Janet Leigh's Outfits in PSYCHO Are A+
And truly, Janet Leigh is a timeless beauty. See for yourself:
This is not about her looks, necessarily, but more about how she wears the clothes in the film. Leigh’s character Marion Crane is stern and almost masculine in her manner –– somewhat risqué for 1960.
We first meet Marion shirtless during a sexual rendezvous on her lunch break, after which she buttons herself up in a menswear-inspired dress shirt. She exudes confidence and is powerful in the way female characters of the sixties rarely were written.
I could go on and on about how fantastically beautiful Janet Leigh is, so I’ll spare you. But for a film made almost sixty (yes, sixty) years ago, Marion Crane is woman far ahead of her time. Any actress could have worn the clothes, but Janet Leigh wore the outfits with the confidence they deserved.
I’m done talking about Leigh and women’s clothing of the 1960s (for now) but it felt pertinent to jot down my thoughts during my recent re-watch of Hitchcock’s classic.
But I’m not sure why I was so focused on her outfits, considering in her most famous Psycho scene she wears no clothes at all.