Jean Louis is pictured here with Rita Hayworth and Elizabeth Courtney on the set of Affair in Trinidad, around 1952.
Photo: Sunset Boulevard/Getty Images
Even though he designed two of the most iconic dresses of Hollywood’s Golden Age—the strapless black satin gown worn by Rita Hayworth and the sparkling nude illusion dress Marilyn Monroe wore while singing “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy—French-born costume designer Jean Louis isn’t as famous as his peers like Adrian, Edith Head, or Travis Banton. The new book Jean Louis: Hollywood’s Bombshell Designer (Rizzoli), written by biographer brothers Roger and Mauricio Padilha, aims to set the record straight. According to Mauricio, Louis’s legacy is all about high glamour—a sharp contrast to today’s on-screen realism. But things might be shifting: the authors point to young stars like Sabrina Carpenter and Anya Taylor-Joy, who are bringing back the sparkle and allure of old Hollywood style, as a sign that people are craving the more theatrical look that Louis was known for.
Louis was married three times, and his last wife was Loretta Young, who inherited his estate and later passed it on to her son. She gave the Padilha brothers full access to Louis’s archives, and they also watched all 188 films he worked on. It’s a testament to his talent that he could convey glamour so vividly even in black and white—though Mauricio notes that Louis, who once worked at a Paris couture house, was also a wonderful colorist. Below, the Padilhas share their thoughts on the man and his work.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
How do you choose the subjects for your books?
Mauricio Padilha: We pick people we admire, as well as artists we feel may have been somewhat forgotten over time or didn’t get the recognition they deserved.
Roger Padilha: We’ve always worked in fashion and have written books about fashion designers and fashion-related figures, but Hollywood was really our entry point. As kids, we weren’t so much into fashion magazines as we were into old movies. I think it was called the four o’clock movie. After school, there was a TV channel that played these classic films. Our real introduction to fashion came through the glamorous world of Hollywood.
MP: When Roger and I were kids, we’d watch Marilyn Monroe specials on TV—they were on all the time in the ’80s and ’90s. They always showed her walking in and singing “Happy Birthday,” and we were just captivated by that performance, which lasted less than a minute. It was so sparkly and sweet—I think it made us gay, but I’m not 100% sure.
After finishing our last book, New York After Dark, we were trying to decide what to do next. Roger and I wanted to get back to writing about designers, which is what led us to start with the Steven Sprouse book.
Marlene Dietrich wearing Jean Louis, around 1953.
Photo: John Engstead / Courtesy of Rizzoli
Mugler, spring 1998 couture.
Photo: Condé Nast Archive
Why do we know the names Adrian, Edith Head, and Travis Banton, but not Jean Louis?
RP: There are a few reasons. One of the main ones is that Columbia wasn’t as big a studio as MGM or RKO. For its first couple of decades, it was seen as a B-movie studio, so it didn’t have the press agents pushing its designers the way other studios did for Adrian or Edith Head.
Another factor is that Jean Louis was very insecure. He was only 5’2″. Even though he’d lived here since around 1938, he never fully mastered English. In a strange way, that gave him a certain mystique. But it didn’t help his legacy.
Even when he won his Oscar—it’s really funny, you can see it online—Elizabeth Taylor announces his name, he walks down the aisle, grabs the Oscar, and…He walks off without giving a speech. Elizabeth Taylor is like, “What do I do now?”
Femme Fatales: Rita Hayworth in Gilda, 1946.
Photo: Courtesy of Rizzoli
Femme Fatales: Jean Louis for Rita Hayworth.
Photo: Courtesy of Rizzoli
Nicole Kidman in a Gilda-inspired Chanel dress at Vogue World: Hollywood, 2025.
Photo: Jerritt Clark / Getty Images
What do you know about Jean Louis before he came to New York?
RP: Jean Louis’s family wasn’t in fashion at all; his father actually supplied ships. But they lived just blocks from Place Vendôme, so as a child he was in the neighborhood where high fashion was born, and that influenced him. As a kid, he was obsessed with hats and would sketch them all the time. He did go to fashion school, and then he started working for the house of Drecoll.
MP: [Which was] next door to Schiaparelli.
RP: It’s not a well-known couture house now, but it was huge back then. That’s where he perfected his craft. While he was there, he got hit by a taxi and received, I think, around 2000 francs… so that’s how he ended up in New York.
MP: He was saving money to go to Greece and just have fun, but then his friends were coming to New York, and they convinced him to join them. He came over on the Queen Mary.
Did he serve in the military?
RP: He was in the army for a year.
MP: He served in the French Army before 1936, before he came here.
RP: I couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t part of World War II.
Show Girls: Jean Louis for Dorothy Lamour in Lulu Belle, 1948.
Photo: Courtesy of Rizzoli
Show Girls: Jean Louis for Claudia Cardinale in Blindfold, 1966.
Photo: Bettmann
When I worked at the Museum at FIT, we did an exhibition on Hattie Carnegie [a famous, fancy dressmaking establishment in New York where many designers got their start], so it stood out to me that Jean Louis worked there.
RP: Hattie Carnegie originally didn’t want to hire Jean Louis. She just happened to have his sketches on her desk, and when Irene Dunne walked in to order dresses, she saw the sketches and said, “Oh, I want these.” So that’s how he got the job.
MP: He worked there with Pauline Trigère, Norman Norell, and James Galanos. He stayed friends with James his whole life.
RP: Jean Louis actually funded James Galanos’s first collection.
Ingénues: Jean Louis for Kim Novak in Picnic, 1955.
Photo: Archive Photos / Getty Images
Ingénues: Jean Louis for Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits, 1961.
Photo: Ernst Haas / Getty Images
What else did you uncover?
RP: Through public records, I was able to piece together a good history of his early years. Even back in the ’30s, if you traveled by ship, your name would be in the newspaper. So I could look him up and see all the trips he was taking and compare the passenger lists, which is how I became convinced he had a long-term boyfriend because the same man was on the same ships as him. And then that person eventually started working in movies as well.
So it was about piecing things together, but during his retirement, Jean Louis was encouraged by his wife, Maggie [Fisher Louis], to start writing a book. We got the original proposals for that book. I guess they never went ahead, but there were sample chapters, and there was a lot about his childhood in there too.
MP: She would interview him, thank goodness, for Margaret. And then we also found an AFI [American Film Institute] interview that was 120 pages. It was a really detailed interview they did with Jean Louis right before he passed away… that really helped us with some things we didn’t know about. We didn’t know that he had done all the costumes for Sandra Dee for Gidget, but he wasn’t credited.
Goddesses: Jean Louis for Rita Hayworth for Down to Earth, 1947.
Photo: Sunset Boulevard / Getty Images
Goddesses: Jean Louis for Rhonda Fleming, Serpent of the Nile, 1953.
Photo: United Archives / Getty Images
Who was Margaret?
MP: She was a journalist [who had been] a fit model at Hattie Carnegie; that’s how theWe met. Jean Louis had actually been married once before, to a woman who passed away just seven months after their wedding. She was 20 to 30 years older than him, so we’re not entirely sure why they tied the knot. Less than a year after her death, he married Margaret. Her father was a dignitary, and she worked as a model and painter before eventually becoming a journalist in Hollywood.
Roger, tell her about the Lavender Scare.
RP: The Lavender Scare was similar to the McCarthy hearings. The FBI was aggressively targeting people rumored to be gay and causing all kinds of trouble for them.
Well, of course, we can’t know for sure, but based on all our research, we’ve guessed that these were marriages of convenience—arrangements with professional friends of Jean Louis. I believe he was a gay man working in a very tough environment and era to be gay. He never came out publicly, and while we can’t confirm it, to me, it’s pretty clear.
MP: Basically, he could have lost his career. So I think he made an agreement with these women. He did love Margaret—he even asked to be buried with her. They were best friends and soulmates, and he truly cared for her, but I think it was also a way to protect his career from being ruined during those times by something that seems trivial now but was very serious then.
Working Girls: Jean Louis for Judy Holliday in The Solid Gold Cadillac, 1956.
Photo: Silver Screen Collection / Getty Images
During the Depression and the war years, movies offered a crucial escape. There were also fewer entertainment options back then.
RP: I think escapism is one factor, but there’s also practicality. Most women in the 1940s and ’50s made their own clothes and knew how to sew. Many of the fashions shown on Christian Dior’s runways in Paris were actually sent back to America as patterns. Not all of us have the skill to sew our own clothing. If I did, I wouldn’t just be wearing tank tops—I’d be wearing something cooler, I hope.
MP: While going through the archives, I found boxes and boxes of forecasting illustrations from Europe from the 1940s and late ’30s. They featured strips of small illustrations along the top and bottom. What I found interesting was that Jean Louis was giving the American public a glimpse of European fashion trends. He definitely stayed up to date with everything happening in Europe, and I think that comes from his background in couture.
Scandal Queens: Jean Louis for Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly Last Summer, 1959.
Photo: Courtesy of Rizzoli
Scandal Queens: Jean Louis for Ann Margret in Bus Riley’s Back in Town, 1964.
Photo: Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images
Scandal Queens: Jean Louis for Vivien Leigh in Ship of Fools, 1965.
Photo: Archive Photos / Getty Images
Flipping through your book, it struck me that Jean Louis wasn’t just creating glamour—he was doing it largely in black and white. Can you talk about that?
MP: I have to admit, it frustrated me that there were all these amazing Technicolor movies, but no color photographs of them. For Pillow Talk with Doris Day, every scene uses a different color, and the costumes match the set. For example, on a mustard yellow set, she’d wear green, or on a gray set, she’d be in red with leopard print. Everything Jean Louis did made the actresses stand out. A lot of the images in our book are black and white when they could have been in color, but back then, newspapers, magazines, and the studios were cheap.
RP: Looking at all his movies, he was actually a fantastic colorist. You can see that when you find rare color photos of his work or in his later color films. By 1955, TV was taking over, so movies had to offer bigger landscapes and wilder plots. That’s when the Hays Code started to loosen because films were competing with television.
Do you see a shift in cu…RP: Funny enough, I think that was Steven Sprouse’s doing. He was the first fashion designer who really looked toward music, and then Versace, on a bigger scale, carried that forward. I think what we’re seeing now is the full realization of his vision. Even in his personal artwork, like when he painted Iggy Pop crucified, he was basically saying that rock and roll is the new religion. And I think he was definitely ahead of his time on that.
With the counterculture revolution, people definitely started gravitating more toward pop stars. The clothing of rock and roll performers and pop stars felt more within reach than what was happening in Hollywood. You could rip up some jeans, get some cheap tattoos, and look just like your favorite rock star. But it’s a lot harder to pull off Marlene Dietrich as a Russian princess draped in miles of mink.
MP: You see clothing in movies that you now see on everyday people in the street. Movies aren’t the escape they used to be. In the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, you’d see feathers, jewels, and glamour—the Grand Hotel and all these places you’d never encounter in daily life. Now, when you go to a movie, it’s pretty much about being as realistic as possible. People wear T-shirts and jeans, and they don’t really dress up or do wild musical numbers. So I think times have changed, and the influence of movies has changed too.
That’s why I think it’s so important to highlight Jean Louis. I got so excited when you did Vogue World Hollywood and Nicole Kidman came out in the Chanel copy of Jean Louis’s Gilda dress—it showed that it all started there. Then you went to Doja Cat dressed as Tina Turner, so it showed the whole range, from where it began to where we are now.
What kind of lessons might be in your research that can help us better understand how we exist in fashion or in the world today?
MP: With Jean Louis, I think his legacy is glamour. It’s over-the-top glamour, but done in a very understated, modern way. That Gilda dress could be worn by anyone today to a black-tie event and look amazing; it’s timeless. The Marilyn Monroe Happy Birthday dress has been copied a thousand times. Last year, Selena Gomez wore a Ralph Lauren version of it to the Oscars, and then she went to Taylor Swift’s wedding wearing another version, I believe by Oscar de la Renta. So a young generation is kind of obsessed with some of the things he did. I think they want to take that old Hollywood glamour and bring it back.
I see actresses who wear T-shirts and jeans on TV shows and in movies, but when they hit the red carpet, they go all out with full glamour from the old Hollywood days. That’s pretty much the only place they’re allowed to do that nowadays, so I think it holds importance. People want that, but modern life hasn’t adjusted to it as well. I think that’s one of Jean Louis’s legacies: he was one of the designers who created gowns like that, and they’re still being copied today.
RP: Thinking back to your question about what this means for the future of fashion, I think history is cyclical. It’s only very recently that designers, stylists, and hair and makeup people are finally getting credit for the work they did behind those angelic star images that people are obsessed with. Thirty years ago, we didn’t know or care who designed Marilyn Monroe’s clothing, hair, or makeup—it was just Marilyn. I think getting to know who these artists were, what their motivations were, and looking at their body of work is really important for understanding our visual culture.Fashion history in this world is especially significant when you consider that two of Jean Louis’ dresses are arguably the most famous in pop culture history—the Gilda dress and Marilyn Monroe’s “Happy Birthday” dress. Even though I think Adrian, Edith Head, and Orly-Kelly were all geniuses, if you asked someone on the street, “Do you know what these two dresses are?” I imagine most people over 25 would recognize the Marilyn Monroe dress and the Gilda dress, and those are both Jean Louis.
Romantics: Jean Louis for Sandra Dee in If a Man Answers, 1962.
Photo: Alexandre Fuchs / Getty Images
Romantics: Jean Louis for Claudia Cardinale in The Hell With Heroes, 1968.
Photo: John Springer Collection / Getty Images
How did you organize the book?
RP: We watched all 188 movies that Jean Louis designed for, and they weren’t the most progressive films. Women are treated very poorly, and there’s a lot of racism. They’re 1940s movies, so they don’t align with our modern moral standards. It was challenging to figure out how to present his work in a contemporary context. We decided to organize the chapters around different female archetypes. I wasn’t going to ignore the fact that the ingénue archetype has problematic aspects, but it gave us a way to structure the book while also showing that these were different times.
MP: In ’40s film noir, every woman is a sexy gangster’s moll. They get slapped around and aren’t taken seriously. I literally watched 20 movies where the main female character gets slapped at least twice in each one. In the ’50s, you have Judy Holliday and Doris Day, and women are becoming more respected—they can work in an office, but only as secretaries, not CEOs. In the ’60s—and this is why I think Marilyn’s dress is important—she took the sexuality that everyone exploited in the ’40s and ’50s, had that dress made, walked on that stage, and was in control. So I see a progression of what women were allowed to do, up to the point where Marilyn had the courage to take that power and use it to her advantage.
RP: There was a huge cultural shift between the ’50s and ’60s, and Marilyn was smart enough to understand image and realize that her image could have stayed stuck in the ’50s. I think this was her way of aligning herself with the Kennedys, who were this incredibly young, dynamic political couple. It was a way for her to present a new image of herself. Her hair and everything else took on a ’60s modernism. Marilyn was a master of image, and she understood that things were changing, and she was trying to find her place in the world.
Click here to listen to Nicole Phelps speak with Roger and Mauricio Padilha on The Runthrough Podcast.
Jean Louis for Marlene Dietrich.
Photo: Courtesy of Rizzoli
Marlene Dietrich in Jean Louis.
Photo: John Engstead / Courtesy of Rizzoli
Thierry Mugler, fall 2005 ready-to-wear
Photo: Eric Rovert / Getty Images
Rihanna at the 2014 CFDA Awards in Adam Selman.
Photo: Larry Busacca / Getty Images
Jean Louis: Hollywood’s Bombshell Designer by Roger Padilha and Mauricio Padilha. (Rizzoli)
Photo: Courtesy of Rizzoli
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs about Jean Louis the legendary Hollywood costume designer
General Background
Q Who was Jean Louis
A He was a famous Hollywood costume designer most active from the 1940s through the 1970s He dressed some of the biggest stars in history including Marilyn Monroe Rita Hayworth and Marlene Dietrich
Q Why havent I heard of him if he was so famous
A Costume designers often work behind the scenes Unlike actors or directors their names arent widely known to the public even if their work is iconic Youve probably seen his designs without realizing who made them
Q What is he most famous for designing
A He is most famous for two things designing the legendary bejeweled nude dress Marilyn Monroe wore to sing Happy Birthday to President Kennedy in 1962 and for creating the stunning backless nude dress for Rita Hayworth in the film Gilda
Q Where did he start his career
A He was born in Paris and started as a milliner He moved to Hollywood and began working for costume house Irene Inc before becoming the head designer at Columbia Pictures
His Work Signature Style
Q What was Jean Louiss signature style
A He was a master of glamour and structure He loved using luxurious fabrics like silk and velvet and he was famous for creating gowns that were incredibly fitted and dramatic He knew how to accentuate a womans figure
Q What does a nude dress mean in costume design
A It doesnt mean the actress is naked Its a dress made of sheer skincolored fabric that is heavily embellished with beads sequins or crystals It gives the illusion of nudity while being completely covered
Q Did he only design dresses for women
A While he was primarily known for stunning womens gowns his job at the studio also involved designing costumes for men including suits and military uniforms though he is less famous for that work
Q Who were some of the other actresses he dressed