This article draws on a qualitative study of six interviews with British women, focused around film star fashions and home dressmaking in the 1950s and 1960s. It is concerned with rethinking existing accounts of the female spectator within film studies, and approaching spectatorship as a socially and historically embedded activity which extends to practices outside the cinema. Drawing on Beverley Skeggs’s use of Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, the article attends particularly to the significant role played by the intersection of class, gender and historical period in determining the choice of a star as a model of ideal femininity in relation to dress. It also offers an account of a gendered way of looking, talking and remembering, in relation to dress and dressmaking, which has implications for the theorization of gendered spectatorship.