There’s a very sensuous moment in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1946 postwar classic Notorious. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman step out onto the porch of a Miami bungalow and into the late-night breeze. He’s in a cool dark suit, she’s in a shimmering zebra-print top that reveals a slash of bare midriff—code for “bad girl” in the 1940s.
“Don’t you need a coat?” Grant’s T.R. Devlin asks her.
“You’ll do,” Bergman’s hedonistic Alicia Huberman shoots back. Then, to protect her from the cold, he wraps his handkerchief around her waist and leans in closely.
Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection
Hitchcock’s films are full of little costume touches, where scarves and handbags, glasses and ties, are used as narrative tools for romance, disguise, and even murder. Throughout the film, Grant and Bergman bring the heat to their secret love affair, but it’s this scene that sets the simmering tension. For Alicia, the handkerchief will become a symbol of their first meeting, before she realizes he is a government agent sent to recruit her to seduce a Nazi collaborator in Rio de Janeiro.
It’s been 80 years since Notorious was released in the United States, and it’s still as impactful as ever. Ingrid Bergman’s Alicia haunted Jonathan Anderson’s pre-show trailer for his debut Dior cruise 2027 show, with actress Alison Oliver as stylish and reckless as Bergman behind the wheel of her convertible, laughing manically as the wind whipped through her hair.
There’s a reason Notorious is on the moodboard for designers like Anderson. Not only was it the film that confirmed Hitchcock’s position as the “master of suspense”—with its Nazi spy rings and uranium hidden in wine bottles—but it also has an important place in Hitchcock lore, and indeed in cinematic history.
Notorious was the director’s first collaboration with legendary costume designer Edith Head, she of the eight Oscar wins and 35 nominations over her 70-year career, and who as head costume designer at Paramount Pictures created such classics as Bette Davis’s chocolate-brown, shoulder-slipping cocktail dress in All About Eve, Audrey Hepburn’s blouse and skirt for nipping around the Colosseum on a scooter in Roman Holiday, and Elizabeth Taylor’s light-as-air strapless white gown in A Place in the Sun.
But most famous of all is her collaboration with Hitchcock. She designed for 11 Hitchcock films, including Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, The Birds, and Marnie, and she created Vera Miles’s wardrobe in Psycho. Think of a classic Hitchcock scene, and there’s a good chance Edith Head was involved.
