Film, Fashion & Consumption - Volume 1, Issue 3, 2012

The American independent film-maker David Lynch and the French fashion house Dior would seem to make for strange bedfellows. Lynch is the director of some of the most uniquely disturbing cinematic visions of the past four decades. His work is delivered through the popular medium of cinema but appeals to a very specific audience. Dior markets exclusivity to the masses, using widespread recognition to sell a line of products that includes clothing, handbags and perfume. Yet in 2009, Dior sponsored the production of Lynch’s short film Lady Blue Shanghai, a sixteen-minute noir mystery starring French actress Marion Cotillard. The backer allowed the director complete creative control of the Shanghai-set production, providing that three conditions were met: a particular Dior accessory had to be featured prominently, the Oriental Pearl Tower had to be seen, and some scenes had to be shot in old Shanghai. Although it promotes a brand, Lady Blue Shanghai is a ‘short’ rather than a conventional commercial, albeit a short that contractually features a luxury product. Lady Blue Shanghai was made available via the Dior website, reaching audiences through new media while attracting the attention of the mainstream press due to the reputation of its director. This article will examine the dual status of Lady Blue Shanghai as a film by David Lynch and as a Dior project through reference to the director’s narrative and stylistic signatures, while assessing such authorial elements alongside the manner in which the brand is conveyed through his aesthetic sensibility.

Fashion films, which take the place of the catwalk show, break with the actual and virtual perception of fashion. The catwalk show’s predominant purpose is to present the clothes on display, to present the material object in time and space. By breaking with this tradition, by replacing the live event with the projection of a digital film, we alter the experience, as well as the reality of the garment. This article seeks to explore the role and function of non-narrative fashion film in relation to the collaboration between Ruth Hogben and Gareth Pugh. The aim is to establish an ontological study of the aesthetic nature of non-narrative fashion film.

This article examines the relationship between costume and character, self and appearance in Luca Guadagnino’s film, Io Sono l’Amore/I Am Love (Guadagnino, 2009). As played by Tilda Swinton, Emma Recchi is a woman whose dress reveals a meticulous record of her emotional journey, providing an almost textbook case of costume performing emotional exteriority. Complicating any straightforward analysis of costume design in I Am Love, however, is a deep fashion consciousness that pervades the film and goes beyond the widely publicized association with fashion houses, Jil Sander, Fendi and Hermès, to a recognition of fashion as a complex discourse able to canvas multiple, even contradictory, interpretations. Just as Guadagnino draws on other narratives and other films to tell his story, Swinton’s off-screen life and on-screen personae shadow her portrayal of Emma, constructing a character who is both the unique individual of I Am Love and the hollow image of fashion that is the Emma of ‘I Am Style’.

This article draws on Walter Benjamin’s theories of modernity and fashion to theorize the political potentiality of popular documentary film Bill Cunningham New York (Press, 2010). The article begins with a theoretical consideration of the relationship between photography and fashion in modernity. This discussion of the material and immaterial constraints and aptitudes of each artistic medium clears the space for a Benjaminian analysis of fashion photography’s singular characteristics. The article then moves on to posit an immanent political charge in what can be termed the fashion documentary film genre; a political charge that grows out of the genre’s preoccupation with what Benjamin calls phantasmagoric society. Finally, the article takes a closer look at Bill Cunningham New York, and, using this film as a case study, teases out some of its contradictory political gestures at once revolving around a radically democratic notion of fashion, yet falling back onto a hierarchic structure of social value based on cultural elitism.

In this article, I analyse the function of Art Deco designs in the 1930s gangster genre and, in particular, Warner Brothers’ Marked Woman (Bacon, 1937). Like many gangster films of the period, it associates high-style Art Deco with excess and the criminal underworld. My findings, however, reveal a tension between the film’s moralist stance and its visual excess. Compelling visual signifiers of leisure, style and social mobility, the modern designs are free to circumvent the film’s critical message and reinforce American capitalist ideologies. My analyses underscore Art Deco as an emblematic style of commercial modernity. Marked Woman and other gangster films not only reflect the latest trends in design, but also negotiate a constellation of values, ideologies and desires at a time of social and economic volatility.

Roland Barthes suggested that photographs are, essentially, about death. This article traces the relationship between crime scene photographs of the 1930s and 1940s, the visual aesthetic of film noir and a resurgence of the genre in high fashion photography. From the bruised-eyed runway models of Comme de Garçons in the 1980s to the preoccupation with death, trauma, alienation and decay in the work and promotions of Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan and Victor & Rolf throughout the 1990s, this trend has grown stronger in the new millennium, as seen in campaigns by leading fashion photographers, both in editorial and in advertising for luxury brands. LA photographer Melanie Pullen continues to explore these themes in her ongoing work ‘High Fashion Crime Scenes’. Drawing on Weegee’s Noir explorations of urban life and films such as Irvin Kershner’s 1978 film, The Eyes of Laura Mars, Pullen uses fashion as a symbol of the deceased’s everyday life, the mundane juxtaposed with the catastrophic. This imagery probes the unions between beauty and brutality, artifice and alienation, glamour and gore. Drawing on the seminal work of John Berger on photographic advertising in Ways of Seeing (1972), Jennifer L. Pozner’s work within the media, and Caroline Evans’ influential text Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Deathliness and Modernity of 2007, this article will attempt to unravel the relationship between high fashion and violent death within contemporary visual culture.