Costume worn by Mae West in I'm No Angel, designed by Travis Banton, 1933.

Mae West was an actress, playwright and screenwriter. Her career spanned seven decades and she became known for her bawdy double entendres. West’s career began in Vaudeville and eventually she was writing her own plays for Broadway. She began making films in 1932 and exercised a good deal of control over her own scripts. As a result she clashed with the Hollywood censors for sexual explicitness, even when it was cloaked in double entendre. In I’m No Angel (1933), West plays a lion tamer in a travelling circus. To disguise the fact that West was under five foot in height, costume designer Travis Banton designed long dresses for her and she wore stiletto platforms to give the appearance of height. The high heels aided West’s famous walk.

The British Film Institute (BFI) acquired its costume collection for display at the Museum of the Moving Image, which existed on the South Bank in London between 1988 and 1999. The collection is made up of British, European, American and Japanese films and covers the period from the silent film era to the mid-1990s. It contains a wealth of historic and significant film costumes worn by major performers and designed by some of the 20th century’s most important film costume designers. The collection was transferred to the V&A in 2015.