Fashion Flashback: Revisiting Cecil Beaton’s Costumes for the Original Production of My Fair Lady

When My Fair Lady transferred from Broadway to the West End in 1958, it precipitated an irrevocable shift in the reputation of musicals across the capital. Years earlier, a critic scandalized by the number of all-singing, all-dancing New York productions being staged at Drury Lane had scathingly referred to the theater as an “asylum for American inanity,” but any lingering trace of that sentiment evaporated the first night that Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison went toe to toe as Eliza Doolittle and Professor Higgins—with the former captured standing in her dressing room waist-deep in bouquets after the final curtain. “The last thing I want to do is drown My Fair Lady in fulsome, exaggerated superlatives,” a journalist in attendance wrote. “It deserves better than that.” London theatergoers agreed; tickets sold on the black market for five times their usual price, with the production going on to run for 2,281 performances, despite being one of the most costly West End shows ever staged.

Central to its success (and its expense): the clothes, conceived by Vogue’s Cecil Beaton. Lerner and Loewe, who masterminded the musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, scouted the photographer for the role of costume designer before My Fair Lady’s Broadway debut in 1956. As the former put it, “His very look is such that it is difficult to know whether he designed the Edwardian era or whether the Edwardian era designed him.” Beaton had, in fact, spent his childhood collecting postcards of turn-of-the-century actresses and browsing Les Modes, a magazine first published in 1901 and devoted to black-and-white portraits in the style of Sargent and Whistler.

In spite of his initial reluctance, Beaton became fanatical about the project, which caused such a sensation upon opening in New York that the police had to be called to keep order outside the Mark Hellinger Theatre’s box office. At Cecil’s request, more than 10,000 pearl buttons were detached from the curtains that once hung in his Wiltshire retreat of Ashcombe House, shipped to America, and repurposed for the Pearly Kings and Queens shepherding Alfred Doolittle “to the church on time,” while the society darlings that Beaton had previously captured for the pages of Vogue proved invaluable sources of information about Edwardian fashions. Specifically, he canvassed Lady Diana Cooper about what her mother, the Duchess of Rutland, would wear to the races while dreaming up the production’s monochrome Ascot gowns—a tribute to the Black Ascot of 1910, held in the wake of Edward VII’s death. On stage, the end result looked like “a motionless frieze of ladies like magpies against a white drop,” in Cecil’s own words.

His enthusiasm only redoubled when My Fair Lady decamped to London. If Beaton made a cool 150 costumes for the Broadway production, he made an additional 20 for the West End one—deeming them far superior in quality to his earlier work. Despite getting off to a rocky start together (Cecil was virtually apoplectic when his leading lady wore one of her hats the wrong way around on opening night in New York), Andrews was pleased to continue working with Beaton on home shores. “All the clothes were so much more detailed and beautifully made than I’d ever expected,” she graciously reflected many decades on. “Though we had to make some adaptations, his knowledge of the period was extraordinary. It wasn’t until I had Eliza’s shawl on my shoulders and her silly broken hat on my head that I knew how I was supposed to act.”

In honor of Vogue World: London’s My Fair Lady tribute, revisit Beaton’s own behind-the-scenes photographs of the original production, below.