumes,” Conley said.
Conley was an expert ice skater and at the same time she was working on the Disneyland costumes, she was also designing costumes for the Shipstead & Johnson’s Ice Follies, for whom she became the exclusive designer. Conley also designed for ready-to-wear makers, but with limited success. “It’s not easy for a designer in the studio to design for the public,” Balkan said of Conley’s attempts to design in the garment district of downtown Los Angeles. “It’s a little hard to rein in that extra that you put in for films.”
A costume sketch by Renié Conley for Tamara Toumanova in Tonight We Sing (1953).
A costume sketch by Renié Conley for Kim Novak in The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968).
In 1953, Conley became a founding member of the Costume Designers Guild and served on its executive board. She was involved with the Costume Council and the Fashion Group, which worked hard to establish an adequate research center at the Los Angeles County Museum. She also taught about ethnic costumes at UCLA.
In Body Heat (1981) Conley successfully updated the 1940s film noir genre, adding a heightened sensuality to Kathleen Turner’s Matty Walker. Although Body Heat proved Conley’s skills were still relevant, that would be her last major film. She died on June 12, 1992, in Los Angeles, at the age of eighty-eight.
“If she eventually grew disenchanted with the direction the movie business was headed,” Hollywood Reporter columnist Robert Osborne said following Conley’s death, “she was never less than enthusiastic about life or travel or adding to her extensive collection of ethnic costumes, which she shared with thousands when giving lectures throughout the world. She always had spirit and taste, and it always showed, on and off screen.”