Name/Title
Mirror and Wallpaper, Adrian GreenbergContext
Adrian Greenberg, known professionally as Adrian, was an American costume designer. He is most famous for designing the costumes for the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. This work included designing Dorothy's ruby slippers. Greenberg designed costumes for more than 250 films. In most of the movies, he is credited as "Gowns by Adrian." Still, occasionally he is credited as Gilbert Adrian, and in The Wizard of Oz, his credit simply reads costumes by Adrian.
Adrian Adolph Greenberg was born in 1903. After attending the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts (Now the Parsons School of Design) in New York, Greenberg transferred to the school's Paris branch. Irving Berlin hired him to design costumes for The Music Box Review. In 1924 Natacha Rambova, wife of Rudolph Valentino, hired Greenberg to design costumes for A Sainted Devil (1924) and What Price Beauty (1925).
In 1926 Greenberg became head costume designer for the independent film studio owned by Cecil B. DeMille. When DeMille went to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1928, Greenberg was hired as the head costume designer for that studio. In 1941, he left MGM to establish his own independent fashion design house. In this capacity, he continued working for Hollywood but expanded his work to include fashion designs for some of New York's most exclusive stores. Hired in 1959 to design costumes for the Broadway play Camelot, Greenberg died of a heart attack while still in the early stages of his work.
Adrian Greenberg is credited with designing the wallpaper and the mirror in the Big House telephone room off of the foyer.
- Research and text by Thomas Bachelder of the Malabar Farm FoundationLocation
Building
The Big HouseOhio State Park
Malabar Farm State Park