Archaeology of Fashion Film

Between 1 September 2017 and 30 November 2019, Fashion in Film Festival’s Marketa Uhlirova was one of the initiators and co-investigators on ARCHAEOLOGY OF FASHION FILM, a two-year research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

The research was jointly run by Central Saint Martins/University of the Arts London and Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton), with fashion historian and theorist Caroline Evans as the principal investigator, media scholar Jussi Parikka as the other co-investigator, and Lucy Moyse-Ferreira as a post-doctoral research assistant.

More about the project:

In an era witnessing a rapid proliferation of the digital moving image across commerce and culture, this research project is the first to investigate the hidden history of fashion film, going back to the beginnings of cinema. It asks what legacy this new history may have for the rapidly changing field of fashion communications today.

Emphasising the transformative effects of film on fashion, the project forges a new understanding of film as a 'fashion medium' and as a 'fashion object'. It will make a major contribution to scholarly studies of the history of fashion, of film, and of fashion film, and will change how contemporary fashion filmmakers and other media practitioners understand the history of their discipline and the media cultural context for their own creative and commercial work.

Positing fashion film as a unique hybrid of two industries with distinct practices, resources, and motivations, the project’s interdisciplinary approach provides a new historical and theoretical framework for understanding this important and increasingly popular phenomenon. To that end, the project brings together scholars with combined expertise in film history, fashion history and media studies, and practitioners involved in various aspects of contemporary fashion film production.

Partners and Outputs:

Project partners included British Film Institute, EYE Filmmuseum Amsterdam, British Fashion Council, Narodni Filmovy Archiv Prague, Academy Film Archive.

Between November 2017 and March 2018 the project staged two major fashion film workshops at Central Saint Martins and British Film Institute (organised by Uhlirova) →, with participants including Tom Gunning (University of Chicago), Patrick Russell (BFI), Marie-Aude Baronian (University of Amsterdam), Kathryn Ferguson (London-based filmmaker), Raven Smith (London-based author and formed Nowness film commissioner), Bryony Dixon (BFI), Nico De Klerck (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History), Jenny Hammerton (The Associated Press), Pamela Hutchinson (Silent London), Sally Bolton (stylist and PhD candidate, UAL), JJ Guest (artist and fashion image-maker), Claire Smith (BFI) and others.

Outputs have included a one-day conference Archaeology of Fashion Film at Central Saint Martins (organised by Evans and Moyse-Ferreira, 6 July 2018) →; a seminar Fashion and Film: A Parallax View, at Winchester School of Art (organised by Parikka, 2019) →; talks at Parsons Paris, Fashion Film Festival Bucharest and Fashion Film Copenhagen (Uhlirova & Evans); a film exhibition Early Cinema’s Costume Attractions, Fashion Film Copenhagen (Uhlirova) →; a themed issue of the Journal of Visual Culture (edited by Evans and Parikka) →; articles on Sonia Delaunay’s 1926 fashion and textiles film (Moyse-Ferreira, 2020 →, and Uhlirova, 2022 →); conference papers at the 4th International Conference Colour in Film (Uhlirova) → and Global Colour and the Moving Image University of Bristol (Moyse-Ferreira) →; a project website (now discontinued); and a forthcoming book Conversations about Fashion Film (Uhlirova, 2026).

Researchers:

The project investigators are established researchers in the fields of cultural studies of fashion, cinema and media archaeology:

Caroline Evans is Professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. She has published widely on historical as well as contemporary fashion. Her publications include Fashion at the Edge and The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900-1929 (Yale University Press, 2013) and ‘Materiality, Memory and History: Adventures in the Archive’ in: Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! (Rizzoli International Publications, 2013) and the anthology Time in Fashion: Industrial, Antilinear and Uchronic Temporalities (as editor, with Alessandra Vaccari)

Marketa Uhlirova is an art historian and curator specialising in the intersections between fashion and film. She is Reader in Fashion, Cinema and Visual Studies at Central Saint Martins, and Director and Curator of Fashion in Film Festival. She has published numerous articles and catalogue essays on aspects of fashion and cinema. Her books include Birds of Paradise: Costume as Cinematic Spectacle (as editor, Koenig Books, 2013) and If Looks Could Kill: Cinema’s Images of Fashion, Crime and Violence (as editor, Koenig Books, 2008).

Jussi Parikka is a media theorist and Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). He is also co-founder of The Archaeologies of Media and Technology (AMT) research group at WSA. His books include Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), A Geology of Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), What is Media Archaeology? (Polity, 2012).

Lucy Moyse Ferreira’s research focuses on fashion media, beauty and violence in fashion. She completed her PhD at The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. Her publications include the book Danger in the Path of Chic: Violence in Fashion between the Wars (Bloomsbury, 2021), and articles for International Journal of Fashion Studies, BIAS: Journal of Dress Practice, Journal of Visual Culture and Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion.