Fashioning Hitchcock: Costume and Suspense

Caroline Young is at Dovecot Studios on Thursday 12 November for Fashioning Hitchcock: Costume and Suspense, a talk that looks at how costume designers shaped Alfred Hitchcock's cinema. Young is an Edinburgh-based author who specialises in film, fashion and popular culture, and this sits within Dovecot's wider costume and fashion programming.

The talk focuses on Hitchcock's collaboration with Edith Head and on clothing as a tool for suspense. Young uses a few specific examples to make the point: Cary Grant's glen-check suit in North by Northwest and Kim Novak's ghost-grey suit in Vertigo. It's the kind of thing you might have noticed without thinking much about it, but she'll be unpicking how those choices actually work on screen.

Young has written a fair bit on this ground. Her books include Hitchcock's Heroines, The It Girls, Living with Coco Chanel, Audrey in Paris and Crazy Old Ladies: The Story of Hag Horror, the last of which was nominated for a Rondo Hatton Award 2023 and the 2022 Richard Wall Memorial Award. She's spent a lot of time at the intersection of film and fashion, so she knows her way around these things.

The talk is in the Ladies Baths/Conference Room at Dovecot Studios, 10 Infirmary Street in the Old Town, and runs from 18:00 to 19:00. Tickets are £15, which includes entry to the exhibition Costume Couture: 60 Years of Cosprop from 5pm before the talk starts, so you can have a look around the gallery before she begins. Dovecot is a world-renowned tapestry studio and centre for contemporary art, craft and design in the heart of Edinburgh, with gallery programmes supported by Creative Scotland and the Dovecot Foundation.