Gossip, first impressions, trends in the making, celebrities and style setters. A regular feature by fashion critic Booth Moore.

I’ve always thought that L.A.’s fine arts and academic institutions should do more to promote and preserve Hollywood costume design, which is as much a part of our cultural history as anything that happened on 7th Avenue. And this week, UCLA took a huge step in the right direction by naming Deborah Nadoolman Landis the first David C. Copley Chair for the study of costume design at the School of Theater, Film and Television.

An Academy Award-nominated costume designer, Landis’ credits include "The Blues Brothers," "Animal House," "Coming to America," "Thriller" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark." (Her husband is director John Landis.) She is a past president of the Costume Designers Guild, a teacher and an author, most recently of "Dressed: A Century of Hollywood Costume Design" (HarperCollins).

Landis is going to be a busy woman in the coming months. In addition to her new post, which is being endowed by San Diego Union-Tribune publisher David C. Copley, she’s curating the upcoming exhibit "Icons: A Hundred Years of Hollywood Costume Design," opening in 2012 at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

We chatted for a few minutes on Tuesday about her future plans for the Copley Center.

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I met David Copley because he has a huge collection of motion picture costume illustrations. I went down to his house and was overwhelmed! He has Cecil Beaton’s original sketches for "My Fair Lady," Jean Louis’ sketches for "A Star is Born," I could read the walls like Egypt. At the time, I was working "Dressed" and it was already at HarperCollins. But when I saw Beaton’s original sketch of Audrey Hepburn in the Ascot dress, I had to have it in my book. He lent me the sketch, and then we spent some time together at Cannes.

At the same time, I had been talking to Robert Rosen, who is the dean at the UCLA school about a chair in costume design. We wrote a proposal and I never thought it would be funded, but David has a profound appreciation for the role costume plays in our imagination and I couldn’t be happier.