The Designer I Should Have Known

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition, Costume Art, I kept drifting back toward the same dress. It was white and heavily embellished, almost like something a modern Greek goddess would wear. Somehow it felt incredibly current despite being decades old — the kind of dress I could genuinely imagine wanting to wear someday to a black-tie gala or formal event. What was strange was that it did not even dominate the room.

Costume Art was overflowing with dramatic pieces, tourists moving from gallery to gallery, cameras flashing, people trying to absorb everything at once. But every time I wandered into another room, I somehow ended up standing in front of that dress again. Eventually I looked down at the placard. Gilbert Adrian. The name meant absolutely nothing to me. That genuinely surprised me because I spend an embarrassing amount of time reading about fashion history. On Queen Esther, I have researched Jewish designers, beauty founders, retailers, and Hollywood costume legends before. I had even written about Edith Head, the famous costume designer behind films like Rear Window, Roman Holiday, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But somehow, I had never heard of Gilbert Adrian.

The second I got home, I Googled him. That was when I learned Gilbert Adrian was born Adrian Adolph Greenburg to a Jewish family in Connecticut. While studying design in Paris during the 1920s, he was encouraged to professionalize his name into “Gilbert Adrian” because it sounded less identifiably Jewish and supposedly fit Hollywood better. The more I read, the stranger it felt that I had never known his name before. Adrian designed costumes for Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, and Judy Garland. He helped shape the sharp silhouettes and glamorous image that became classic Hollywood itself. Then I discovered he designed Dorothy’s ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz.

I had grown up recognizing the shoes instantly without ever knowing the person who created them.

And suddenly that felt oddly symbolic of Hollywood itself.

The actresses remained famous. The images remained famous. But many of the designers, photographers, costume creators, and image-makers behind them slowly faded into the background.

While researching Jewish figures in fashion history, I have kept noticing how many changed their names, softened parts of their identities, or became disconnected from the work they helped create.

Sometimes the image survives longer than the person behind it. Only a few dresses away from Adrian’s were designs by Tory Burch and Michael Kors, two Jewish American designers whose names currently feel impossible not to recognize.

Right now their names are almost bigger than the clothes themselves. But standing there, I kept wondering whether fifty years from now museum visitors will still recognize the stories behind them too.

Or whether someone my age will someday stand in front of one of their dresses, stare at it for several minutes, look down at the placard, and think:

Wait, who was that again?