Film, Fashion & Consumption - Current Issue

The costuming of actors plays a significant role in how their characters and their actions are understood by audiences. This article examines how male transgression is encoded in fictional royal television via costuming. Costumes for royal characters sit at the intersection between dramatic convention and popular expectations of royal behaviour. Little work has been done to date to examine how costume works in this space, even less on fictional male royal costuming. This article demonstrates, via a discussion of the four kings of the television drama The Royals (2015–18), how costuming both engages in narrative expectations and reveals transgressions.

This article examines the role popular media have played in disseminating images of mafia fashion. Through the representation of criminal apparel on-screen spectators are encouraged to identify with the societal transgressions of the mafioso, engendering an abiding fascination with mafia style. By looking at Italian and Italian American productions from early silent cinema through contemporary television crime series, menswear becomes a primary means of harnessing spectatorial desire and identification that embraces enduring associations that link southern Italian identity with criminality and style. In the analysis of these texts it becomes apparent how costuming communicates a series of semiotic properties that reflect the complex interplay of masculine identities in an environment based on violence, power and appearance.

The article examines how fashion assists in emphasizing heteronormativity in the musical film Hipsters (2008). The film is about the first countercultural phenomenon in the Soviet Union – Stiliagi. Predominantly men, these young people adapted different styles of dress, language, behaviour and dance that they felt was closely copying the styles of western cultures such as Teddy Boys. While the movement that started in the late 1940s and continued to the early 1960s included heterosocial behaviour, the film that presumably recreates the affective feeling of the culture distorts the history to spotlight heterosexuality and the search for individual freedom. It argues that given that historically and currently, the association between fashion and masculinity in the Russian culture is understood as effeminate, the film had to create clear heteronormative relationships between the male and female protagonists while emphasizing fashion and consumption. The article demonstrates how the film works within post-Soviet ideology by comparing the use of fashion in the film and the historical data about the actual Stiliagi movement of the 1950s. By negating the heterosocial and heterosexual relationship, the film created an artificial understanding of the Soviet culture. It follows the official ideological doctrine of creating nostalgia for the simpler yet somewhat stifled life in the Soviet Union without attracting the audience’s attention to the repressions of the post-Stalin Soviet Union.

This article discusses the language of screen costume and representations of masculinity via a close reading of the successful and critically acclaimed 2019 HBO drama series Euphoria. It considers three key characters, Rue, Nate and Fez, and how each of these characters makes visible certain cultural and sociological ideologies which concern and influence current debates around diverse masculinities, social class and creative subjectivity. It is argued that the production team behind Euphoria employs creative acts of appropriation to articulate and explore the diversity of masculine lived experience within the restricted language of television. This is evidenced through the character of ‘Rue’, who sits in opposition to all other characters identified as feminine or transitioning in both narrative context and, significantly, costuming. ‘Rue’ is therefore explored as the masculine articulation and/or manifestation of the creator – Sam Levinson’s subjective position. ‘Nate’ is explored in relation to the currency of damaging stereotypes of dominant masculinity within television drama and how misconceptions around gendered identities work to reinforce, perpetuate and normalize problematic behavioural traits. It is suggested that we need to expand understandings of ordinary clothing or costume as a language, how meaning is articulated within this language and how the materiality of ordinary or unexceptional dress evolves and mutates and becomes a set of unquestioned yet dangerous symbols or significations. ‘Fez’ will be examined in response to Henri Lefebvre’s 1960s ideas around moments of contestation, alongside a discussion of the role that the body and clothing play in marking out or positioning ideas around the intersection of social class and masculinity which can be applied to differing, global manifestations of social hierarchies. Readings of ‘Fez’ highlight middle-class insecurities around subjective value and distance from working-class experience and are played out through the character’s costuming.

The historical drama series, The Club (2021–22), narrating the story of a nightclub at the centre of Istanbul nightlife during the 1950s, achieved great success by becoming the eighth most-watched non-English-language series on an international digital streaming platform. The significant public affirmation the series gained rose on the representation of the leading character – the nightclub star. He directly refers to respected queer singer Zeki Müren (1931–96). Müren has been credited as the greatest performer in Turkey and a modern male icon with his artistic excellence in singing and his outstanding stage performances for over 40 years. He designed his own costumes as well as those of his musicians, the décor for his performances and the choreography of the dancers. Müren appeared on his stage in black tuxedos, suits with sparkling accessories or even mini-skirts with platform shoes. He was aware of the taboos on homosexuality and how this might have affected him. Although his sexuality was in question, his sex never was. He was, after all, an exemplary male citizen of the Turkish Republic with his kindness to his audience, his charity works, his artistic status. Many fans, including the media, referred to him as a pasha, a heroic military commander, to express that he was the most influential artist in Turkey. The referential association of the fictional character with Zeki Müren will be interpreted in the article to further discuss the portrayal of the queer performance in the series. For this purpose, the article will introduce the conceptualization of nonosh, a polite yet explicit contempt, and present an embraceable form of queer identity in Turkish society to define the common portraiture of queer in Turkish popular films and TV shows.