Frankly, my dear

The story opens in 1861, during the mythologised closing days of the American Old South, a world depicted as lazy, charming, and gentle. But civil war is already on everyone’s lips, and before long the terrible conflict has destroyed Scarlett O’Hara’s world. Stripped of most of her illusions – except the stubborn, mistaken belief that she loves Ashley Wilkes, instead of the dashing Rhett – Scarlett hardens, but she endures. It was a modern, female-centred, war-torn epic, its unusual blend of romance and cynicism offering a new version of the American dream.

First published on 30 June 1936, the novel was an immediate, roaring success, selling a million copies in less than six months before becoming the bestselling American novel of all time. With total sales exceeding 30 million, it has been translated into at least 27 languages, 300,000 copies still selling each year. The producer, David O. Selznick, snapped up the film rights, and instantly began planning the epic to end all epics. He roped in writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ben Hecht, and Anita Loos (Fitzgerald only lasted about ten days), while his ballyhooed ‘Search for Scarlett’ had the most famous actresses of the day – Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Irene Dunne, Katharine Hepburn, Lana Turner – fighting for the role, before the unknown British actress Vivien Leigh carried it off. Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn were considered for Rhett Butler, before Selznick secured everyone’s first choice, the King of old Hollywood, Clark Gable.

The film smashed all records upon its release in 1939, and reviews were ecstatic. It premiered in racially segregated Atlanta; the film’s Black cast members were not invited. This did not prevent white America from going into immediate raptures over the film, even as Black audiences sharply criticised its apologia for slavery. It soon became an international triumph, exporting its romantic but deeply inaccurate version of American history around the world, through war-torn Europe and beyond.

Selznick’s determination to increase the glamour quotient sometimes made author Margaret Mitchell howl with laughter, as when he created in Tara a palatial home that would never have been built on a Georgia plantation in the 1840s. But his extravagant vision is what made the film epitomise the ultimate glamour of old Hollywood. Its ravishing costumes, heightened Technicolor palette, sweeping panoramas, exciting spectacles, and lush, romantic music, along with its sharp, often witty script, and Oscar-winning performances (including Hattie McDaniel, the first Black actor to win an Academy Award), mean that it continues to cast its spell.

But most of all there was the legendary romance of Scarlett and Rhett, who survive the ruin of war, emerging as unrepentant oligarchs, in a love story that displaced much of its erotic energy (evading the film censorship of the 1930s) into the glamour of its setting and look.

Indeed, the film’s costumes have become legendary in their own right, thanks not only to their beauty, but also to the cinematic mythology surrounding them. The opening barbecue features Scarlett in a white dress with a green spring pattern over an enormous crinoline hoop skirt, and a matching straw hat with velvet bow – after the audience has just seen her clutching a bed post and gasping as Mammy pulls her corset tighter, to get her into that dress. Later, after the war, comes the unforgettable olive and gold velvet gown, also hooped, that Scarlett creates from her mother’s curtains, complete with a belt made from the silk cords and tassels. It is followed by a dramatic, lattice-cut-sleeved black-and-white robe on her riverboat honeymoon with Rhett, so iconic that a Scarlett Barbie doll comes gowned in it, and it is one of the star lots in Bonhams’ Classic Hollywood Sale in Los Angeles in December. Then there’s the sheath-style clinging scarlet satin gown that Rhett forces Scarlett to wear when confronting rumours of an affair with Ashley (a very 1930s silhouette, the only anachronistic gown in the film).

Hoops were invented in Europe to show off the sumptuous fabrics that only aristocrats could, at first, afford. But hoops were also, historically, more liberating for women than their reputation suggests, contributing greatly to their popularity. Crinolines were light and airy, dispensing with layers of heavy petticoats that dragged the wearer down. They freed the legs, making their wearers feel more mobile despite their cumbersome size. Wide skirts minimised the waist and emphasised the hips, exaggerating the female form; they were also suspected of popularity because of their ability to hide pregnancy for longer.

As a result, they were also considered risqué: a sudden breeze or movement could reveal an ankle or even a semi-nude leg, with the suggestiveness of nothing but a chemise and a corset above – a sexiness to which the film alludes when Scarlett first sees Rhett staring appreciatively upwards at her on the stairs and whispers: “He looks as if ... as if he knows what I look like without my shimmy,” or chemise. All of this is suggested by Walter Plunkett’s clever and historically accurate costume designs for the film, including the sketch of Scarlett scandalously dancing in her widow’s weeds, revealing her feet and ankles.

But although the hoop may have felt comparatively liberating, it remained deeply impractical, of course, and helped spur the dress reform movement led by Amelia Bloomer and other feminists. Scarlett’s hoop skirts mark her as an aristocrat of the Old South, not only because of the sheer expense of the costume, but because not being able to work in your clothes puts you in the leisure class. As Susan B. Anthony put it: “I can see no business avocation, in which woman in her present dress can possibly earn equal wages with man.” After the war, women like Scarlett began working – Scarlett’s scandalous determination to visit her lumber mills on her own would be virtually impossible in hoop skirts. Her dresses in the second half of the film reflect the rapid decline in popularity of the crinoline skirt after the Civil War ended in 1865, as the sumptuous fabric shifted into bustles and trains in public and flowing draperies at home, like the dramatic black-and-white gown Scarlett wears on honeymoon with Rhett in 1868.