100 Unforgettable Dresses by Hal Rubenstein

Author:Hal Rubenstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061151668
Publisher: HarperCollins

DRAGON-LADY GOWN

Travis Banton | 1934

Wong Liu Tsong was the first female Asian-American movie star, a testimony to both her talent and her bewitching looks. But the fact that she achieved lasting fame—after her family thought it wise to rename her Anna May Wong—playing a stereotypical siren of menacing mystery is a telling commentary on the inherent racism that governed Hollywood in its early days.

She played Lotus Flower, the doomed heroine, in an adaptation of Madame Butterfly called The Toll of the Sea; the 1922 film became a surprise hit, partially because it was the first general release film shot totally in Technicolor, but also because of seventeen-year-old Wong’s unexpectedly mature and moving performance. Nonetheless, it’s pretty difficult to become a leading lady when you are ethnic Chinese in a country that forbids interracial marriage and has only one male Asian film star, Sussue Hayakawa. Instead of being able to parlay her success into major roles, Wong was first relegated to featured parts playing an Eskimo, an Indian, and the exotic Tiger Lily in the silent film version of Peter Pan. Her double-edged career-making and career-defining breakthrough came in 1924 when Hollywood’s biggest star, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., cast her as the scheming Mongol slave in his epic blockbuster The Thief of Bagdad. Simultaneously, a star and Hollywood’s “dragon lady” was born.

Though readily accepted on Broadway and the London stage, and welcomed as a film star in Europe (fluent in French and German, she made films in both countries), Wong was deemed too Chinese to play Chinese heroines in Hollywood, so the studios hired Helen Hayes, Myrna Loy, and German-born Luise Rainer to play Asian instead. But when it came to casting an irresistible “Oriental” vixen for a film like Daughter of the Dragon or Limehouse Blues, Wong was Hollywood’s girl. She was a knockout, in both her performance and her appearance.

For Limehouse Blues, Wong is in only two major scenes as Tu Tuan, but the gown Travis Banton created for her is far more memorable than the film: a streamlined and formfitting variation on the classic cheongsam, eliminating the diagonal button closure at the top, the piping, and the traditional printed embroidery. In its place, he worked with a high-necked, long-sleeved, curvaceous second skin of bias-cut high-sheen black satin that emphasized Wong’s lithe frame and height. But the spectacular highlight of the gown is the pair of dazzling, brilliantly executed gold-and-silver-sequin-scaled dragons, one running up the front of the dress, the other running down the back and along the nearly three-foot-long train. The gown was accessorized with big disk earrings, and Wong’s complete image was made all the more dramatic by her highly arched, drawn-on eyebrows and piercingly long fingernails.

If you’re going to be typecast as a dragon lady, then you might as well look as if anyone crossing you is playing with fire. And though actresses from every era continually gush about how much they relish playing wicked, too few have burned as brightly as Anna May Wong.

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