Dietrich had her pants custom (and expensively) made for her at Knize, an upscale men’s suit tailor. (She and her husband would both go, and be fitted for suits the same day.) According to her biography, written by her daughter, Dietrich was amazed at, and disdainful of, the controversy her pants caused. In her hometown of Berlin, women had been dressing in masculine attrire for years, even wearing suits and ties.
Dietrich’s director, Von Sternberg decided to play up this “shocking” pants controversy in the movie Morocco. In one of the first scenes, Dietrich appears in a top hat and tails. She kisses a woman on the mouth, takes the woman’s flower boutineer, deeply inhales from it, and then flicks it to Gary Cooper. It had blatantly (for the times) lesbian overtones, and movie buffs are still amazed that it managed to get by the censors.
Hollywood didn’t know what to make of its new, exciting star. They had fan cards distributed with Dietrich’s pant-wearing picture on them, with the slogan “The woman even women can love.” But worries grew that Dietrich seemed too masculine, so fan cards were also distributed of her and her young daughter, Dietrich wearing a demure black dress with a lace collar.
There was a famous controversy caused by Dietrich’s pants: newspapers reported that city officials in Paris had forbidden Dietrich to wear pants while shopping on Parisian boulevards. (A publicity stunt, according to her daughter.) Later, the Hotel Lancaster supposedly refused to house Katherine Hepburn for wearing pants.
Again, according to Dietrich’s daughter, Marlene was always claimed that Lombard tried to look like her, and deeply resented it.
Later, in her stage career, Dietrich always changed her costume to top hat and tails to sing love songs to women. Most love songs can be changed simply by substituting male pronouns for female ones, but Dietrich insisted that the lyrics written to women were more romantic, and sang them in male attire.