Film, Fashion & Consumption - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2017

Cloth has a particular relationship with the human body. It is always in contact with, or imagined to be in contact with, the skin, our largest sense organ. Cloth is our interface with the outside world, and the way in which we cover that interface has meaning. The important relationship that we have with cloth to protect and augment our bodies performs as a prosthesis of touch that, in its everydayness, offers a constant opportunity for expression and fetishization within the various discourses of identity in art, fashion and lifestyle. This article aims to explore the way in which cloth as costume in the medium of film, having been ‘broken down’ to naturalize the piece to its setting, stimulates an embodied relationship between the audience, the actor and the film itself. Following Laura Marks and her theories on visual haptics, the piece is a sensuous scholarship of an-often overlooked and under-researched textile art whose effect, the article argues, is that of reinstating the ‘aura’ that Walter Benjamin stated is lost by the mechanical intervention of the movie camera.

This article seeks to analyse the use of fashion brands in two pop music videos: LFO’s Summer Girls and 5 Seconds of Summer’s She Looks So Perfect. The analysis takes a multimodal discourse and intertextual approach, by teasing out the uses of the brand name and the imagery of the music videos, in order to compare the video-brand relations in each. Through this analysis, it is possible to see this intertextuality as a dialectic relationship that provides a unique meaning for each, while also evaluating the desirability of both. Moreover, using each pairing as a stand-in for cultural messages presented to teens, it is possible to tease out representational issues between the release of Summer Girls in 1999 and She Looks So Perfect in 2014. This suggests changes in sexual behaviour, the increasing sexualization of western society and general consumption habits, with less movement in representations of race, gender and sexual orientation.

This article focuses upon the telefantasy series Torchwood, which has existed as both a sole BBC Wales production and twice as an international co-production with first the CBC (Series 1) and then the American cable broadcaster Starz (Series 4). The series, a spin-off of British telefantasy series par excellence, Doctor Who, includes highly stylized costume for some lead characters, especially the males, which both function as metonyms for the characters themselves (much like comic iconography) as well as complicating simple readings of national identity of both character and series. These complications include the fact that a programme that was paratextually positioned as being Welsh had an American-accented, pseudo-RAF-uniformed man from the future as its lead and metonym, as well as how the costuming (amongst other aesthetic elements) changed and the change in how they were interpreted when the series moved production to the United States. Drawn from my Ph.D. research and including empirical audience data, textual analysis and interviews with both costumers associated with the series, this article will both use the series as a case study for how national identity can be discursively constructed, reinforced and analysed via costume as well as looking at the specifics of how a globalized (and glocalized) genre series uses costume.

Fashion is prominently displayed in Jacques Becker’s Falbalas (1944), through the presence of mannequins, both living women and display models. Falbalas is an unusual French film that incorporates both a contemporary fashion house and the creation of a couture collection during the Second World War, which marks a key moment in the history of fashion and cinema. Living and still mannequins are part of a skilful cinematic mise-en-scène, carefully elaborated by an imaginative filmmaker conscious of the power of theatricality. Jean-Paul Gaultier credits the film for starting his career in fashion; he was, and still is, influenced by the way the models moved, or ‘evolved’, in Falbalas, rather than by its plot. Falbalas, heavily marked by Paul Poiret’s theory on mannequins, was orchestrated by couturier Marcel Rochas. Falbalas plays with the spectator on various levels, following the way in which the film’s designer plays with his models, both living and still. The mannequin resists Philippe, and comes to life at the end, signifying the death of an era, but also paradoxically the birth of a new style.

A show created and hosted by Elsa Klensch, a former Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar fashion editor, brought exclusive runway shows from global fashion capitals to a new and very receptive audience. Fashion had been acknowledged as a serious and an occasional news topic, but until 1980, the year Style with Elsa Klensch (1980–2001) was first broadcast, fashion coverage was both limited and sporadic. Her new show very soon became popular with viewers – of all ages. Klensch was arguably the inventor of the ‘fashion television’ we take for granted.

Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 27 May 2017–18 February 2018