Back to School - Most Stylish Films

The American Films -

Laura, with Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews

The Thomas Crown Affair, with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway

Bonnie and Clyde, with Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty

The Hunger, with Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie

American Gigolo, with Richard Gere and Lauren Hutton

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman

Charade, with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant

Arabesque, with Sophia Loren and Gregory Peck

Mahogany, with Diana Ross and Billy Dee Williams

The Eyes of Laura Mars, with Faye Dunaway and Tommy Lee Jones

Shanghai Express, with Marlene Deitrich and Anna May Wong

The Foreign Films -

Breathless, with Jean Paul Belmondo and Jean Seburg

Purple Noon, with Alain Delon

La Dolce Vita, with Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, and Anouk Aimee

8 ½, with Marcello Mastroianni

The Leopard, with Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, and Alain Delon

In The Mood For Love, with Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chui Wai

A Death in Venice, with Dirk Bogarde

Blowup, with David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave

Belle du Jour, with Catherine Deneuve

Last Year at Marienbad

"More shoes, but you're already bought be dozens."

Arabesque is a 1966 thriller starring Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren. The movie is based on Gordon Cotler's novel The Cypher and directed by Stanley Donen, who also directed Charade, Indiscreet, and Funny Face.

The plot, involving an evil Arab industrialist, and assassination attempt, and Loren as an Arab double agent and Peck as a bumbling Oxford professor, is not important. What stands out in this movie is Loren’s Marc Bohan designed Christian Dior wardrobe and a pivotal scene in her dressing room with dozen’s of pairs of Roger Vivier shoes. Vivier also designed the shoes for Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour.

Venezia, Visconti, and Karl

Death in Venice, Luchino Visconti's adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel, is the very definition of sumptuous: the costumes and sets, the special geography of Venice, and the breathtaking cinematography combine to form a heady experience. At the center of this gorgeousness is Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde in a meticulous performance), a controlled intellectual who unexpectedly finds himself obsessed by the vision of Tadzio, a 14-year-old boy, while on a convalescent vacation in 1911. Karl Lagerfeld showed his 2010 Chanel Cruise collection in Venice, at the same beach setting as the film. The collection included a few men’s looks borrowed straight from Tadzio’s wardrobe, and shown on Karl’s own obsessions, Brad Kroenig and Baptiste Giabiconi.

I Am Belle de Jour

In Luis Buñuel’s1967 Belle de Jour, Catherine Deneuve plays Severine, a beautiful young women married to a doctor. She loves her husband, but cannot bring herself to be physically intimate with him, his caresses failing to satisfy her psychic need for brutal degradation. She indulges instead in vivid, kinky, erotic fantasies to entertain her sexual desires. Eventually she becomes a prostitute, working in a brothel in the afternoons from two to five, the mystery of her matinée schedule causing her to be christened Belle de jour.

Deneuve’s wardrobe for the movie was designed by then 29 year old Yves Saint-Laurent. He and Deneuve developed a lifelong friendship on the set of the film, the designer calling her his “muse.”

Slim is a Lady

Slim Keith was a socialite and fashion icon during the 1950s and 1960s. She is perhaps best known, along with her friend Babe Paley, as the thinly veiled inspiration for the characters in Truman Capote’s novel, Answered Prayers.

Slim launched the career of a young Lauren Bacall when she spotted Lauren on the cover of Bazaar, and suggested her for a part in To Have and Have Not, with Humphrey Bogart, directed by her then husband Howard Hawks. Her second husband was the theatrical producer, Leland Hayward. They were such a popular couple in the 1950’s, and she such a fashion icon, that they rated a mention in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. When Grace Kelly’s character in the film mentions meeting the couple for cocktails, Jimmy Stewart asks, “Now tell me, what was Mrs. Hayward wearing?”

Her final marriage was to Sir Kenneth Keith, Baron of Castleacre. Slim had become Lady Keith. "God blessed me with a happy spirit and many other gifts. What I was not blessed with I went out and got. Sometimes the price was too high, but I've never been much of a bargain hunter."

All the fringe benefits

Everyone knows about Givenchy and Breakfast at Tiffany's. But for real style, watch Patricia Neal and her Pauline Trigère wardrobe. Trigère was the French born American designer popular in the '50s, '60, and '70s. ''Fashion is what people tell you to wear,'' she often said. ''Style is what comes from your own inner thing.'' Of course the most stylish thing Patricia does in the movie, is write her "boy" a check for $1000 to take a girl on vacation. "I am a very stylish girl."

The VIPs

It all started with Elizabeth Taylor and the V.I.P.s. The V.I.P.s is a movie from 1963 starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and directed by Anthony Asquith. The movie is about a group of travelers waiting in the V.I.P lounge at a London airport for their fog grounded New York bound flight. The significant detail in this film is the custom mink rain coat that was made for Miss Taylor for the movie. In a famous antidote from the making of the movie, Liz kept giving away the custom coats to crew members on the set.