Film, Fashion & Consumption - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2019

This article explores the multidimensional relationship between fashion and cinema by analysing the Spanish film Alta costura (Marquina, 1954). The film centres on a noir plot involving the investigation of a homicide during a couture show of garments designed by Cristóbal Balenciaga. The catwalk show becomes a structural pillar providing a framework for characterization and plot development, instead of a mere narrative digression. In addition, the show serves to display some of Balenciaga’s groundbreaking innovations in the female silhouette, while also making a surprisingly strong anti-fashion statement by encapsulating the film’s ethical message that is coded negatively. Fashion becomes associated with the negative effects of modernity, with death and destruction, to make a case for the conservative notions of gender roles that prevailed in the 1950s in Spain.

Released during the heyday of the costume drama, La princesa de Éboli (That Lady) (Young, 1955) is an Anglo-Spanish co-production about Ana de Mendoza, Princess of Éboli (1540–92), a prominent figure at Philip II’s court who was accused of treason. Based on Kate O’Brien’s novel, the film adaptation was eventually made into two different films for Spanish- and English-speaking audiences owing to the restrictions of Spanish censorship. Modifications to the script, film-edit and ending of the film offered a reversed interpretation of the fate of the protagonist in the Spanish version. Focusing on the costumes of the Princess of Éboli (played by Olivia de Havilland), we explore the shifting meanings that are brought to bear between the Spanish and the English versions. In contrast to costume films of nationalistic glorification in which the heroine sacrifices her personal desires for the more noble cause of patriotic ambitions, the English version disturbed official views of the past by celebrating female pleasure.

This article combines an analysis of the fabrics, surfaces and styles chosen to dress Pedro Almodóvar’s male characters with an exploration of how those codes might be read with respect to the specific and significant shifting historical contexts of 1980s and 1990s Spanish society. Through focusing our interdisciplinary analysis upon Labyrinth of Passions (Almodóvar, 1982) and The Flower of My Secret (Almodóvar, 1995), we will identify the multifarious ways in which the male subject mirrors societal and cultural trends in a rapidly changing Spain during the years following the country’s emergence from isolation after the Franco years, its subsequent return to democracy and the emergence of a high-living, fashionable cosmopolitanism. In examining the tensions that emerge between pairings of key male figures in the Spanish director’s work, we will pay particular attention to their costuming as central to the construction and performance of masculine identities. We will argue that in the films under examination, a series of binary oppositions are offered in which the suited male (whether a doctor or a military general) is self-consciously contrasted with representations that connote shifting bohemian, subcultural (or ‘alternative’) identities that destabilize and reconfigure the construction and performance of masculine identities and their more ‘traditional’ counterparts.

Harley Quinn as she is represented in the film Suicide Squad directed by Ayers (2016) marks a dramatic and provocative departure from the manner in which she was originally cast in the DC Comics Batman: The Animated Series (1992) and Mad Love (1994). Depicted as an anti-hero in a dysfunctional relationship with The Joker, she is now transformed into a deviant and defiant super-villain in the film. Gone is her harlequin costume to be replaced with fishnets, blue and red velvet hot pants with red brassiere and high-top Adidas sneakers with heels. Although Quinn has been represented as heterosexual and stereotypically feminine there has always been a queer subtext operating. This article will examine the pornification and queering of Harley Quinn, through dress codes and appearance. It will argue that visual signifiers of femininity challenge notions of gender and sexuality and fold heterosexuality back upon its historical imperatives and conventions.

Fashion Film: Art and Advertising in the Digital A ge, Nicholas Rees-Roberts (2018) London: Bloomsbury, xv+220 pp., ISBN 978-0-85785-666-1, hb/k, £63.00; pb/k, £20.69

Street Fashion Moscow, Elena Siemens (2017) Bristol and Chicago: Intellect and The University of Chicago Press, 160 pp., 192, colour illustrations, ISBN 978-1-41578-320-1, h/bk, £64.50

L.A. Chic: A Locational History of Los Angeles Fashion, Susan Ingram and Markus Reisenleitner (2018) Bristol and Intellect and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 234 pp., 81 black and white illustrations, ISBN 978-1-78320-934-7, pb/k, £34

Transglobal Fashion Narratives: Clothing Communication, Style Statements and Brand Storytelling, Anne Peirson-Smith and Joseph H. Hancock II (eds) (2018) Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, vi + 363 pp., 50 b&w illustrations, 3 tables, ISBN 978-1-78320-844-9, h/bk, £83.00

Fashion and Feminism, Ulster Museum, Belfast, 22 June 2018–2 June 2019

Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, February–September 2019; Christian Dior: Couturier Du Rêve, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, July 2017–January 2018