Creating the Illusion

In 1974, Theoni Aldredge was approached to design The Great Gatsby, starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.

“I went to meet [director] Jack Clayton,” Aldredge said. “After I got over the shock of his offering me the job of costume designer, I told him I really didn’t have enough time to do it properly. He told me the more I talked, the more time I was wasting because he knew I was going to do this film.” Aldrege had only one and a half months before principal photography began. She began her research by looking at 1920s copies of Vogue magazine and the French magazine Femina. “The most helpful photographs were those picturing actual families, not just the models in ’20s clothes,” she said. Then she scoured the Paramount studio and textile mills in London to find the correct pure silk gauzes and the chiffons needed for the period.

Though the film received lukewarm reviews, it became an instant fashion classic. “Not only has she faithfully recreated ’20s fashions for the Newport set, she has done so with such brilliance that you are never aware of the movie as a fashion statement,” Mary Lou Luther wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “Daisy’s clothes are Daisy’s clothes, not Theoni Aldredge’s imposition of a look on Mia Farrow.” When people referred to the “Gatsby Look” upon the film’s release, Aldredge was puzzled. “Gatsby didn’t create an era,” she said. “He just lived in one. He didn’t create a look. I didn’t create fashion here. I tried to service a piece of work.” Aldredge won an Oscar for the film.

Theoni Aldredge was born on August 22, 1922, in Salonika, Greece, as Theoni Athanasiou Vachlioti. She was the daughter of a surgeon general of the Greek Army and a member of the Greek parliament. As a child, Aldredge collected dolls and was fixated on their clothes.

She graduated from the American School in Athens, Greece, in 1949 and decided on theater as a career. On her way to attend acting school in Chicago, Aldrege stopped in New York. There she attended a showing of the film Caesar and Cleopatra (1945). “A strange thing happened,” Aldredge said. “I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the flowing garments worn by Vivien Leigh. People can look so beautiful in clothes. I said to myself ‘there is a mystery to costume,’ and that’s when it started.”

Theoni Aldredge

Aldredge studied at the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago. There she met the actress Geraldine Page. Page told Aldredge to look her up when she came to New York, and Aldredge’s first Broadway job was designing Elia Kazan’s production of Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) for Page.

On Broadway, Aldredge designed costumes for some of the most famous musicals of the modern era, including A Chorus Line (1975), 42nd Street (1980), and Dreamgirls (1981). She won three Tony Awards, for her work on Annie (1977), Barnum (1980), and La Cage Aux Folles (1984). Aldredge was producer Joe Papp’s main designer at the New York Shakespeare Festival for more than twenty years. “Papp made me learn my craft, whether I liked it or not,” Aldredge told the New York Times in 2001. “He paid me $80 a week. I’d say, ‘Joe, that’s not enough for my cigarettes.’ He’d say, ‘You have to stop smoking.’”

Bruce Dern and Mia Farrow in The Great Gatsby (1974).

Theoni Aldredge’s costume sketch for Bette Midler in The Rose (1979).

Cher in Moonstruck (1987).

Aldredge began designing for films in Greece, with Stella (1955) starring Melina Mercouri. Aldredge continued designing for Mercouri films—including Never on Sunday (1960) and Phaedra (1962)—even as she was finding her footing on Broadway. Aldredge designed for Broadway and film concurrently. Her film credits include Network (1976), Semi-Tough (1977), Moonstruck (1987), Ghostbusters (1984), and Addams Family Values (1993).

“She didn’t try to over-glamorize me, which I appreciated,” Jacqueline Bisset said of Aldredge’s designs for her wardrobe in Rich and Famous (1981). Bisset and Aldredge shared a similar view about what Bisset’s character—a moderately successful writer—would wear. “The old tweed coat, a nice cashmere sweater, jumpers, and shirts. I was believably dressed,” Bisset said. “I didn’t feel my character was fashion-y; she was just okay with her clothes, but not more. The wardrobe looked like what my character would wear based on what she earned.”

The designer married Tom Aldredge in 1953, and the couple was married until Theoni’s death on January 21, 2011, in Stamford, Connecticut, at the age of eighty-eight.