Film, Fashion & Consumption - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2016

Seen as the leading contemporary maker of behind-the-scenes documentaries about the world of fashion, French journalist Loïc Prigent has established a career from delving into the methods and processes involved in fabricating designer fashion. His popular television series Le Jour d’avant (The Day Before) (Prigent, 2009–10) mixes traditional information and observation with a more performative and selfreflexive mode with ironic nods to factual entertainment formats and reality television. This article unpacks Prigent’s documentary method underlining his sociological precision and particular interest in the creative process through analysis of his filmed portrait of Jean-Paul Gaultier at work recreating and contextualizing his most famous designs in front of the camera. The article concludes by critiquing Prigent’s possible collusion with the luxury mega-brands arguing that his work illustrates the precarious position of the documentarian working in global fashion in the twentyfirst century, torn between a journalistic ethic of information and the lucrative lure of covert promotion.

This article analyses how Sex and the City: The Movie 2 (King, 2010) represents a binary between style that is coded as ‘vintage’ and, therefore, desirable, and style that is depicted as ‘dated’ and identified as bad taste. Although this has been a dominant motif in both the Sex and the City series and first film (King, 2008), Sex and the City: The Movie 2 maps this distinction onto a West/Middle East binary. While everything Western (or, more precisely, everything NYC) is represented as stylish, the Middle East (and here it is Abu Dhabi that stands in for the Middle East) is depicted as dated and, the film suggests, trapped in the decade of the 1980s. Sex and the City: The Movie 2 develops many of the prejudices found in contemporary Western representations of the Middle East but articulates these through the motifs of fashion, consumerism and female sexuality. The article proposes that what is most offensive about Sex and the City: The Movie 2 is that it conflates all the social, cultural, political and, most importantly, religious differences that exist between secular New York and Muslim Abu Dhabi and reduces all of these issues to a simple question of style and knowing consumerism.

Roger Vadim’s Barbarella (1968) looms large in popular culture. Disguised under its sartorial splendour, the film’s narrative clearly negotiates social anxieties of the late 1960s. Similarly, the production design of the film incorporates contemporary elements from art, architecture and fashion. Arguably, these elements of style have played a key role in catapulting the film to its cult status. Franco-Spanish designer Paco Rabanne is frequently, albeit erroneously, credited for the creation of Jane Fonda’s on-screen parade of highly stylized costumes in the film. In fact, the man responsible for creating fashion in the diegetic year 40,000 was French costume designer Jacques Fonteray. Rabanne’s involvement in the film was limited to the creation of one costume. Based on archival research conducted in France and the United States of America, this article explores the role of Jacques Fonteray in the creation of the film’s costumes while simultaneously debunking the popular misconception regarding Paco Rabanne’s influence on the film’s overall aesthetics.

My article, which begins by noting the fluke meeting between writer James Joyce and film star Marlene Dietrich in a Paris restaurant, considers the importance of masquerade and gender performativity in three texts of the late 1920s: an extract from Joyce’s final novel, Finnegans Wake, first published in 1925; Dietrich’s film, The Blue Angel (1930); and Joan Riviere’s psychoanalytic essay, ‘Womanliness as a masquerade’ (1929). After critically assessing the term ‘masquerade’ and Riviere’s reflections on it, I discuss the significance of Dietrich’s self-made costumes for The Blue Angel, arguing that she recognises the playful potential of the masquerade. Following this, I discuss the gender performativity of ALP, the heroine of Finnegans Wake, noting that her chapter of the novel shares with Dietrich’s and Riviere’s texts an emphasis on gender instability and shows how this can be performed through fashionable dress. I end by noting that Joyce, a male modernist often criticized for his reductive representations of women, is highly sensitive to the relationship between fashion and gender at this point in time.

This article explores how Disney provides a utopian response to the horror and corporeal trauma of warfare through the family musical Bedknobs and Broomsticks (Stevenson, 1971), a film in which amateur sorceress Eglantine Price (Angela Lansbury) can enchant a museum’s weapons and heritage military wear into battling the Nazis in the place of ageing members from her own community. In this film, the mobilization of and attitudes towards costume and the heritage antiquity can displace human labour in wartime, so that death, destruction and bodily injury are prevented from occurring and families are brought together as opposed to being driven apart. The article ultimately argues that while human unity and the idea of multicultural harmony are celebrated, the enchanted object provides a means of cleansing political struggle in a way that disavows the human cost of warfare rather than serving to question the nature of warfare itself.

This essay proposes that reality television show RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–present) simultaneously participates in a highly commercial medium while commenting on, critiquing and parodying consumer culture. Drag Race, like other drag or female impersonation competitions, engages dress and performance to parody a range of normative social categories such as gender and sexuality. Yet the show differs from other drag competitions like those featured in US documentaries The Queen (Simon, 1968) and Paris is Burning (Livingston, 1990) in its ambivalent and lucrative engagement with consumer culture. In so doing, RuPaul’s Drag Race manages to parody the so-called American Dream while encouraging its pursuit.

In the spirit of Film, Fashion & Consumption’s ‘Short Cuts’ section, which encourages short analyses of timely topics, this piece aims to spark discussion across disciplines. It is my hope that experts in other fields, including queer theorists who study drag culture, will further enrich the conversation with their contributions.

Fashion and the Consumer Revolution in Contemporary Russia, Olga Gurova (2015) London and New York: Routledge, xvii + 182 pp., 13 b&w illustrations, ISBN: 9780415841351, h/bk, £95.00

CONFERENCE REVIEW

EUPOP 2016: The 5th International Conference of the European Popular Culture Association (EPCA), Paris, 20–22 July 2016

FASHION’S DOUBLE: REPRESENTATIONS OF FASHION IN PAINTING, PHOTOGRAPHY AND FILM, ADAM GECZY AND VICKI KARAMINAS (2016) 1st ed., London and New York: Bloomsbury, 192 pp., ISBN 9781472519290, p/bk, $24.99, h/bk, $122.00, e-book, $24.99