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- Volume 10, Issue 2, 2021
Film, Fashion & Consumption - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2021
Volume 10, Issue 2, 2021
- Editorial
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- Articles
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Surface tensions: Race, costume and the politics of texture in Claire Denis’s Chocolat (1988)
More LessThis article examines the costumes of Claire Denis’s Chocolat. A highly aestheticized drama of pressed khaki uniforms and pith helmets in colonial Cameroon, clothing is, as this article argues, enfolded into a far broader topography of material power; it is an apparatus through which racialized and gendered difference is actively ‘fashioned’ for the screen. In Chocolat, it becomes clear that fashion and celluloid are intimately intertwined (‘sutured’ together, through Denis’s editing), with the bio-political containment of white femininity, historically underwritten by French society’s anxieties concerning racial miscegenation and sexual excesses in the colonies. Concurrently, however, dress also grants expression to transgressive currents of desire, which, in Denis’s provocative portrait of interracial attraction, intersect vividly with the sexual politics of fetishism. In the very fabrics of its material content – costumes, the pliable ‘skin’ of its images and the tissue of human relationships – Chocolat portrays colonial identity as deeply conflicted, and Denis affirms the material world as an agile and highly transgressive force in the theatre of colonial power.
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Fashion-forward killer: Villanelle, costuming and queer style in Killing Eve
Authors: Sarah Gilligan and Jacky CollinsCostuming within the BBC television drama series Killing Eve (2018–) functions as a spectacular dressing-up box to support the representation of Villanelle (Jodie Comer) as the glamorous globe-trotting assassin. This article will argue that Villanelle’s fashion-forward wardrobe offers a multifarious representation of contemporary queer styling. Her costuming is characterized by gender fluidity and a play with the dominant codes and signifiers of lesbian style and identity. Villanelle’s looks move beyond the stereotyped constraints of the butch-femme binary to construct a polymorphous representation of femininity with broad cross-over appeal. In offering a striking silhouette that draws attention away from the material body onto costuming, Villanelle’s representation highlights the fluidity of gendered and sexual identities. Her costuming may appear to reduce Villanelle to a series of surface appearances, yet these iterations result in a significant queer representation on mainstream contemporary television.
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TikTok teens: Turbulent identities for turbulent times
More LessThrough the examination of two subcultural fashion trends spawned on the micro-vlogging platform TikTok, this article will consider how the mythic functions of the archetypal ‘clown’ and ‘rebel’ have been redeployed by Generation Z TikTok users in an attempt to push back against prevailing beauty ideals. These short-form film performances reveal the specular world-view of a demographic that is as used to being watched as it is watching others. The bulk of TikTok’s content revolves around viral trends; dances that spread by mimesis, hashtags that agglomerate universally relatable human experiences and the usual aspirational travel and fashion material. Those that break away from this mould find themselves in algorithmically led micro-communities (self-termed ‘core aesthetics’), which form satellites around more popular content forms and occasionally gain virality themselves for their freakishness or downright surrealism. The ‘clown’ and ‘rebel’ are still seen as liminal characters in the social space – affording them certain freedoms from the visual dominance of celebrity culture but also requiring certain compromises; existing at the fringes is, by definition, to be excluded and ‘othered’.
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The invisible corset: Discipline, control and surveillance in contemporary yogawear
Authors: Juliana Luna Mora and Jess BerryThis article examines the ways in which contemporary yogawear brands contribute to the perpetuation of patriarchal social constructs around the female body and new modes of moral distinction, discipline, surveillance and social control. They do so by promoting an internally and externally self-monitored body. The yoga uniform and its symbolic ‘invisible corset’ respond to the social need to create similarity and sense of belonging whilst simultaneously creating status and class division. Yogawear poses a paradox as it concurrently empowers and controls the female body, signalling both austere and hedonistic, individual and collective values with a postfeminist sensibility. This article evaluates the idealized bodies of Lululemon Athletica and Aloyoga – the two leading global yogawear brands in the sportswear and fashion industries. Specifically analysing the interplay of gender, social class and race on social media, it examines how yogawear and the yoga uniform reinforce traditional, regulating and standardizing female body ideals validating certain body types and silencing others.
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- Stories
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From research to practice: The talking frocks1
By Sue HarperThis article reviews my academic research on costume design in film, and introduces a number of my short stories on dress and adornment. The article argues that research and creative work are more closely allied than is often thought, and that they can share approaches, methods and discourses.
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- Book Reviews
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Libertine Fashion: Sexual Freedom, Rebellion and Style, Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas (2020)
More LessReview of: Libertine Fashion: Sexual Freedom, Rebellion and Style, Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas (2020)
London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts (Dress, Body, Culture series), 256 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-35005-407-3, p/bk, h/bk, eBook, £24.99
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Worn: Footwear, Attachment and the Affects of Wear, Ellen Sampson (2020)
More LessReview of: Worn: Footwear, Attachment and the Affects of Wear, Ellen Sampson (2020)
London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 250 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-35008-718-7, h/bk, £70
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