Film, Fashion & Consumption - Volume 14, Issue 1, 2025

This article examines the collaborative relationship between director Luca Guadagnino and fashion designer Jonathan Anderson in Challengers (2024) and Queer (2024), exploring how costume functions as a key narrative and aesthetic device. Through a close reading of both films, this article investigates how Anderson’s designs articulate themes of desire, power and identity – ranging from the commodification of sportswear and branding in Challengers to the melancholic elegance and sartorial decay in Queer. Drawing on theories of film and costume, queer and subcultural style, the article argues that clothing in these films not only constructs character but also operates as a visual language that encodes cultural concerns around masculinity, queerness and social status.

This article examines how Hollywood costume designers helped shape consumer culture through product endorsement during the studio era. Drawing on extensive archival research, it highlights how designers like Adrian and Travis Banton, celebrated for their glamorous on-screen creations, were enlisted to promote ordinary household items like washing powders and hosiery. These campaigns emphasized the designers’ expertise in garment care and fashion, transforming everyday products into aspirational tools for achieving Hollywood-style sophistication. The study reveals how the studio system extended costume designers’ influence beyond film production, transforming them into trusted authorities in marketing and taste-making. Through a nuanced analysis of promotional campaigns housed in the J. Walter Thompson Collection at Duke University’s Rubenstein Library and the Gary and Sandra Baden Collection of Celebrity Endorsement in Advertising at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the article uncovers the overlooked labour of costume designers as cultural intermediaries, who not only shaped Hollywood’s visual identity but also bridged the gap between aspirational glamour and accessible consumer goods. By situating these practices within a broader context, the study offers fresh insights into the commercialization of Hollywood glamour and its enduring legacy in consumer culture.

The appearance of recognizably fascist, and usually Nazi, references in fashion advertising and at fashion shows is nothing new; whether categorized as Nazi chic, Nazi retro, or – in some cases – Nazi porn, images recalling the Third Reich continue to have an incandescent presence on the runways of Paris, Milan, London and New York. What a half-century ago Susan Sontag labelled ‘fascinating fascism’ seems to have lost none of its appeal, even as current political polemics traffic indiscriminately in associations and analogies that reach back into what has been called Europe’s dark century. This article explores three lodestone sources of this cultural phenomenon, in Italian sensationalist cinema of the 1960s, in what is still perhaps the most notorious of art-house films of the 1970s, and in the gay leather culture that originated in San Francisco, spread to New York and other urban centres, and persists – disease, repression and cultural backlash notwithstanding – to this day.

This article is framed within studies on the role of fashion publications in the dissemination of certain models of femininity. During the 1950s and 1960s, when Spanish high fashion was embarking on a process of internationalization, industry magazines in the United States conveyed the concept of national identity through a specific female archetype. First, a terminological study of how Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue constructed a narrative around Spanish women based on a symbolic repertoire previously used to disseminate a specific imaginary of the Italian feminine paradigm. Comparing this with the transalpine ideal circulating in media across the pond, reports starring Lola Flores, Lucía Bosè and Naty Abascal, figures well known to the American public, were analysed. Finally, an attempt has been made to determine whether Spain managed to project a new and alternative female archetype.