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

Drawing on the example of the teenage girl and her bedroom, in this article I argue that personal and private spaces such as bedrooms are not just ‘hubs’ of social and cultural activity but are important sites within which teenage girls’ social and cultural identities are continually ‘styled’ and represented. As a key space of expression, identity and consumption for girls experiencing their teenage years, I examine the concept of ‘styling’ in teenage girls’ bedrooms as an ongoing process of identity formation and experimentation. In doing this, I explore the interplay between the public and private realm in the styling of personal spaces, whereby teenage girls’ practices of identity flow between the two, can intertwine and are inextricably mapped onto one another. In exploring the relationship between teenage girls, consumption and identity, and specifically focusing on the role of ‘space’ in this relationship, I take the example of fashion stores such as Topshop and Urban Outfitters to explore the ways in which elements of public spaces of teen consumption are ‘taken home’ to be recreated and rearticulated back in the bedroom as a stylistic statement about a teenage girl’s identity. In doing this, I argue that teenage bedrooms are important sites of contemporary youth identity construction and display and that teenage girls’ emerging adult identities and patterns of consumption are articulated through the ‘fabric’ of bedroom space.

Sofia Coppola’s film The Virgin Suicides (1999) can be viewed as visualizing the (re)negotiation process of the twinned aspects of girlish ‘autonomy’ and ‘restriction’. Although the film’s references to more established images of girlhood are observable, its vague, narrative neutrality, supported by cinematic aesthetics with a dreamy and melancholic effect, leaves their meanings largely unexplained. Connected to our contemporary ideas about adolescence, femininity is generally linked to either pathological fragility or emphasized sexual assertiveness. I question the legitimacy of these binaries and instead read The Virgin Suicides as a depiction of female complexity where the subtle complexity of the heroines contradicts these stereotypes. Instead of situating on either polar of extreme assertiveness and fragility, Coppola presents her conception of adolescent girls as floating between these two. The film’s ethereal and maidenly aesthetics conveyed through the visual qualities of the Lisbon Sisters, including the dresses they wear, effectively layer the girls’ sense of autonomy and sexual maturity, signifying the negotiation of idealizing, suppressing and empowering adolescent girls. The tragic fate of the girls, on the other hand, limits the film’s capacity to offer an alternative to the monolithic idea of adolescent ‘girlhood’ and how it is visualized in our contemporary culture.

In a number of recent romantic comedies including 27 Dresses (Fletcher, 2008) and Bride Wars (Winick, 2009) the wedding dress takes on a particular significance as the daughter desires to wear her mother’s wedding gown on her own big day. This article explores the dress within these films, amongst others, demonstrating, with reference to a discussion of consumption, gender roles and psychoanalytic frameworks, that a complex debate around femininity, inheritance, love and consumption is presented. The mother’s dress is an effective totem object that must be overcome by the daughter, who never wears it, in order to forge her own identity. This renders feminine inheritance unimportant and offers a false notion of personal identity to its heroines. The discussion of the wedding dress is extended to include the tension between the vintage and designer wedding dress in Sex and the City (King, 2008) a film in which the vintage dress is celebrated, potentially representing a more balanced and forward-thinking notion of marriage and womanhood.

Online promotional fashion film has become a significant aspect of the symbolic production of fashion in the twenty-first century. This article presents a broad overview of the genre’s most prominent aesthetic and formal tendencies. Three approaches to fashion film-making are discussed: first, the non-narrative, where the status of fashion as a designed object is foregrounded; second, the conventional narrative, in which fashion acts as an aspirational symbol; and finally, the ‘organic’ narrative approach, where the visual style and the formal system of the moving image are constructed around clothing. The films discussed include Portent (2009), directed by Nick Knight, Karl Lagerfeld’s Remember Now (2010) and Once Upon a Time ... (2013), and Lucrecia Martel’s Muta (2011). The article assesses this medium in relation to its potential to challenge the existing paradigm associated with the rhetoric of fashion on the one hand, and the narrative film form on the other. Promotional fashion film, while being a form of ‘new media’, is also firmly situated within the domain of postmodernism, which may explain its limited ability to undermine the established dominant representational codes.

A ‘rites of passage’ movie set in the USSR of the 1950s, Valery Todorovsky’s film Stilyagi (2008) tells the story of the transformation of the hero Mels from loyal member of the Komsomol to stilyaga. For many critics, Todorovsky’s stilyagi are the very embodiment of anti-conformism. And yet to read the film in this way is to overlook one of its key elements – consumption. For in order to acquire their clothes and other accessories, the stilyagi need money. Zooming in (literally) on the financial transactions that these young people engage in with such astonishing regularity, Todorovsky reminds us that without money, there can be no ‘style’, and consequently, no stilyagi. Seen in this light, the stilyagi are not at all subversive, but in fact highly conformist precursors of today’s post-soviet shoppers. It is this paradox at the heart of the stilyagi and their ‘revolt’ as presented by Todorovsky, which will be the subject of our article.

Fashion in Film, Adrienne Munich (ed.) (2011) Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 376pp., 90 b&w illustrations ISBN: 978-0-253-22299-2, p/bk, $27.95