Film, Fashion & Consumption - Volume 2, Issue 3, 2013

This article analyses Dancin’ Days, a telenovela broadcast in 1978 by Rede Globo, Brazil’s largest FTA-TV network. The process of economic, social, political and ideological change during the late 1970s, including the renewal of the material base of societies all over the world, is the general context in which the article seeks to identify the aesthetic and visual implications of the technological revolution afoot at that time. More specifically, it attributes them to aspects of the production of Dancin’ Days, like its set, costumes and recording techniques, associated with the dramatic technological expansion of the period and the rise of the consumer culture.

This article examines the role leading twentieth-century Brazilian popular culture figure, Carmen Miranda, had in shaping modern ideas of brasilidade/Brazilianness. I show that she became a popular film and radio star in 1930s Brazil not only because she was an adept performer, but also because she crafted a public image inspired by Hollywood glamour. Unlike the World War II-era Latin American caricature she became in the United States, from 1929 to 1939 Carmen Miranda was a culturally influential and modern star in Brazil. Inspired by the Hollywood styles that she observed in imported films and that were featured in domestic magazines, Carmen Miranda became one of Brazil’s first film stars, the nation’s international ‘Ambassador of Samba’ and an important influence on modern understandings of brasilidade.

This article discusses the creation of youth culture in the 1960s, focusing on the meaning of the urban space as a place of sociability for the youth of the day. The streets that were centres of youth sociability and culture in the 1960s, as Rua Augusta in São Paulo and Carnaby Street, the nucleus of the effervescence then called Swinging London, are the core of this analysis, and a comparison is drawn between both places. In Brazil, the establishment of youth culture is also related to the development of consumer habits and the occupation of an urban space. Rua Augusta constituted a locale for this growing public in the city of São Paulo. In the middle of the Jardins district, this commercial street was a scene of freedom, and used to be closed off on Saturdays, when it would turn into a sort of a boulevard. This street acted as a showcase for a new sociability and a space where youth could coexist, nourishing recognition and identity.

The artist and journalist João Affonso (1855–1924) published in his early career drawings of characters, or ‘street types’, from the city of São Luís in the magazine A Flecha (1880–1881), and from the city of Belém in the magazine A Vida Paraense (1883–1884). These sets of characters, especially the women, were presented later in his book Três Séculos de Modas/Three Centuries of Fashion in 1923, considered one of the first studies of fashion history undertaken in Brazil. These types and their way of dressing show us the traits, diversity and contradictions of the Brazilian population and its relationship with European fashion.

This article focuses on the periodicals with fashion content published in Rio de Janeiro in the first half of the nineteenth century: O Espelho Diamantino (1827–1828), A Mulher do Simplício (1832–1846), Correio das Modas (1839–1840), O Gosto (1843), Espelho Fluminense (1843), and O Martinho (1851). First it discusses the rise of Brazilian fashion magazines against the background of the development in Rio de Janeiro of the printing and clothes industries. Second, by examining the section ‘Modas’/‘Fashions’ against the pictorial and other textual contents of the above-mentioned periodicals, it presents the principal characteristics of the first Brazilian fashion magazines and establishes the origins of the Brazilian fashion editorial as a journalistic genre.

This article examines the influence and impact of European dandyism on the clothing of artists and public figures – key players in fashion – in Rio de Janeiro during the Belle-Époque by the end of the XIX and beginning of the XX century. The interpretive stance of this model questions symbolic and aesthetic choices and ways of building and expressing distinct world-views, for one side, the symbols and signs associated to the European literary and artistic dandyism, and for the other, the north-American rational and pragmatic dressing standards, which are key to understanding the various choices and successive movements that form contemporaneity.

This article comprises three sections aimed at presenting some questions about the relationship between fashion and popular culture in Brazil. The first part deals with the relationship developed between the centre (Europe) and the periphery (Brazil) in the period when fashion culture emerged in Brazil in the nineteenth century. The second part addresses the emergence of a Brazilian visuality, expressed through clothing – yet not constituting fashion – and connected to popular culture, which developed on the fringes of Brazilian society from the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. Finally, the third part seeks to show how, from the end of the twentieth century, the phenomenon of globalization and its impact on identity have established a different relationship between centre and periphery.

If our historic-cultural mestizo background can endow us with a capacity to face the challenge of mixed races matrices, there is also an anthropophagic inscription that is found in our culture that can enable us to select and assimilate critically the repertoires to obtain power and expand our horizons. This article seeks to formulate ideas about Brazilian Fashion that are raised by these questions.

This article discusses the path of the creations of Brazilian designer Ronaldo Fraga in conjunction with the concepts of territory, authorship, politics and game, as conceived of by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari. Reference is also made to excerpts from writers and poets who are themselves the objects of Fraga’s investigation. To this end, this article briefly explores various aspects of the designer’s collections, from his first, launched in 1996, until the 2012 catwalk show.