Film, Fashion & Consumption - Current Issue

The series The Kominsky Method (Netflix, 2018–20) stars Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin as two ageing members of today’s Hollywood milieu. Sandy Kominsky (Douglas) is an acting coach. His effort of self-preservation and perpetuation of the star’s charisma clashes with corporeal decay and financial collapse. Norman Newlander (Arkin) is Sandy’s agent and caustic friend. He has peculiar death thoughts and constantly makes humorous reference to both men’s physical, psychological and social disparities. What does Kominsky tell us about contemporary celebrity culture as regards ageing and the crisis of public appearance thereto related? The show reveals film and television industry’s leading position in setting desirable or disputable models of old age through a renovated alliance with fashion. Arkin and Douglas’s looks express the shame of old age but also glamorize it. A self-reflexive narrative testifies Hollywood’s search for innovative strategies of self-representation that includes old age, showcasing the transformation of celebrated bodies and underlying the value of personal flexibility. Amid the decline of their image and influence, Douglas and Arkin develop a new adaptability, demonstrated variously in terms of masculine aesthetics, through clothing, living spaces, gestures and dialogue. This article investigates the implied social meaning attached to the dressed old body in the public sphere when the predicaments concern privilege and influence. The main character’s costumes draw on fashion trends such as dandyism, hipster style and vintage. Arkin’s, on the other hand, stick to the classic, although not in a strict formal way. Their juxtaposition reveals how fashion trends come to the aid of celebrities’ effort to overcome crisis, a means to manage as well as spectacularize confused and ambivalent attitudes to ageing.

The article’s goal is to analyse the ageing-related crisis in the TV series Feud (FX 2017) through the story of two entertainment icons, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. On-screen, advancing age is narrated as a critical moment for Hollywood of the period. In those years, women after the age of 40 no longer appeared attractive in the movies. The narrative complexity therefore recalls the set of issues related to sexism and misogyny present in the film industry of the time. That is, age challenged the very aura of celebrity, accentuating a rivalry towards the antagonistic actress as towards a younger self. In the television series, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford are played in turn by two other major film personalities: Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange. On-screen, the two leading ladies express their personalities already by the clothes they wear and the colours they favour, which refer to specific meanings and values. The presence of these two great actresses also defines a further level of interpretation of the text, linked to contemporaneity. The advancing of age, so well highlighted in Feud as a source of crisis, capable of creating a path of lonely struggles in the narrative, becomes off-screen in the current landscape, an opportunity for confrontation and complicity among many actresses and women.

When facing criminal charges, female defendants face a difficult double bind; they are simultaneously judged for the crimes they have committed and for breaching socially defined boundaries of femininity. An unfair portrayal in the media may cause a crisis in any instance, but when the subject is facing criminal charges, the stakes are much higher. To appeal to the court of public opinion, female defendants must consider implicit gender biases by performing a type of femininity that is perceived as authentic and earnest yet appropriately moderated. These expectations are most evident in high-profile celebrity scandals as the defendant is measured against their public persona – even if that persona is entirely constructed. This article examines how dress affects the way female celebrity defendants are perceived in the courtroom and how attained fame and American mass media influence this perception as is evident in the cases of Alexis Neiers, Patty Hearst, Winona Ryder and Anna Delvey.

Chiara Ferragni is a renowned fashion influencer and transnational celebrity. After her hyper-celebrated marriage with Italian rapper Fedez and the creation of the international celebrity brand Ferragnez, Chiara Ferragni is now a full transmedia celebrity, with the docu-film Chiara Ferragni-Unposted (2019) and her participation in the 2023 Sanremo Festival, the main national popular television singing event in Italy. The aim of this article is to analyse Ferragni’s transmedia communication during her Sanremo appearances through her use of fashion as a communicative strategy to raise awareness of the complexity of maternal identity. My argument is that Chiara Ferragni’s maternal celebrity image is an example of what I label digital brand-mom activism: her maternal identity becomes part of the self-branding and is framed in the neo-liberal emphasis of individual choice and ‘have it all’ mentality popularized by Sheryl Sandberg and her Lean In manifesto. The maternal crisis is thus resolved in a generic and superficial exhortation to ‘be yourself’, without questioning the real reasons of the contemporary crisis of motherhood, related to persistent gender stereotypes and structural social impediments for working mothers.

This article focuses on Italian micro-celebrities and their engagement with body positivity within the framework of affective labour and authenticity performances online, specifically through Instagram. The body positivity discourse has been embraced by very different subjects, negotiating sometimes conflicting ideals such as empowerment, social liberation, commercial exploitation and neo-liberal individualistic co-optation of the same values. Among many, I will focus on two accounts: influencer/content creator Muriel (@murielxo) and content creator Denise D’Angelilli (@dueditanelcuore). Muriel and Denise D’Angelilli are two different examples of how many young female micro-celebrities discuss issues such as beauty standards, harmful stereotypes against non-conforming bodies and female empowerment, mostly starting from their own experiences, sharing intimate accounts of their lives and images of their bodies. This type of sharing can be framed as a specific type of affective labour performed by creators negotiating their online presence and self-branding through a performance of authenticity. Moreover, the article focuses on their adoption of peculiar fashion practices and fashion choices and how these practices contribute to their ongoing narrative around authenticity and body positivity. While in the case of Muriel we have a ‘professional’ content creator who builds her online persona through the more institutional co-optation of fashion language, sponsored content and modelling jobs, @dueditanelcuore is insistently using her apparent lack of interest in fashion as a marker of an authentic self. Far from being genuinely opposite, I argue that both strategies are part of a constant negotiation between ‘authentic’ empowerment and post-feminist individualism that permeates online conversations around body positivity.

This article focuses on two successful Italian web personalities who work in the beauty industry and embody the overlapping between business and public identity. Clio MakeUp (Clio Zammatteo, @cliomakeup) and Estetista Cinica (Cristina Fogazzi, @estetistacinica) are two professionals whose success and personal histories are similar and different at the same time. Coming from low-to-middle-class backgrounds, they are both ‘self-made-women’ who managed to build two beauty enterprises (a make-up brand of the same name, the former; a skincare and beauty brand, VeraLab, the latter) tightly intertwined to their public personas. In both cases their business’ success is strictly connected to two loyal online communities: Clio Zammatteo built her whole career around her online presence, starting in 2008 as the first successful Italian make-up YouTuber, reaching a large community way before she entered the beauty business with her make-up brand; Cristina Fogazzi worked her way from beautician to businesswoman, and successfully used Instagram to communicate her brand and personal philosophy, conquering a large and engaged community of followers and customers. This article will address Zammatteo’s and Fogazzi’s interconnected personal and professional identities from different perspectives. First, I will explore how they put themselves and their own non-conforming bodies at the centre of a communication strategy that defies conventional beauty standards and constantly connects their social media presence to their brands’ body-positive and non-judgemental approach. Second, I will focus on the habit of sharing their everyday life to reinforce their public personas and their brands. Third, I will analyse how their fashion choices intersect their media presence and the conversation about normative appearance, and how they resonate with their respective communities. Finally, building on the recurring presence of their domestic space on social media, I will investigate how both Zammatteo and Fogazzi negotiated their presence, bodies and personal spaces online during the pandemic.

The dismissive stance of thinkers towards fashion is often the starting point for those theories of fashion that are increasingly contributing to overcoming it. However, very rarely do even philosophies of fashion dedicate as much as a single thought to the fashion of philosophers. This neglected aspect of the everyday life of intellectuals, people of the mind, provides a new interpretive key. This article explores two prominent cases of intellectual celebrities, to whom we turn especially in times of crisis, personal or public. Diderot famously underwent a personal crisis as a result of a beautiful new silk dressing gown. Marx, on the other hand, often on the verge of destitution, repeatedly pawned his coat – which poignantly also featured at the beginning of Capital as the epitome of the commodity that does not keep you warm – affecting his capacity or otherwise to go and study at the British Museum. These two cases take us directly to the clothed body of two intellectuals and to the struggle – of mind and body, private and public – that led them, via practice, to theory.

In September 2020, the Italian edition of Vanity Fair magazine published a series of interviews with Italian women in important professional positions. Each woman interviewed was compared with a female figure that had a paramount role in history or in popular culture. Chiara Ferragni, entrepreneur and influencer who had established herself in the international fashion scene, was depicted as the Madonna with child, painted by Giovan Battista Salvi, also known as Sassoferrato, upsetting readers and social network/internet users. This will be the starting point of our analysis of other cases. At times the media portray or adorn the celebrity as a deity, or as a cult figure, thus mystifying or desecrating the sacred meaning of deities and history; there are dozens of examples of famous people who were portrayed or have made appearances dressed as divinities. The article will aim to offer a comparative analysis by attempting to systematically explain the variants of the social phenomena found in the parallelisms between appropriation and spectacularization of religious clothing.