Sometimes during the studio era, if an actor or actress appeared in two films taking place in the same period, they would be reassigned a costume they had already worn. This saved time and money, as the studio already had costumes made just for that actor that could be easily pulled from stock without any altering.

In this instance, actress Mary Nash wore the same blue Edwardian gown. She first wore the costume in the 1937 Shirley Temple film Heidi, where she played Fraulein Rottenmeier. However, since the film was in black and white, its color was not seen.

The true color of the costume was revealed to be blue just a few years later when Nash wore the gown again in 1939 in another Shirley Temple film, The Little Princess, where she played Amanda Minchin.

Despite the gown actually being blue, it has shown up in other places as a different color entirely. A lobby card for Heidi features the gown as purple, though lobby cards frequently featured incorrect and imaginative colors for costumes.

Once VHS became readily available, Shirley Temple’s movies became very popular again, and most of her films that were previously in black and white were colorized. The colorized version of Heidi made the gown a brownish gray.