Film, Fashion & Consumption - Volume 3, Issue 3, 2014

This article contends that the first two screen adaptations of Suzanne Collins’ trilogy The Hunger Games creates a space for critical reflection on the currently intensifying levels of global inequality under late capitalism through its creative imagining of the future relationship between fashion and class. It argues that both the first film of the trilogy The Hunger Games, directed by Ross (2012), and the second The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, directed by Lawrence (2013), in their representation of a figurative dystopian state ‘Panem’ estrange our day to day experience of fashion by juxtaposing it with dress, restricting fashion as a social practice to the elite social class in Panem’s capital city ‘Capitol’. In encouraging the development of this Suvinian ‘cognitive effect’, this article argues that the films ask us to reappraise the basis of fashion in our own world as a fetishistic regime of consumption and also to look again at the class dynamics of society and the role of fashion and celebrity within these. In doing this, however, importantly, both films resist any simplistic condemnation of fashion and celebrity, instead pointing to how these spectacular cultural dominants might be used to ferment resistance to injustice in order to mount a challenge to the seemingly unassailable power structures that perpetuate it.

Reality television has spawned a proliferation of programmes that feature ‘ordinary’ people. Often this notion of ordinary not only means non-celebrity but is also a synonym for working-class. Class, however, is typically unacknowledged and unspoken in the narratives that unfold in the genre, while the programmes themselves construct class and perceptions of difference, largely through fashion and appearance. Although there is an increased representation of working-class subjects in the reality genre, this visibility is not matched by an access to control of media platforms. Therefore, it is argued, what is often found in the representations generated by these programmes is a kind of class tourism that involves Othering. A substantial branch of reality TV that deals in narratives of transformation and foregrounds fashion and the body as signifiers of classed taste is introduced, and it is posited that cultural hegemony might be identified in the framing of middle-class taste as good taste in this subgenre, not only for those surveyed on-screen but also for the audience watching at home. Snog Marry Avoid? is analysed in relation to the performance of classed femininity it offers within this context.

This article uses a comedy sketch Only Fools and Horses: Beckham in Peckham (2014) as a point of departure to discuss ideas around the designation, embodiment and treatment of contemporary working-class masculinity. It uses this sketch to explore the relationship between working-class masculinity and fashion in the age of the metrosexual. The article considers the importance of the body to this relationship – the ways in which the middle-class eye of the mainstream media manages and maintains this classification via judgements of value and taste. Within the United Kingdom the class structure is susceptible to shifting patterns of classification, but with regard to masculinity and fashion, this article argues, media representations continue to be reductive and work to actively reinforce established stereotypes.

This article examines costume and class in the films of Woody Allen, with a focus on anti-fashion as aspirational middle-class costume, using two recent and notable examples from Allen’s European-tour oeuvre. We consider the tension between the bland, yet curiously compelling costuming of the middle classes in Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) and Midnight in Paris (2011) and explore how the mundane costumes of the bourgeoisie in these films are upheld in the press and by audiences as fashionable and desirable. We place our analysis in relation to the work of Gaines, Bruzzi and Warner to highlight the audience appeal of the costume that, whilst unspectacular, represents an aspirational dress code that is unrelated to specific trends or designers. Our argument is twofold: first, that anti-fashion in film is a trope of the middle class, which is limited in range and personality and is positioned in the narrow margin between bourgeois aspirational dress codes and expressive bohemianism. Second, we contend that the costume is both anti-fashion and, paradoxically, fashionable and desirable through association with Allen’s rarefied world of urban intellectualism. This article addresses a need to explore the lack of analysis in costume studies on middle-class costume in cinema.

In a number of studies that look at the cultural history of post-war Britain, class is referred to and used as a concept and a theoretical model of analysis. This article discusses aspects of the interdependent relationship between class, consumption, film and fashion in its analysis of a Clarks shoes advertising campaign from the 1940s, which featured an array of contemporary and mostly British actresses of both screen and stage. Unpacking how these elements work together in a network of meanings and values, this article suggests that the ways in which these various actresses are grouped together and represented in the branding of Clarks shoes is a process and practice of classification. Here, amongst other things, the actresses are defined by their ‘work’ and ‘labour’. By questioning how these elements also work to classify and categorize the actresses, this article invites alternative ways to think about and employ the concept of ‘class’ in practices of historical interpretation.

Women Fashion Power, Design Museum, London, 29 October 2014–26 April 2015