Cellophane Glamour

These new materials are expressive of our own age. They speak in the vernacular of the twentieth century. Theirs is the language of invention, of synthesis. Industrial chemistry today rivals alchemy! Base materials are transmuted into marvels of new beauty.

—Paul Frankl, Form and Reform (1930)¹

Under Cellophane Skies

As the curtains opened on the avant-garde opera event of 1934, Virgil Thompson and Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts, the audience faced a vast sign of the production's cutting edge modernity: 1500 square feet of sky-blue cellophane was draped from the sides and ceiling of the stage, creating a semi-transparent cyclorama, glittering under bright white lights. The stark artificiality of the stage design proclaimed its relationship to the modern world and its unsurpassed hold on the new: "The cellophane set, brilliantly lit to evoke a sky hung with rock crystal, defied comparison to anything the audience had ever seen."² The set and costume designer was Florine Stettheimer, a New York painter whose close friends included Marcel Duchamp and Carl Van Vechten, and whose paintings were characterized by their light-infused surfaces and whimsical approach to their subjects (her style was sometimes called "primitive moderne"³). Stettheimer had never ventured into the world of stage or costume design before Four Saints (and wouldn't again), but her efforts were met with critical acclaim for her spectacular vision: "some thought that [her] costumes outdid the Ziegfeld Follies, and one quipped that the sets were 'Botticellophane.'"⁴ Plastic, that most twentieth-century of materials, here transformed the stage into a powerful blend of art, glamour, and the latest technology.

Fig. 1.

Decipher. Photographs of stage sets for Four Saints in Three Acts. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

We've lost, in the intervening decades, the ability to read the early-century semiotics of plastics, and particularly of cellophane. Stettheimer's stage today, rather than looking sleek and streamlined, appears hung with the cheap plastic that wraps mattresses or other bulky household items for shipping. But what did cellophane signify? Why was it taken up not only by Stettheimer, but by the designers of lavish Hollywood musical sets and their promoters? Cellophane appears throughout popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s, generally signifying the slickly modern. Cellophane tablecloths glitter in an upscale nightclub in the Astaire-Rogers blockbuster Swing Time (1936); cellophane also appears in an earlier Joan Crawford film, Dancing Lady (1933), in the transparent swags at the back of a dance set, and again in the Broadway musical staged within the film. Here, the cellophane appears in costume-form: a group of black-attired old women, complete with bonnets, lace collars, wire glasses, and bent-over backs make their way into a futuristic beauty parlor and emerge as modern bombshells, perfectly artificial with cellophane outfits and what might be plastic hair. Cellophane similarly appears in a swanky Chinese nightclub as the "The Girls in Cellophane" take the stage in W.C. Fields' International House (1933). Cellophane was chic and, above all, now.

How could this plastic sheeting have connoted glamour for 1930s audiences? From its first American appearance in 1931 as the revolutionary new moisture-proof wrapper of Camel cigarettes, cellophane was an undisputed success, standing out "as the lone spot of brilliance in the otherwise dismal commercial landscape of the Depression."⁵

Fig. 2.

Dancing Lady, DVD, directed by Robert Z. Leonard (MGM, 1933; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video).

Fig. 3.

Dancing Lady, DVD, directed by Robert Z. Leonard (MGM, 1933; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video).

Cellophane served as a cultural reference with greater significance than the mere freshness of cigarettes: it inspired a new packaging aesthetic as well as an intensified relationship of desire between consumer and product. And the aesthetic clearly went beyond the mundane glamour of such luxuries as tobacco products. Cellophane proved to be a cultural force: besides appearing on the avant-garde stage, the MGM musical set...