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- Volume 3, Issue 1, 2014
Film, Fashion & Consumption - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2014
Volume 3, Issue 1, 2014
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Birds of paradise: Feathers, fetishism and costume in classical Hollywood
More LessAbstractThis article aims to investigate the reasons for the prolific use of feathers in 1930s Hollywood costume. Instead of positioning them merely as a spectacular tool of glamour in the Golden Age, it will focus on feathers as a form of material culture and specifically on their fetishistic nature in order to pose an alternative explanation for their sartorial popularity in a decade marked by the introduction of the Production/Hays Code. I wish to demonstrate that by shifting the methodological emphasis on feathers from object to subject, we open up an autonomous narrative for the material that would be missed when focussing only on its contextual reading. This in turn potentially offers a new dimension as to their use, in particular as a metaphor for female sexuality and therefore as a vehicle for reading 1930s cinematic sexuality.
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Femininity and costume in 1930s horror
By Ellie SleeAbstractThis article addresses the repeated use of imagined sartorial archaisms in female costuming in 1930s Hollywood horror films, by both analysing the physical make-up of the dress in question and bringing contemporary and historical outside influences into account. It examines female costuming as both a plot facilitator and one of the true visual symbols of the Gothicism that proliferated in films of the era. The article also focuses on the limited roles for women, particularly in 1930s horror, and the way in which costume reinforces and compounds this. The influx of German Expressionist film-makers to America prior to World War II brought Romanticism into the mainstream. It was accountable for the Gothic subject matter and aesthetic of Hollywood’s ensuing horror films over a period of decades, beginning with Dracula (Browning, 1931). It also marked a new dawn in female costuming for Hollywood, when women were not wearing historical dress, or contemporarily fashionable dress, but an imagined, evocative dress that never existed in history, but simultaneously looked as if it had.
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Dressing for the future: Speculative fashion in 1930s Hollywood
By Barry CurtisAbstractThe interwar years saw extensive speculation on the future in all fields of design. Hollywood was remarkably reticent on the subject and ‘science fiction’ was a subordinate genre. This article explores significant films that were set in the future with particular regard to dress and architectural mise-en-scène. It suggests how certain tropes of future dress, partly indebted to avant-garde design and partly adapted from historical fictions, were deployed and considers in some detail the futuristic Just Imagine of 1930, popular serials of the era and finally the utopian Lost Horizon of 1937. It concludes with some reflections on how dress appeared as part of the future proposed by the New York World’s Fair of 1939.
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Modernity, femininity and Hollywood fashions: Women’s cinephilia in 1930s French fan magazines
By Leila WimmerAbstractMy broad aim in this article is to explore the reception of Hollywood fashions in French mass circulation film magazines of the 1930s as it intersects with specific ideals of modernity, femininity and national identity. These magazines allow for a case study exploring the nexus between the global and the local in the construction of particular models of modern femininity in consumer culture. I want to suggest that these publications offered a key site for French women’s negotiation of modernity and were a key locus of a popular, feminine cinephilia neglected in existing accounts of cinephilia.
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