Garbo Got A Kick Out Of Sporting Turtlenecks At A Time When Only Jockeys And Prizefighters Wore Them,

Garbo got a kick out of sporting turtlenecks at a time when only jockeys and prizefighters wore them, and she was the first film star, followed by Katharine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich, to liberate women from skirts. Knowing observers slipped innuendo into their reports of Garbo and Dietrich’s preference for masculine styles. Vanity Fair pictured the Swede and the German, in 1932, under the headline “Both Members of the Same Club,” implying more than their mutual fondness for men’s suits and slouch hats.

Women who spurned skirts were not only violating taboos at the time, but breaking laws; in Paris in the twenties, a permis de travestissement was required of any female wearing a man’s suit. Mores were not much more relaxed on Hollywood Boulevard. “Garbo in Pants!” shouted a wire-photo caption.

“Innocent by standers gasped in amazement to see Mercedes de Acosta and Garbo in pants pretty much managed to go Where she pleased (and, perversely, she didn’t seem to mind the extra attention her fashion preferences brought her).

One night in 1928 Bill Frye slipped her into Chasen’s by rolling her trousers up beneath her overcoat, which she wore to the table. “We had already booked the reservation,” says Frye, “and when I saw what she was wearing I called the restaurant and told them I was bringing Miss Garbo to dinner and could she please come in slacks. They said no, she could not. I asked, ‘What if you put us to the right, just as we come in the door?’ They still said no, so we played our little trick.”

Greta Garbo striding swiftly along… dressed in men’s clothes.” A few days later, MGM sent out a story under Garbo’s name, in which she apologized for inflicting her “trousered attitude” on hostesses, escorts, and maitres d’.

Greta Garbo in The Single Standard (1929)