Film, Fashion & Consumption - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017

Personal Shopper (2016), dir. Olivier Assayas, France: CG Cinéma

This article analyses the role of costume in contemporary heterosexual hard-core moving-image pornography. Building upon a previous study (Church Gibson and Kirkham 2012), it focuses on the representation of youth in a sub-site of the American website Reality Kings (2000–present). By drawing on an emergent yet fragmented body of work in this field, it situates the importance of costume and dress in communicating aspects of gendered identity and debates pornography’s use of ‘authentic’ visual strategies. In addition, it problematizes the much-discussed concept of ‘pornification’, arguing for the recognition of an inverse effect in pornographic texts.

This article investigates discourses about fabric and embodiment in Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In (2011). The aim of the study is to consider how the film’s narrative and mise-en-scène positions fabric as an expression of corporeal vulnerability and subjectivity. Drawing primarily on Warwick and Cavallero’s notion of ‘permeable boundaries’, in the relationship between clothing and bodies, this article argues that Almodovar has interwoven motifs of somatic integrity and dissolution in relation to skin, textiles and film. This investigation proposes that The Skin I Live In offers a compelling interplay of surfaces that is a valuable resource to reflect further on the symbiotic connections between corporeal materiality and fabric.