Ithaca earned the moniker “The Biggest Little City” when, from 1914-1919, it was home to Wharton, Inc. Studio, a bustling movie production company that produced dozens of films and serials starring some of the best-known movie actors of the day: Irene Castle, Lionel Barrymore, and Pearl White. The Biggest Little Fashion City: Ithaca and Silent Film Style is a play on Ithaca’s well-deserved title, and explores how silent film revolutionized dress and fashion communication in the 19-teens and 1920s. We begin with fashions from the 1910s and end with the late 1920s, thus spanning the heyday of the silent film era. Film showed, through moving pictures, changes in dress, accessories and hair. By including garments worn by silent film stars like Irene Castle and Minnie Madden Fiske, and featuring designers who dressed silent film stars like Lucile (Lady Duff Gordon) and Paul Poiret, we show how silent film enabled new fashion possibilities, which were later adopted by the masses and came to epitomize 1920s style.

We take for granted the prevalence of moving image in our daily lives, whether television, film, or online videos; however, moving pictures were a brand new medium in the early 20th century. Silent films emerged as a new, immediate, and democratic means of communicating fashion information. In the early era of motion picture production costume departments were a rarity—it was the actors and actresses who put together wardrobes and selected their favorite fashions. Silent film stars were important arbiters of fashion and profoundly affected the styles we imagine when we think of 1920s fashion.