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Banton of Paramount: Haute Couture in Hollywood's Golden Age
An introduction to the career of Travis Banton, one of the preeminent costume/fashion designers of Hollywood’s Celebrated “Golden Age.” Working at Paramount Pictures from 1925 through 1938, Banton was responsible for creating the on-screen images of such legendary actresses as Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Mae West, and most notably Marlene Dietrich. His peers were Gilbert Adrian at MGM and Orry-Kelly at Warner Brothers; one of his proteges was the legendary designer Edith Head. Eschewing a potentially lucrative legal career, Banton attend the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts, the first school in New York City to offer courses in fashion design. This led to positions with the most famous and successful couturiéres of the day, the British Lady Duff-Gordon and Madame Frances who, despite her name, lived and worked in the United States. They both served as a training ground for Banton’s eventual move to Paramount Pictures in 1925. This celebration of his career and achievements is long overdue.
352 pages, Hardcover
Published May 19, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 3, 2026
🧵👗🎬👡🪡
Review:
When Old Hollywood not only dominated public entertainment, but the fashion became a lifestyle, Travis Banton’s designs were on everyone’s lips. Howard Gutner who has previously wrote the biographies of the other two members of the Hollywood Fashion big three finishes out his triumvirate with a man destined for the law who chose to create American Haute Couture from New York to Hollywood.
Travis Banton, a born Texan came from a family prestigious in the legal community and was expected to follow in their footsteps, but after high school in New Jersey, he pursued art and design school in NYC. He worked for the premier Lady Duff-Gordon’s fashion design where he learned that making a big production out of fashion (music, setting, ‘model’ characters, and entertainment) was a must. He designed for exclusive wealth, but broke into Broadway and then was tempted out to Hollywood in the 1920’s where he pioneered designing for the actress’ character and had a gift for working with the most temperamental of actresses to wear his work. He was one of the first to have extensive control over his fashions put into his contract and his was the opinion every American fashion journal awaited when he came back from Paris and NYC fashion week.
He made ‘talkie’ actresses the absolute word on chic, his Dragon Dress designed for one of his favorite actresses, Anna May Wong, is iconic. Fan and fashion magazines were rivaling Paris fashion at the height of the ‘30s and Travis Banton was an innovator on the lips of the fashion conscious. Marlene Dietrich’s fabulous furs or feathers, putting the word in to bring Claudine Colbert to Hollywood and “throw(ing) a bolt of material at Carole” Lombard to make her look great, and there was that wary first meet with Mae West after his DA uncle had to toss her in jail… he went with her ‘overstated and overdone’ look that made her iconic.
But, his laziness in letting assistants finish the last touches and his alcoholism were sadly catching up to him when he had to leave Paramount and was briefly signed with 20th Century Fox in 1940. He later did some WWII “canteener” wartime women’s uniform designs, and retired from movie design in 1951 after doing successful period drama costumes on several movies. However, he wasn’t done and designed for Television fashion designing for Dinah Shore and Rosalind Russell’s Auntie Mame Chinese Red PJ theater fame. His Rosalind Russell designs sent him out with a bang.
All in all, this delve into the Old Hollywood fashion glam was a feast for the eyes and Banton’s designs and style has lived on with each old movie on TV or video reproduction, new shows pulling out of storage the old costumes for reuse, and lush, historical biography books like Howard Gutner’s Banton of Paramount to peruse.
Rating: 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟
I rec’d a finished print copy from Globe Pequot to read in exchange for an honest review.
🧵👗🎬👡🪡
#BantonofParamount #HowardGutner #LyonsPress #Fashion #HauteCouture #GoldenAgeofHollywood #CostumeDesign
My full review will post at my Instagram page, @sophiarose1816 6.3.26.
Review:
When Old Hollywood not only dominated public entertainment, but the fashion became a lifestyle, Travis Banton’s designs were on everyone’s lips. Howard Gutner who has previously wrote the biographies of the other two members of the Hollywood Fashion big three finishes out his triumvirate with a man destined for the law who chose to create American Haute Couture from New York to Hollywood.
Travis Banton, a born Texan came from a family prestigious in the legal community and was expected to follow in their footsteps, but after high school in New Jersey, he pursued art and design school in NYC. He worked for the premier Lady Duff-Gordon’s fashion design where he learned that making a big production out of fashion (music, setting, ‘model’ characters, and entertainment) was a must. He designed for exclusive wealth, but broke into Broadway and then was tempted out to Hollywood in the 1920’s where he pioneered designing for the actress’ character and had a gift for working with the most temperamental of actresses to wear his work. He was one of the first to have extensive control over his fashions put into his contract and his was the opinion every American fashion journal awaited when he came back from Paris and NYC fashion week.
He made ‘talkie’ actresses the absolute word on chic, his Dragon Dress designed for one of his favorite actresses, Anna May Wong, is iconic. Fan and fashion magazines were rivaling Paris fashion at the height of the ‘30s and Travis Banton was an innovator on the lips of the fashion conscious. Marlene Dietrich’s fabulous furs or feathers, putting the word in to bring Claudine Colbert to Hollywood and “throw(ing) a bolt of material at Carole” Lombard to make her look great, and there was that wary first meet with Mae West after his DA uncle had to toss her in jail… he went with her ‘overstated and overdone’ look that made her iconic.
But, his laziness in letting assistants finish the last touches and his alcoholism were sadly catching up to him when he had to leave Paramount and was briefly signed with 20th Century Fox in 1940. He later did some WWII “canteener” wartime women’s uniform designs, and retired from movie design in 1951 after doing successful period drama costumes on several movies. However, he wasn’t done and designed for Television fashion designing for Dinah Shore and Rosalind Russell’s Auntie Mame Chinese Red PJ theater fame. His Rosalind Russell designs sent him out with a bang.
All in all, this delve into the Old Hollywood fashion glam was a feast for the eyes and Banton’s designs and style has lived on with each old movie on TV or video reproduction, new shows pulling out of storage the old costumes for reuse, and lush, historical biography books like Howard Gutner’s Banton of Paramount to peruse.
Rating: 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟
I rec’d a finished print copy from Globe Pequot to read in exchange for an honest review.
🧵👗🎬👡🪡
#BantonofParamount #HowardGutner #LyonsPress #Fashion #HauteCouture #GoldenAgeofHollywood #CostumeDesign
My full review will post at my Instagram page, @sophiarose1816 6.3.26.
November 16, 2025
Film and fashion lovers will adore this look at the impact of costume/clothes designer Travis Banton during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Mesmerizing!
October 13, 2025
Great research, photos and history of an exquisite time at Paramount Studios. Thanks to Edelweiss for the eARC.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Banton of Paramount is a beautifully illustrated exploration of the impact of Travis Banton’s costume design—mainly for Paramount Studios—during Hollywood’s golden years, from the silents to the coming of colour.
This isn’t a biography in the traditional sense. We learn relatively little about Banton’s personal life; instead, it focuses on his collaborations with some of the biggest female stars of the era, and the dialogue between costume design and high fashion.
I am a huge fan of classic film, and have read many books covering this period—its stars, directors, screenwriters, and studios—but I haven’t looked at costume design in this detail before.
In the silent days, leading ladies in glamorous roles were goddesses, and their clothes could be spectacular with little basis in practical reality. While the costumes took note of Parisian haute couture, actresses operated in more dimensions than models, so their clothes needed to bewitch regardless of the action required. They learned to stand and move to show the designs to their best advantage. When sound arrived, and these goddesses revealed earthy accents and diction, realism crept into both performance and costume. Greater innovation in cut, style, and fabric was needed to make designs feel convincingly real-world while retaining their glamour. As these looks became more attainable, the relationship with high-fashion houses began to shift. Hollywood started to lead.
Gutner explores Banton’s sometimes fractious collaborations with stars like Marlene Dietrich, Carole Lombard, and Mae West—whose stardom and curves disrupted decades of gamine dress design within and beyond the studios—as well as his work alongside designers such as Edith Head and Howard Greer. He also shows how costume could underscore or subvert character, and highlight empathy or tension between figures on screen.
His book offers real insight into a discipline I hadn’t quite appreciated in its own right. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and lingered long over the gorgeous images.
This isn’t a biography in the traditional sense. We learn relatively little about Banton’s personal life; instead, it focuses on his collaborations with some of the biggest female stars of the era, and the dialogue between costume design and high fashion.
I am a huge fan of classic film, and have read many books covering this period—its stars, directors, screenwriters, and studios—but I haven’t looked at costume design in this detail before.
In the silent days, leading ladies in glamorous roles were goddesses, and their clothes could be spectacular with little basis in practical reality. While the costumes took note of Parisian haute couture, actresses operated in more dimensions than models, so their clothes needed to bewitch regardless of the action required. They learned to stand and move to show the designs to their best advantage. When sound arrived, and these goddesses revealed earthy accents and diction, realism crept into both performance and costume. Greater innovation in cut, style, and fabric was needed to make designs feel convincingly real-world while retaining their glamour. As these looks became more attainable, the relationship with high-fashion houses began to shift. Hollywood started to lead.
Gutner explores Banton’s sometimes fractious collaborations with stars like Marlene Dietrich, Carole Lombard, and Mae West—whose stardom and curves disrupted decades of gamine dress design within and beyond the studios—as well as his work alongside designers such as Edith Head and Howard Greer. He also shows how costume could underscore or subvert character, and highlight empathy or tension between figures on screen.
His book offers real insight into a discipline I hadn’t quite appreciated in its own right. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and lingered long over the gorgeous images.
May 3, 2026
So. I have strongly mixed thoughts on this. On the one hand I'm fascinated by Golden Age Hollywood and it's great to find out more about a figure that I didn't really know much about. However, I think this is going to be one of those books where having a physical copy is going to be the key to your experience and enjoyment because I had an eproof via NetGalley and the formatting on it was a real issue. There were photo captions out of order, stuff that was marked as "a rare colour photo" that was in black and white and just a general jumble at times where picture captions were mixed together with the main text and separated from the pictures they were referring too. This meant that it was hard to follow the narrative thread of the writing because you needed to keep flipping pages back and forth to match up the photos to the captions and to keep the thread of sentences. The pictures are the great gift in this though- lots of shots of beautiful outfits.
I was reading on an iPad mini (because of all the pictures and colour I thought it wouldn't be great on my Kindle paperwhite) and I hope that it looks better on larger screens, but given the art book format and corresponding price tag for the Kindle edition it needs to be better in the actual purchasable copy.
****Copy from the publisher via NetGalley for review consideration. All opinions are my own.*****
I was reading on an iPad mini (because of all the pictures and colour I thought it wouldn't be great on my Kindle paperwhite) and I hope that it looks better on larger screens, but given the art book format and corresponding price tag for the Kindle edition it needs to be better in the actual purchasable copy.
****Copy from the publisher via NetGalley for review consideration. All opinions are my own.*****
November 24, 2025
Thank you to NetGalley and Globe Pequot for providing this book as an eARC. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.
This book was an incredible read that introduces you to Travis Banton, an influential yet often overlooked costume designer who left an indelible mark not just on Hollywood but on fashion at large. Howard Gutner expertly weaves a narrative about image-making, socioeconomic conditions, and interpersonal relationships whilst finding ways to describe the art of costume-making that leave you breathless with wonder at Banton's influence. I particularly appreciate the manner in which the book provides a look at the nature and power of celebrity by giving us a look behind the curtain, and how it takes its time to bring different aspects of Banton's life together to culminate in a powerful way that underscores the very thesis of the book itself, namely that Banton is a name worth knowing and remembering.
This book was an incredible read that introduces you to Travis Banton, an influential yet often overlooked costume designer who left an indelible mark not just on Hollywood but on fashion at large. Howard Gutner expertly weaves a narrative about image-making, socioeconomic conditions, and interpersonal relationships whilst finding ways to describe the art of costume-making that leave you breathless with wonder at Banton's influence. I particularly appreciate the manner in which the book provides a look at the nature and power of celebrity by giving us a look behind the curtain, and how it takes its time to bring different aspects of Banton's life together to culminate in a powerful way that underscores the very thesis of the book itself, namely that Banton is a name worth knowing and remembering.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
A look at the fashion highlights of Travis Banton - designer to the stars. In the Golden Age of Hollywood, Banton was one of the most sought after on-set designers, dressing stars such as Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, & Carole Lombard in the films of their heyday.
Although I'd never heard of Travis Barton, Classic Hollywood is one of my favourite things to read about & I was not disappointed. The information on the films, & also the role of fashion both onscreen & off, is top notch & the photographs included are stunning. It was an interesting & informative read but at times Banton felt almost incidental as the main topic were the fabulous clothes.
SUMMARY:
Research: Excellent - The information on the films is top notch & the photographs included are stunning.
Writing Style: Excellent - Conveys the information in an interesting way & a more informal style.
Enjoyment Level: Moderately High - Interesting & informative whilst the photographs are a delight. For me, Banton felt almost incidental at times.
My thanks to NetGalley & publishers, Globe Pequot/Lyons Press, for the opportunity to read an ARC.
Although I'd never heard of Travis Barton, Classic Hollywood is one of my favourite things to read about & I was not disappointed. The information on the films, & also the role of fashion both onscreen & off, is top notch & the photographs included are stunning. It was an interesting & informative read but at times Banton felt almost incidental as the main topic were the fabulous clothes.
SUMMARY:
Research: Excellent - The information on the films is top notch & the photographs included are stunning.
Writing Style: Excellent - Conveys the information in an interesting way & a more informal style.
Enjoyment Level: Moderately High - Interesting & informative whilst the photographs are a delight. For me, Banton felt almost incidental at times.
My thanks to NetGalley & publishers, Globe Pequot/Lyons Press, for the opportunity to read an ARC.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I was familiar with the name of this designer, but not in any great detail. What interested me most was his connection to two favorites actresses that I admire...Claudette Colbert & Carole Lombard. He made a significant impact on their fashions on & off the set.
The author covers his early life in detail & how his education lead him to be a trendsetter in Hollywood. Some of his biggest stars aren't actresses that I watch a great deal though (Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong & Mae West).
His name should come before the other respected designers in Hollywood, Adrian and Edith Head, because of the contribution he left when he passed in 1958.
I thank NetGalley, the publisher & the author for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for a fair & honest review.
The author covers his early life in detail & how his education lead him to be a trendsetter in Hollywood. Some of his biggest stars aren't actresses that I watch a great deal though (Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong & Mae West).
His name should come before the other respected designers in Hollywood, Adrian and Edith Head, because of the contribution he left when he passed in 1958.
I thank NetGalley, the publisher & the author for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for a fair & honest review.
October 2, 2025
I received an advanced reader copy via NetGalley.
This was a FANTASTIC read and will be a must-have for any fan of old Hollywood glamour.
I loved the way it was organized, covering Banton’s relationships with several of his most notable actress pairings: Marlene Dietrich, Carole Lombard, Mae West, Anna May Wong, Kay Francis.
A wide variety of sources were used and this contained a lot of insightful analysis of the costumes and how they reflected the characters in the film, but also reflected fashion history (both historical films and the then-current trends of the 30s).
This was a FANTASTIC read and will be a must-have for any fan of old Hollywood glamour.
I loved the way it was organized, covering Banton’s relationships with several of his most notable actress pairings: Marlene Dietrich, Carole Lombard, Mae West, Anna May Wong, Kay Francis.
A wide variety of sources were used and this contained a lot of insightful analysis of the costumes and how they reflected the characters in the film, but also reflected fashion history (both historical films and the then-current trends of the 30s).
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
An interesting look at fashion from Hollywood's Golden Age and the designers that created the iconic looks.
The photographs are great and I loved the explanations about the use of certain textures and styles to suit each actress how they translate on film. I particularly loved the anecdote about zippers!
This will make great coffee table book for fashion and cinephiles alike.
*Thank you to Netgalley for the arc*
The photographs are great and I loved the explanations about the use of certain textures and styles to suit each actress how they translate on film. I particularly loved the anecdote about zippers!
This will make great coffee table book for fashion and cinephiles alike.
*Thank you to Netgalley for the arc*
September 24, 2025
This book is brimming with history, details and anecdotes about Banton‘s fashions for stars like Carole Lombard and Mae West, but I have to admit I was mostly there for the gorgeous photos. There are tons. If you love old style Hollywood glamour, you won’t be disappointed.
I read an advance copy of this book via netgalley.
I read an advance copy of this book via netgalley.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews