I wish I could be like Edith Head

I’m interchanging David Watts with Edith Head, mainly because Edith managed to become a David Watts, by creating her own niche in the film business.

Edith somehow got a job as a costume sketch artist at Paramount, with only rudimentary drawing skills. Well that’s how the mythology goes. But she managed to climb the slippery pole and become Chief Designer at a major studio.

When she started in Hollywood, men were the chief designers, and Edith was thrown the scraps. During her early years at Paramount she was taken under the wing of Travis Banton (the studios Chief Designer), who delegated the jobs he didn’t like (actresses were not his favourite species) to her. She found her niche designing costumes for women, incorporating the actress’s personal preferences into costume sketches; rather than foist her personal taste on them. Ordinary actors/actresses were commodities, so the idea of choice, was not part of their working lives. Naturally for those lucky to become extraordinary, there were benefits; larger salary, star status and a little more choice. Edith progresses by the drip-drip method, some of her clients became stars, with the power to request her services. When Benton left, Head was appointed his successor.

Edith kept the same look right up to her death; a short fringed hairstyle and round dark glasses. The dark glasses were a relic of the black and white days when designers would wear tinted lenses to check how their costumes would look on screen. The glasses gave her an inscrutable, ageless look. And coupled with the unchanging school teacher black/brown clothes and hairstyle; pre-empted the modern day fashion designers with their signature looks. Karl Lagerfeld is the most obvious candidate here.

She dressed both men and women, but it’s the gowns that made her famous. Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday; Grace Kelly in Rear Window and To Catch a Thief; even Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid , which was released after her death.

Edith managed to become David Watts, without actually being David Watts. And in many ways that’s what I’ve aspired to. If your personality precludes, becoming the head boy in the school, head of costume design, head of IT; then the Edith Head strategy is a possibility.

I was reminded of my own Edith Head Empire building when commenting on a Guardian blog. The piece was purported to show real IT peoples view of the IT crowd(C4 comedy show), by using a couple of project managers and a technical architect. In the course of venting my spleen, a whole host of memories came flooding back. But first here is my reaction posted on the Guardian website :


A late comment. The three people you use are representative of a certain type of what is termed non-technical person. The sort of tier in the department pyramid you can remove, and feel no pain whatsoever. The rise of the project manager has been happening since the 90s, outsourcing as one of those enlightened people punted as a new idea has been around for decades. I agree with whoever said this was a picture of times past – in terms of a big operation, the lone ranger geek type was culled big-time when the dot com bubble burst. So you started getting managers walking around talking about soft-skills and adding value, and all that shite. The weird thing about the IT crowd is they are clearly desktop-support , and no server-support(operations team) or development team exists. These of course can exist somewhere else in the world, but it would be a nice touch if they sometimes communicated (in a off stage way) with the IT Crowd. Rather like Carlton your doorman in the old American sitcom Rhoda.

But I left the following out, because it’s a bit too personal and serious for a comment on a comedy blog. No matter how secure you think your empire is, someone is going to find a way to topple it. The old adage nobodies indispensable may be a cliché, but it’s correct. I spent a good few years, mapping out my own little area, so I could keep out all those project managers and management speak types. To use one of the spineless ones sayings, I made my own “comfort zone”. Ah but that was not to last.


The pain would be a little easier if the mechanism for my personal toppling was by stealth, but it was obvious and without camouflage. Here’s the missing part of my comment:

Funnily enough my last employer re-employed all the outsourced people, including myself. Then (as most people predicted) made them redundant after a year or so. The outsourced people spent their time handing stuff over to people far away in Asia, and once they were done, chopped. Digging your own grave is the best analogy.

I wish I could be like Edith Head.