Dressing the Part: Cinema and Clothing
Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson

Most people, in 2006, probably have at least one white T-shirt somewhere in their wardrobe. However, before A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951) and Rebel Without A Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) the white T-shirt was unfamiliar to the general public, for it was simply the standard vest issued to American servicemen for use under combat dress. After its adoption by Marlon Brando and James Dean respectively – both on and off screen - this item of utility clothing became synonymous with youthful, virile masculinity. It heralded the return of an item of male underwear that had been forgotten amongst younger men since Clark Gable appeared without a vest in Capra’s It Happened One Night in 1934. In 1977 Ralph Lauren designed Diane Keaton’s costumes for Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. Within six months Keaton’s quirky masculine attire had been copied at both couturier and mass-market levels, whilst the more enterprising fashion-conscious women could mimic the look by raiding charity shops for waistcoats, oversized jackets, peg-top trousers and ties. In the 1920s Clara Bow’s mouth created a demand for easily-available red lipstick and in the 1950s Marilyn Monroe’s blonde, Italian “demi-wave” hairstyle was copied across the Western world. Lastly, Uma Thurman’s appearance in Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) wearing Chanel “Rouge Noir” nail varnish created a pre-launch waiting list that was so long that department stores in New York were sold out on the day of delivery. As these examples – merely a few among many – indicate, the relationship between fashion and film is multi-faceted and constantly evolving. It is, however, infinitely more complex than the mere mass-market emulation of star styles; it isn’t simply the case that, as Elsa Schiaparelli famously remarked, what Hollywood does today fashion will do tomorrow.

As the Festival’s programme indicates, from the earliest days of cinema, short films showing ordinary women the world of high fashion were a popular part of the cinematic repertoire, and during times of political emergency, cinema was the most effective means of propaganda. Film has always had a role in making fashion accessible and it has consistently been a vehicle for designers to showcase their wares, but it has also served to demystify fashion. Fashion in cinema is so often about fantasy and escapism, about offering, primarily to women, the “forbidden fruit” - as shown in Fig Leaves (Howard Hawks, 1926), which opens this festival – of the glamorous, the exclusive and the luxurious. Not that fashion should be completely demystified, rather it should also be discussed as it operates in various different ways within the cinematic text.

The Fashion Industry in Film

There are surprisingly few films which actually use the fashion industry as setting or which are about the mechanics of fashion - or even designers themselves. Films that attempt to show the industry with any degree of accuracy are often box-office failures, such as Robert Altman’s Prêt-a-porter (1994) or Douglas Keeve’s documentary Unzipped (1995) about New York designer Isaac Mizrahi. Related to this is the frequent depiction of fashion within Hollywood narrative film as the sort of environment where women can flourish, because the jobs themselves are “feminine” and neither demanding nor threatening. In Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) Grace Kelly works in a top New York department store, seemingly as a buyer, while in There’s Always Tomorrow (Douglas Sirk, 1956) Barbara Stanwyck is a fashion designer, as is Lauren Bacall in Designing Woman (Vincente Minnelli, 1957). However, in all of these examples, women’s work is secondary to their romantic expectations; as in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) where Barbara Bel Geddes, a successful fashion illustrator, is hopelessly in love with James Stewart and destined to remain forever unfulfilled.

In the Fifties, the most successful “fashion film” was, of course, Stanley Donen’s Funny Face (1956). Leading photographer Richard Avedon not only acted as “visual consultant” to the director, but also took the photographs which feature throughout the narrative. Donen’s film is not only remembered for the collaboration between Givenchy and his muse Audrey Hepburn, but also for its atypical, affectionate portrayal of the industry.

In the Sixties the mood darkened as, ironically, fashion became increasingly accessible to women lower down the socio-economic register. In Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965) the fashion model Diana Scott, played by Julie Christie, is spoilt, selfish and deceitful, as the discrepancy between her voice-over and the events unfolding on screen makes abundantly clear. Blow Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1967) was enthusiastically received at the time. A closer look, however, at the way in which it depicts fashion photographer Thomas and his milieu reveals disturbing levels of misogyny and his contempt for the world in which he is compelled to operate. As in the later Prêt-a-porter it is intriguing that so many real-life designers, models and photographers were happy to collaborate with what are, in fact, negative portrayals of the fashion world.

Men

In all these films, fashion is equated with the feminine and the superficial. Men, it is assumed, have their minds on higher things: the legacy of Fl?gel’s notion of “The Great Masculine Renunciation” when, in the early nineteenth century, men repressed their desire to be considered beautiful and displaced onto women the affirmation of their wealth and status. Likewise, film until recently has reflected this idea of the woman’s body as the site of display. It was through the subcultural styles of the Fifties and Sixties that young men began a process of reclaiming fashion for themselves, culminating in the so-called menswear revolution of the Eighties and the extraordinary changes within visual culture that followed.

During the dark ages of self-denial, men had, however, the subtler pleasures of Saville Row suiting. Cary Grant is the epitome of “tailored man” with six identical grey suits worn while filming the famous crop-dusting sequence in Hitchcock’s North By Northwest (1959). There is a seminal tailoring moment in the Ur-lad film The Italian Job (Peter Collinson, 1969) when Michael Caine, just released from prison, prioritises a visit to his tailor before the satisfying of his libidinal urges. More poignantly, the self-exiled spy Guy Burgess (Alan Bates) in Alan Bennett’s television play An Englishman Abroad (John Schlesinger, 1986) instructs Coral Browne (playing herself) to visit his tailor and shoemaker on his behalf. This results in a wonderful televisual moment; he makes a triumphant promenade down a bleak Soviet boulevard, sporting cashmere coat, brand new bowler and handmade Lobb shoes, to the strains of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “To Be an Englishman.”

After what could be called the “Great Masculine Reclamation” of the Eighties, sartorial recognition came so swiftly that, in 1984, the style bible The Face nominated as ‘fashion moment of the year’ the splendid array of waistcoats worn by the dandified public school boys in that year’s film Another Country (Marek Kanievska). By the time Hollywood remade The Italian Job in 2003 (F. Gary Gray), Giorgio Armani – who since American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980) has been dressing men in films – was brought in to fashion the film’s four protagonists.

Designers

Armani epitomises one of the two principal ways in which designers have worked with, and in, film. Designers like Armani, Cerruti, and Ralph Lauren have treated all the films with which they have been involved as a way of showcasing their signature looks; they rarely, if ever, have adapted clothes for character or narrative function. The alternative way of working is exemplified by Jean-Paul Gaultier or, more recently, Yohji Yamamoto, who for The Fifth Element (Luc Besson, 1997) and Dolls (Takesho Kitani, 2003) respectively, both willingly subordinated their own individual inclinations to the overall artistic strategy of the films.

The first designer to be openly involved with cinema was Coco Chanel who was famously invited to Hollywood by MGM’s Samuel Goldwyn in the early Thirties. Her Hollywood career was unsuccessful precisely because she refused to make a compromise between her own designs and the practical and narrative demands of the films to which she contributed. Arguably her most successful cinematic foray was Alain Resnais’s L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), where the clothes purchased by Delphine Seyrig from Chanel’s atelier were perfectly suited to the film’s theatricality and visual extravagance. There are one or two films which attempt to portray the designer as artist, most notably Martin Scorsese’s Made in Milan (1990), about Giorgio Armani, and Wim Wenders’s reflective and intellectual tribute to Yohji Yamamoto, Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989). However, the rarity of such films throws into question the very status of the fashion designer. Is he or she to be revered as an “artist” or to be bracketed alongside other “skilled craftsmen” such as the cinematographer, editor or production designer?

Spectacle

The section of the programme entitled The Enigma of the Fashion Object indicates some of the difficulties around clothes. For, they are at the same time both objects of desire and functional garments. Fashion is not often spectacular in cinema, simply because films usually demand that clothes serve to further narrative and illustrate character. When they don’t do this, as in Hitchcock’s The Birds (1962) where we see Tippi Hedren board a small rowing boat in the country harbour of Bodega Bay whilst wearing very high-heeled suede shoes, long suede gloves and a lavish honey-coloured mink coat, it ostentatiously interrupts the narrative flow. Unless, of course, this scene is read as showing the way in which it is her character, Melanie, who is partly to blame for the extraordinary events in this small town. Costumes or fashion in film become “spectacular” if they interrupt the unfolding action, as happens here, and offer an alternative and potentially contrapuntal discursive strategy.

Other problems occur. To display clothes without the body – as is done in a museum – is to divest them of a primary level of signification, as Barthes for one has noted. However, film – and not only avant-garde film – can provide a perfect medium for displaying the tactile and even erotic possibilities of dress. Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993) is the quintessential example of the fetishistic potential of clothes - as Daniel Day Lewis unbuttons Michelle Pfeiffer’s long leather glove to first reveal and then kiss the confined area of flesh beneath, or when Winona Ryder triumphs in the archery contest and the brooch she is awarded roughly punctures the delicate embroidered muslin of her dress, costume’s tactility and innate sensuousness are vividly emphasised. Here clothes have become an alternative language; they are no longer simply a means of reflecting meaning, rather a way of creating meanings and different levels of resonance.