Locating the Intersections of Fashion and Film

Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Montreal, 25-29 March 2015

Since Stella Bruzzi’s trailblazing work, the nexus of fashion and film has been a site of increasing scholarship in both Fashion and Film Studies. This reflects burgeoning institutionalization practices, such as Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design’s Fashion in Film project and the Fashion in Film Festival it hosts biennially, which in turn encourage both filmmakers and academics to turn their attention to the fashion depicted in film. As Adrienne Munich’s 2011 edited volume has established, “fashion is an essential tool in the craft of conveying meaning through film” (5).

In this panel we build on Munich’s work and think it together with Potvin’s volume on the places and spaces of fashion, which includes photography, department stores, window displays and even cyberspace, but not cinema. What we examine are specific deployments of fashion items in fiction films that result in symbiotic forms of identity, with the fashion items taking on specific geo-aesthetic sensibilities and the places taking on fashion-related identities. A black ball gown, a Louis Vuitton handbag, and hipster eyeglasses need not be associated with any place in particular; yet when they feature in Joe Wright’s “Anna Karenina” (2012), Sofia Coppola’s “The Bling Ring” (2013), and Xavier Dolan’s_ “Les amours imaginaires” _(“Heartbeats,” 2010), these items become connoted with the place-specific identities of imperial Russia past and present, millennial louche celebrity L. A. and the trendy Mile End neighborhood in Montreal respectively, which in turn adds to the brand identities of the places in question. Our papers each take a distinctive approach to analyzing the reciprocal relationship of fashion and place. In the case of Elena Siemens’ reading of Anna Karenina, fashion retail is shown to be a key site for mediating influence and generating meaning. Susan Ingram then argues that Sofia Coppola sees celebrity fashion in L.A. functioning as art in Elizabeth Grosz’s Deleuzian understanding of it and offers a reading of _The Bling Ring _in support. Finally, Katrina Sark’s institutional analysis takes its cues from Elizabeth Wilson’s work on street dress codes to identify larger cultural patterns and trends in Montreal’s fashion system. Our discussant and chair, Markus Reisenleitner, will compare these three approaches, resulting in a productive discussion about interpretive strategies and insights into the place of fashion in film.

Source 1: Bruzzi, Stella. 1997. “Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies.” London: Routledge.

Source 2: Munich, Adrienne, ed. 2011. “Fashion in Film.” Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Source 3: Potvin, John, ed. 2009. “_The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800-2007.” _London: Routledge.

Chair and discussant: Markus Reisenleitner, York University

Paper 1: Karenina in Black: The Role of Fashion in Film

Abstract

Commenting on the role of fashion in film, Wim Wenders states: “Clothes indicate the temperature of a picture, the date, the time of day, time of war, or time of peace.” (2010). He adds: “A woman’s life all summarized in her dress, her entire life showing in the sufferings of a dress!” (ibid.). This paper discusses Joe Wright’s critically acclaimed film “Anna Karenina” (2012), based on Leo Tolstoy’s novel, and its impact on the fashion industry from Chanel to Banana Republic. According to the film’s Oscar-winning costume designer Jacqueline Duran, they “took Tolstoy’s 1870s silhouette, but simplified the details, so it had the simplicity of 50’s couture” (Duran 2012). In one scene in particular, Duran points out, they “remained faithful to the literature” – the famous ball, to which Karenina rebelliously wore a black dress, rather than the customary pastel. The paper traces the peculiar itinerary of Karenina’s black dress – from Tolstoy’s novel to Joe Wright’s film, to the runways of major designer labels, and finally to the mainstream fashion. Yury Lotman has identified St Petersburg, one of the key locations in Tolstoy’s novel, as the “eccentric city”: “situated ‘at the edge’ of the cultural space,” this city “is founded as a challenge to Nature and struggles with it” (2000). Citing evidence provided by the novel and the film, as well as various cultural theorists, the paper demonstrates that the Karenina-inspired fashion, like Wright’s film before it, at once undermines and sustains the sense of Russia, and in particular that of St Petersburg, as described in Tolstoy’s text (itself torn between the city’s foundational myth and the author’s own vision). This intricate set of transformations confirms that any performance, to expand on Patrice Pavis’s observation, is inevitably a “confrontation” of at least two “fictional universes” (1992).

Source 1: Wenders, Wim. 2010. “Once: Pictures and Stories.” New York: D.A.P. 14-15.

Source 2: Durran, Jacqueline. October 2012. “A Tale of Two Costume Queens.” British Glamour. 215-217.

Source 3: Lotman, Yury M. 2000. “Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture.” Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 192-193.

Source 4: Pavis, Patrice. 1992. “Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture.” London: Routledge. 21-29.

Author: Elena Siemens, University of Alberta

Bio

Elena Siemens is Associate Professor in Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta. She is the author of Theatre in Passing: A Moscow Photo-Diary (Intellect 2011), and editor of “Dark Spectacle: Landscapes of Devastation in Film and Photography” (Space and Culture 2014), and “Scandals of Horror” (Imaginations 2013).

Paper 2: The Thing about Bling

Abstract

Sofia Coppola’s growing oeuvre is characterized by privileged protagonists who experience their lives as empty and who struggle, mostly unsuccessfully, to break out of their ennui. Her latest, “The Bling Ring” (2013), is based on the Vanity Fair article “The Suspects Wore Louboutins” by Nancy Jo Sales, about a real-life group of teenagers in Los Angeles County, who tracked celebrities online, broke into their homes when they were away and stole millions of dollars worth of cash and designer belongings. The fame of the celebrities in question, such as Paris Hilton, Orlando Bloom and his then partner, Victoria Secret model Miranda Kerr, and Lindsay Lohan, whom the ringleader considered the “ultimate fashion icon” and “biggest conquest,” rests more on their high-end wardrobes and lifestyles than their artistic accomplishments. This paper investigates Coppola’s interest in the interest in these celebrities and their wardrobes, and argues that Coppola has understood something important about how celebrity fashion functions in Los Angeles, namely, that it is consonant with the kind of art that Elizabeth Grosz theorizes in works such as Chaos, Territory, Art (2008) and “Becoming Undone” (2011). Grosz’s productive Deleuzian understanding of art as “the art of affect more than representation, a system of dynamized and impacting forces rather than a system of unique images that function under the regime of signs” encourages a reading of The Bling Ring that goes beyond aesthetic evaluation to attend to “the peculiar relations that art establishes between the living body, the forces of the universe and the creation of the future” (2008: 3). To have a future in the celebrity culture that calls L.A. home, as the examples of Paris Hilton and those who followed in her wake of being famous for being famous demonstrate, requires an ability to mobilize affect, something which high-end fashion items are designed to do. Celebrity fashion is, indeed, as the description of Chaos, Territory, Art has it, “the result of the excessive, nonfunctional forces of sexual attraction and seduction.”

Source 1: Grosz, Elizabeth. 2008. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press.

Source 2: Grosz, Elizabeth. 2011. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Source 3: Church-Gibson, Pamela. 2012. Fashion and Celebrity Culture. London: Berg.

Source 4: Diamond, Diana. “Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette: Costumes, Girl Power and Feminism.” Munich, Adrienne, ed. 2011. Fashion in Film. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 203-230.

Author: Susan Ingram – York University

Bio

Susan Ingram is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities at York University, Toronto, where she is affiliated with the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies and the Research Group on Translation and Transcultural Contact, reflecting her research interests in the institutions of European cultural modernity. She is the general editor of Intellect Book’s Urban Chic series (http://urban-chic.net/) and the editor of the World Film Locations volume on Berlin.

Paper 3: Film and Fashion in Montréal

Abstract

This paper investigates the role of fashion in contemporary films set in Montréal and made by Quebec filmmakers. While Montréal’s neighbourhoods, such as Mile End and the Plateau, are often selected as backdrops of many films, the intersections of local fashion, street wear, and costumes presented on screen and their relation to the city remain largely unexplored.

Elizabeth Wilson, in her chapter on fashion and city life in Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (2013, 1985) examines the notion of street dress as “full of expressive clues,” because it was “still just as important to let the world know what sort of person you were, and to be able to read off at least some clues from the clothes of other people.” According to Wilson, in the modern metropolis, the “individual more and more was what he wore” (137).

Following Wilson’s lead on reading urban and street “dress codes” in the city, and by connecting this semiotic interpretation with larger cultural and institutional trends manifested in film, art, fashion, and culture, I examine in greater detail the relationship between fashion and urban culture in several Montréal films, seeking out particular trends and styles and how they relate to the city’s multicultural identities and its mainstream and independent fashion scenes. I particularly focus on the films of Quebec director Xavier Dolan.

Montréal-born auteur director, writer, and actor Xavier Dolan is known for his provocative storytelling and cinematography. His latest film Mommy (2014), which showcases Quebecois culture and language, won the Jury Prize in Cannes. His 2010 film Heartbeats (Les amours imaginaires) is a love triangle between three young people, set in Mile End. Several of the film’s protagonists wear hipster, vintage, and vibrantly coloured (colour-block style) clothing, which reflects the neighbourhood’s abundance of second-hand and vintage stores. Moreover, the colour-block fashion style popularized in Dolan’s film was taken up as the theme for a Colour Block Party hosted by Montréal’s Fine Arts Museum in conjunction with its exhibition Tom Wesselmann: Beyond Pop Art (http://suitesculturelles.wordpress.com/2012/08/02/tom-wesselmann-and-the-art-of-colour/) and the annual Festival of Fashion and Design in August, 2012.

Source 1: Wilson, Elizabeth. 2013 (1985). Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. London: I.B. Tauris.

Source 2: Baril, Gérald. 2003. “Design de mode,” in Marc H. Choko, Paul Bourassa, Gérald Baril, eds., Le Design au Quebec. Montréal: Les Editions de l’Homme.

Source 3: Rantisi, Norma M. 2011. “The Prospects and Perils of Creating a Viable Fashion Identity,” in Fashion Theory. Vol. 15, Issue 2, 259-266.

Source 4: Rocamora, Agnès. 2009. “Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion and the Media.” London: I.B. Tauris.

Author: Katrina Sark, McGill University

Bio

Katrina Sark is a PhD candidate in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill. Her dissertation entitled “Branding Berlin” is a cultural analysis of the urban, economic, and cultural transformation in post-Wall Berlin. In addition to having co-founded the Urban Chic series and co-authored “Berliner Chic: A Locational History of Berlin Fashion” (2011), she has published several articles on contemporary Berlin culture. She blogs at http://suitesculturelles.wordpress.com/.