- Home
- A-Z Publications
- Film, Fashion & Consumption
- Previous Issues
- Volume 5, Issue 1, 2016
Film, Fashion & Consumption - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2016
Volume 5, Issue 1, 2016
-
-
The Baroque imagination: Film, costume design and Italian high fashion
By Sara PesceAbstractIn the 2010s, feature films such as The Great Gatsby (Luhrmann, 2013) or The Grand Budapest Hotel (Anderson, 2014) and other audio-visuals like fashion films or video ads of Italian fashion houses’ collections reveal a convergence between narration and costume that renovates and adapts the cultural meaning of the Baroque. This ‘Baroque imagination’ has deep roots in the first centuries of European Modernity, when Italian cultural vectors dominated the arts and a few spheres of material culture, including clothing, architecture and garden design. Presently, it is sustained by fashion jargon’s exploitation of the word ‘Baroque’ and by the impressive visual impact of costume cinema (beginning with Marie Antoinette, Coppola, 2006). The author interrogates how some Italian high-fashion brands’ engagement with spheres of meaning connected to sumptuousness and sophisticated craftsmanship plays an influential role on an international scale, as revealed in big film productions based on a ‘sartorial film aesthetic’, which convey exclusiveness of tastes and spaces, blatant social inequality, and an oneiric projection into a decadent past. She explains cinematic vintage aesthetics against the backdrop of the fashion industry’s not-innovative production politics in the current end-of-fashion era. Drawing on some crucial traits of the historical Baroque, including the centrifugal phenomenon of French Rococo, she also underscores surprising similarities with the contemporary culture of celebrity: the rituals of power in a decadent democracy, a perception of economy as static, the fear of public and private debt accompanied by a cult of luxury and personality, the conflict between the exhibition of wealth and its condemnation.
-
-
-
From made in Italy to ethno-chic: Some thoughts on costume design in contemporary Italian cinema (class, gender and national identity)
By Andrea MinuzAbstractThis article outlines an overview of the relationship between costume and film in contemporary Italian cinema, with particular reference to class, gender and ideological discourse. Considering Italian film production in the last fifteen to twenty years, from popular film to auteur cinema, the article lays out the challenge of cultural stereotypes about ‘Made in Italy’ and its meanings in a global age. The significance of costume will be explored in terms of plot and character development, mise-en-scène and visuality, negotiating cinematic technique, film analysis and cultural interpretation. More specifically, and with particular reference to the work of Stephen Gundle, we investigate how costume design of male and female characters embodies national discourses such as nostalgia, male anxiety and the ideals of feminine beauty.
-
-
-
Dressing Checco Zalone: Popular Italian cinema and the rhetoric of national character
More LessAbstractThis article starts from the assumption that male film costuming and popular Italian cinema have been two under-researched topics. The study of costumes in popular cinema requires different tools compared to those of the study of cinema stars and the way people use fashion in everyday life should be at the centre of the analyses of dress, fashion and film. This article, through a close analysis of the box office hits Cado dalle Nubi (2009) and Sole a Catinelle (2013) by Nunziante, against the background of the Oscar-winning The Great Beauty by Sorrentino (2013), aims to suggest that their sartorial codes, which draw upon notions of kitsch and dandyism, offer up afresh deeply rooted stereotypes of Italy and Italian masculinity. In developing the analysis, the article will also take into account that cultural watershed in the Italy’s history of Italy that was represented by berlusconismo, when vulgarity and bad taste in clothing choices were associated with moral and political judgements on the so-called italiano medio – the average Italian.
-
-
-
TV drama and fashion: 1992, An Italian case
More LessAbstractThe aim of this article is to explore an Italian TV drama, 1992. As other recent examples, it represents a ‘quality’ drama, a new kind of Italian TV production. In these products the attention to costumes and fashion is really important. If it is true that fashion has long enjoyed a close relationship with mass media, its role in audiovisuals and particularly in fiction products seems to have recently changed. In this new context, dressing issues are no longer related only to clothing: fashion is increasingly included inside stories. Yuniya Kawamura (2005) argues that, regarding fashion, production influences consumption and at the same time consumption affects production. This circularity makes us ask where we can place fashion TV serials, because they assume a clear role of mediation between high fashion brands, or underground styles, and their possible reference worlds. The TV drama 1992 focuses on the Italian political crises of that period. The story is set in Milan, the Italian city of fashion. In the same years we saw the growing success of Italian fashion in the world. In the analysis we will try to focus on the role of clothes inside narration, to show how fashion is important to determine some specific cultural contexts. Our hypothesis is that – under the main narrative line – it is possible to see other levels, such as the clothes and fashion level, that indicate a specific connection with characters’ personality, spaces and places, and historical periods. Is it also possible to trace a creative vision of all of this? How do the costumes connect to the historical period? How are they connected in some ways to more recent fashion shows? Is it possible to see in 1992 a specificity of Italian fashion style?
-
-
-
Performing style: Fashion in Italian factual entertainment
By Anna ManzatoAbstractIn recent years factual entertainment has gained space in Italian television programmes, especially in ‘native digital’ channels (RealTime, DMAX, La7d). Common people are the main characters of stories dealing with everyday life, often in the makeover form, from the house to cooking, from DIY to personal fitness. And in this context fashion constitutes a privileged theme. The article aims at analysing current examples of Italian fashion factual entertainment, discussing the discursive forms and the thematization processes of the fashion object. The roles of televisual apparatus and audiences will also be considered: experts and learners are represented in these programmes, leading to the consideration of fashion as a space of negotiation of experience. The article aims at answering questions such as: what kind of style is proposed and through which discursive procedures (testimony, suggestion, lesson)? What is the function of television in transmitting fashion contents (divulgation, imposition of a style code)? What is the function of the audience (learner, competent)? Finally, what connotation of fashion emerges (apparatus of rules, individual competence)?
-
-
-
How do we talk about fashion in Italy? The big players and independent publishers from 2000 to today: Transformations and orientations
More LessAbstractThe article wants to shine a light on new orientations in contemporary fashion media in order to begin to understand the new playing field for the journalistic system from the point of view of the publishing economy. In the face of a global redefinition of the language, which has changed thanks to the entry into the press and publishing market of new subjectivity and communication platforms, the media shifts lead fashion journalism and publishing increasingly towards hybridization with contemporary audio-visual languages. The examples we will set out concern publishing projects that are being reconfigured as multimedia systems that hybridize the language of cinema, television, advertising, video games and interactive platforms. This article will begin by analysing how fashion, commerce and consumption have changed, acknowledging the transformation and evolution of the concept of Made in Italy since the mid-1990s to today and will focus on large and small players, independent publishing, praiseworthy online-only projects and the recent Italian experimentation of shoppable magazines, sponsored platforms and the return of house organs, which lead large and small publishers and brands to increasingly define themselves as media companies.
-
-
-
Meso-celebrities, fashion and the media: How digital influencers struggle for visibility
More LessAbstractThis article analyses the Italian field of fashion blogging in relation to the theme of celebrity, which is directly linked to the media visibility of bloggers. Relying on the concept of blogging as a social field in which many agents struggle for the symbolic dominance of space, the notions of micro-celebrity and celebrity are discussed. An intermediate category – that of meso-celebrity – is coined to identify a central portion of the field which comprises a few hundred bloggers characterized by a professional approach to blogging, by a structured relationship with the media and companies, and a visibility at national level. The meso-celebrities are described as occupying a position far from both the few celebrities in the field and the thousands of microcelebrities who live in the shadows of the web. Wendy Griswold’s cultural diamond is used to conclude that bloggers relate to diverse fields of cultural production at the same time (the fashion media, of which blogging is a sub-field; fashion production; the field of celebrity). Fashion bloggers work to promote themselves as commodities in those fields, with a level of success that depends on the amount of celebrity capital that they are able to accumulate. The social world created in and around the fashion blogging field is described as being permeated by a celebrity culture which is symbolically led by a small number of internationally renowned bloggers but is driven by the meso-celebrities. Meso-celebrity is finally described as a result of the gradual reciprocal adaptation between old and new fashion media, with the latter able to alter the practices of the former.
-
-
-
The ordinary celebrity: Italian young vloggers and the definition of girlhood
By Romana AndòAbstractThis article examines the phenomenon of the ‘ordinary celebrity’ on YouTube and social media in relation to female adolescent fandom of Italian teen vloggers. The aim is to contribute to the debate on celebrity culture, by investigating the role of Web 2.0 in building and defining online performances that are recognized by young audiences as expressions of celebrity status. The young female vloggers studied for this work actively and regularly produce videos and media content to share on social media; their results are very impressive in terms of followers and fan comments, which are comparable to (or even greater than) those of mass media stars. However, vloggers’ daily narratives about their experience in everyday life (at school, with friends, opinions on fashion brands and make-up, etc.) are perceived by teenagers as natural and authentic and as something they can easily relate to, unlike the life of a traditional celebrity; as a consequence, vloggers’ discourses and behaviours are easily appropriated and used as symbolic materials in building girlhood identity. The article discusses the results of a netnographic research conducted on three teen vloggers, who are very famous among Italian teenagers, and on twenty teen fans. Vlogging productions and interviews were all analysed to understand what being a celebrity means in the convergence culture of the Web 2.0 and the role of these ordinary celebrities in defining contemporary girlhood.
-