At one point in time, Alfred Hitchcock was the world’s most famous director, recognisable as much from his silhouette and customary cameos as his films. All of which begs the question if there’s any stone left uncovered in a career spanning from the silent era through to the mid-seventies. With a comprehensive examination of Hitchcock’s oeuvre through the focus of fashion, however, Caroline Young proves there’s always more to discover. Of course, the book covers some familiar ground — especially around the auteur’s reputation for tormenting his lead actresses, culminating in a sexual assault allegation from Tippi Hedren — yet Fashioning Hitchcock is a lively and insightful new entry into the bowing shelf of Hitchcock scholarship.
The book makes clear from its effervescent introduction that this story belongs as much to the costume designers as Hitchcock himself. As a critical examination of his works through this lens, providing deeper insight into character motivations, story complexity, and Hitchcock’s own inner workings, Young has crafted an uproarious success. Throughout, there’s acute analysis of the costumes, connecting them with film plots and themes, such as the deliberate cloth and colours used to garb Grace Kelly, or the precise way a purple dress had to unfurl in Topaz.
It also challenges the pervading notion of Hitchcock’s singular genius by telling the stories of his often overshadowed costume collaborators. Among them is Joe Strassner who, in the 1920s, was one of the top couturiers in Berlin and Paris, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Marlene Dietrich. His couture shop was targeted as part of a purge of Jewish businesses during the Nazi rise to power, and he fled Germany to become the first costume designer credited on a Hitchcock film. But much of the book covers the symbiotic relationship with one of the director’s most important collaborators, Edith Head, the self-styled ‘dress doctor’ who was partly responsible for the iconic Hitchcock Blonde.
For horror fans, Young explores the inspirations and creative processes of one of its most important influences, illuminating the key role clothing played in communicating that horror. Whether that’s dinner time conversations as a child about Jack the Ripper inspiring The Lodger — which Hitchcock himself said was his first film in earnest, establishing so much of his signature style — or Rebecca, his first American film, whose success spawned a wave of gothic melodrama. Chapter fourteen extensively covers Psycho and The Birds, the former beginning the sixties with a bloody bang and codifying cinema’s first ‘final girl’. When it comes to Psycho, no outfit is more important than that of Mrs. Bates. Yet, despite the attention to androgyny, gender bending and queerness in earlier chapters, there’s no meaningful mention of cross-dressing when it comes to Psycho, nor the net-negative impact the film had in cinemagoers’ minds that a ‘man’ in women’s clothing is a psychotic, perverted serial killer. In a book about how clothing transmutes and communicates, this feels like a major oversight. At least more can be found on Psycho’s role here and its many imitators in the ground-breaking 2020 documentary Disclosure.
Criticism aside, Fashioning Hitchcock is an intimate, affectionate, yet unflinching biography of the eponymous director, and an essential story of the talented costume designers that helped realise his vision. It’s also a celebration of the transformational power of great costuming, realised as much through the screen starlets as Hitchcock harnessing fashion as a storytelling device to encode signs and symbols in the viewers’ collective consciousness. This is an effortlessly readable resource with precise yet accessible prose, and textured with beautiful turns of phrase, like the final finishing touch on an elegant evening outfit.
WRITER
Caroline Young
PUBLISHER
Bloomsbury Academic
RELEASE
14 May 2026
