Film, Fashion & Consumption - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2013

This article explores how ABC’s fashion magazine set Ugly Betty (Ventanarosa/Reveille Productions, 2006–2010) makes a camp challenge to the ethnic- and class-based constructions of Latinness in mainstream media. It argues that the series’ progressiveness lies in its self conscious ‘makeover’ of both the original telenovela and the character of Betty. In the series Betty’s ‘ugliness’ is shown to be the product of not just aesthetics but also class and ethnographic discourses. This article traces the origins of the cultural, class-based and racial norms of beauty that Betty plays with exploring how these are mapped onto Betty’s body in the first two seasons. It looks at how these beauty norms connect to contemporary notions of social mobility that are increasingly prominent in the third and final fourth season of the series.

Too often, innovation in style has been thought of in terms of either top/down or bottom/up movements of ideas. The continuing interest in Edie Bouvier Beale of Grey Gardens as a style innovator is an opportunity to question this orthodoxy. This article seeks to understand the myriad ways in which Edie challenged the rules of acceptable behaviour and dress. It also deals with her recent recuperation and rehabilitation into a cultural icon. Edie’s image has come to us via numerous reiterations, beginning with the Maysles Brothers’ 1975 documentary Grey Gardens. It is through these retellings that Edie as a creative force has recirculated and gained mythic status. Edie played with inversion of categories, and bodily and geographical zones: wearing too-small skirts upside down; cardigans wrapped as turbans around her head; bedspreads as dresses; the American flag as shawl; and her favourite – accessorizing a bathing suit with pantyhose, pumps and skivvy. In life, Edie’s unconventionality threatened to consume her; in death it has brought her a measure of immortality.

Breast cancer occupies a prominent and powerful position within our cultural imagination. Unlike most other forms of cancer, and indeed most other medical conditions in general, breast cancer is widely discussed and repeatedly represented within popular culture. In order to investigate the impact this development in the cultural understanding of breast cancer has had on both the narration and experience of the disease, this article will examine two televised breast cancer narratives that directly address issues of body-image, sexuality and femininity.

The introduction of Disney’s first proprietary tween fashion collection, called D-Signed, marks an unprecedented expansion of synergistic marketing strategies for comprehensive lifestyle branding to the tween girl market in the United States. The production and exponential growth of this particular fashion collection allow girls to literally (at Target stores or at home) and virtually (via sponsored online dress-up games and social networks) try on the ‘edgy’ fashions of Sonny Munroe (played by Demi Lovato), among many other lines inspired by Disney Channel’s girl characters. Exploring the promotion of and inspiration for the D-Signed fashion collection, this article employs media industries analysis in conjunction with discursive and ideological textual analysis to advance an understanding of how fashion functions economically and ideologically in relation to television as a site of lifestyle marketing to tween girls. This project aims to address gaps in girls’ media culture scholarship and theorizations of postfeminist girlhoods through an exploration of how contemporary girlhood is constructed in the Disney empire. Thus, this article asks, how might the D-Signed fashion collection function, discursively and economically, as a site for the reproduction and performance of a form of idealized, postfeminist tween girlhood? And how do fashion lines affiliated with Disney Channel programmes function within and beyond Disney’s entertainment empire?

This article presents a detailed analysis of one film in the genre of adolescent romantic comedy, Nick Moore’s Wild Child (2008), and considers how the film can be read as a case study of postfeminist girlhood. In particular, it focuses on the film’s implicit construction of young women’s complicated engagement with feminist history, with the aim of answering the following questions: if much of second-wave feminist discourse dismissed femininity as an artificial, man-made product, and if ‘new feminisms’ oppose this political position by reclaiming and reconstituting femininity, then how is this divisive relationship enacted in contemporary Hollywood cinema? What is the role of consumer culture and fashion in the discordant performances of contesting feminisms and commercial femininities?

The Other Boleyn Girl forms part of the recent Tudor revival we have experienced in film and television. In this article I question how costume can conjecture a visceral tactility in heritage drama by analysing the television and film adaptations of the same source. This article will discuss how the different conventions of television and film approach Philippa Gregory’s positioning of dress through the ‘body natural’ versus the ‘body politic’ by specifically focusing on how Anne and Mary Boleyn are presented through costume. How do the individual versions of this tenuous Tudor tale allow for us to feel our way through history by following the evocative folds of clothing? From ‘cheap’ stock costume strategies of television to the more haute-couture fashion seen in Hollywood film, this article will determine the individual approaches towards costume that define The Other Boleyn Girl in terms of medium specificity.

Set a month after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Tom Ford’s film A Single Man – based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood – crashes with emotion through memorable scenes set in snow and rain, by the fireplace and in the stylized rooms of the ultra modernist redwood and glass house designed by John Lautner (1949). While death is forever, this day in the life of George Falconer (played by Colin Firth) is an exercise in fine detail as the camera wrings new meaning from daily rituals lived in the shadow of death. This article examines the numerous ways in which Ford plays with the substance of life and death through the surfaces of the architecture, the grain of the film and the piercing portrayal of a day in the life of a man who cannot imagine his future.