Archaeology of Fashion Film → Conference

Films and film excerpts screened:

Les Costumes de la Femme à travers les ages, excerpt. France, 1908.

Hussein Chalayan, Aeroplane Dress. Dir. Marcus Tomlinson. UK, 1999.

La mode française aux Etats-Unis: Robes et manteaux de soirée. France, 1915.

YSL, Autumn/Winter 2010-11. Dir. Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. France, 2010.

Parisian Modes in Colour, excerpt. Feat. Hope Hampton. USA, 1920.

Fantaisies parisiennes. France, 1920s.

Sparkling Black and White. Dir. Tiffany Frances. USA, 2014.

Chez le grand couturier. France, 1927.

Black. Dir. Nick Knight. Feat. footage of Alexander McQueen’s eponymous show, June 2004. UK, 2015.

Student films: Divinas, excerpt. Dir. Vitoria de Mello Franco. Central Saint Martins, 2018.

Keep Watching the Skies, excerpt. Dir. Sahil Babbar. Central Saint Martins, 2018.

Speaker Biographies and Lecture Summaries                   

Beatrice Behlen | Museum of London

SUMMARY OF TALK: Floating Chiffon and misty tulle: the Materiality of Fashion in Motion

After they have entered the museum, clothes and accessories are usually never worn again. We can no longer experience how they reacted to the movement of their wearer and external forces such as wind, the particular nature of different fabrics in motion and how the layers of clothing once worn together interacted. This talk will look at some uses of film to re-animate dress objects in the archive. 

BIOGRAPHY: Beatrice Behlen studied fashion design and the History of Dress before becoming curatorial assistant at Kensington Palace. She then taught the history of fashion and design at several art colleges and worked at a contemporary art gallery. In 2003 Beatrice returned to Kensington Palace to curate and co-curate exhibitions on royal dress. Since 2007 Beatrice has been Senior Curator of Fashion & Decorative Arts at the Museum of London where she worked on the Galleries of Modern London, curated displays on jewellery and fashion photography and co-curates Show Space, a monthly changing display. Beatrice also works as associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins

Christopher Breward | National Galleries of Scotland

BIOGRAPHY: Christopher Breward is Director of Collection and Research at the National Galleries of Scotland. He was trained at the Courtauld Institute and the Royal College of Art, London and has previously worked as Head of Research at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London and as Principal of Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. His published interests include the relationship between Art and Fashion, Visual and cultural histories of masculinity and histories of city life.

Caroline Evans | Central Saint Martins

BIOGRAPHY: Caroline is Principal Investigator on the Archaeology of Fashion Film project. She is Professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins, and has published seven books and over 40 scholarly articles in the field, including Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness (2003, 2007) and The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900-1929 (2013). Caroline has lectured widely at international design schools and universities, has acted as specialist consultant on fashion exhibitions at international museums, and sits on the editorial and advisory boards of several journals including Fashion Theory.

Lucy Moyse Ferreira  | Central Saint Martins  

BIOGRAPHY: Lucy is the Post-doctoral Research Assistant on the Archaeology of Fashion Film project. She completed her PhD and MA in History of Dress at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, and BA in History of Art at the University of Cambridge. Her recent research has been on fashion and violence, on which she has produced a documentary and is currently preparing a book. She has also published, presented and contributed to media projects on several aspects of fashion design and history, including the co-edited book, Cosmetic, Aesthetic, Prophetic: Beyond the Boundaries of Beauty (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2016).

Isaac J. Lock | Filmmaker and writer

BIOGRAPHY: Former editor of cult fashion magazines, Love and Fantasic Man, Isaac Lock is known for his inquisitive and razor-sharp editorial style. Coming up through the fashion industry, Isaac has developed a delicate and precise aesthetic and eye for beauty, and an ability to translate that into narrative and comedy.  In his first year as a full-time filmmaker Somesuch and Isaac have already produced acclaimed comedy mockumentary short 'Unravelled' for The Woolmark Company, crafted short films for fashion platform M2M, Nowness and a collaborative film with Wallpaper and Pulman Hotels Hong Kong, and are due to release a feature-length documentary, ‘You Will Be With Us in Paradise’, a character study of an ageing British retail duo who have set themselves the unlikely task of bringing back the iconic 70's fashion brand Fiorucci, in an entirely changed world.  Isaac continues to contribute as a writer and journalist, regularly working with Dazed & Confused, i-D, the Observer, the New York Times and Vogue.

Jussi Parikka | Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton

BIOGRAPHY: Jussi is Co-investigator on the Archaeology of Fashion Film project. He is Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics at the Winchester School of Art, and is interested in the materiality of media culture, archaeologies of science, technology and art, and questions of cultural theory. He works on and teaches topics such as e-waste, ecology and digital art and culture. He is the author of several books on media archaeology, digital culture and technical media, including What is Media Archaeology (2012). Recent books include A Geology of Media (2015), and the co-edited Across and Beyond: a Transmedial Reader on Post-digital Practices, Concepts and institutions (2016). 

Nick Rees-Roberts  | University of Paris, Sorbonne Nouvelle

SUMMARY OF TALK: The Paradox of contemporary Fashion Film

From digital promos to behind-the-scenes documentaries, from short art films to big-budget biopics, ‘fashion film’ is a slippery signifier, used to denote different types of filmmaking in different contexts. The paradox of fashion film is the absence of any consensus as to its actual contours. From within the industry, however, fashion film tends to refer to motion editorial or branded content; it is often problematically perceived as a new form emerging with both the advent of digital technology and the corporate consolidation of global brands, both of which have intensified and accelerated since the start of the new millennium. The accepted definition of fashion film as a discrete textual form of moving image used to display fashion in motion has been challenged by the expansion of digital media convergence and the importance to brands of an online video content that is both immersive and interactive. In this presentation, I explore examples of fashion film to highlight the inbuilt tension between the cultural forms of creativity and the economic power of commerce. As the product of both culture and industry, fashion film is a quintessentially contemporary form. In situating fashion film as a hybrid form of communication, one key fault-line emerges—the often contradictory tension between promotion and criticality, between the form’s basic positioning within advertising and promotion and its more varied potential as a vehicle for forms of artistic experimentation or cultural critique.

BIOGRAPHY: Nick Nick Rees-Roberts is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris where is the director of the MA programme in Fashion Design and Creative Industries. He is the author of Fashion Film: Art and Advertising in the Digital Age (Bloomsbury: 2018) and French Queer Cinema (EUP: 2008/2014), co-author of Homo exoticus: race, classe et critique queer (Armand Colin: 2010) and co-editor of Alain Delon: Style, Stardom and Masculinity (Bloomsbury: 2015). He is currently co-editing Isabelle Huppert: Stardom, Performance and Authorship and writing a book on contemporary fashion design and the luxury economy, Postmillennial Fashion: Design and Communication in the Corporate Age.

Stella Scott | Independent Filmmaker  

BIOGRAPHY: Stella Scott is a director from London. She graduated with a 1st in Performance: Design and Practice from Central Saint Martins. She has since written, directed, shot and edited commercial and narrative films for brands and editorial platforms such as adidas, Gucci, Chanel, i-D, Nowness and the Tate. She has made films for artists Hassan Hajjaj, Mark Wallinger, Alice Hawkins and Ellen Von-Unwerth. Her original written, film and photographic work has been commissioned by Film London, HIVE, Dazed Digital and Victoria Miro and screened at festivals worldwide.

Raven Smith | Creative Director  

BIOGRAPHY: Raven is a creative director, writer and lecturer based in London. Raven graduated with a BA from the London College of Communication in photography.  He subsequently worked as an editor for the UK publishing company Black Dog, as an art director at entertainment channel MTV, and as lead creative on the launch of District MTV (now MTV Style International), before moving to Nowness.com, first as an art editor and then, in 2013, as commissioning director, where he commissioned one fashion film a day for several years.

Wanda Strauven | Goethe University, Frankfurt

SUMMARY OF TALK: Text, Texture, Textile: A Media-Archaeological Mapping of Fashion and Film

Adopting a media-archaeological approach, this talk will explore how both early cinema and digital film are connected to textile as technology. It will propose a mapping of various “fortuitous encounters” through time and space, by looking into the etymology of the screen, the history of fashion accessories and the concept of inscription in relation to techniques such as sewing and weaving, punching and coding.

BIOGRAPHY: Wanda Strauven is Privatdozentin of Media Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. Currently, she is also visiting professor at the University of Udine. Her research focuses on early cinema, tactile media, design methods and screenic practices of post-cinema (from interactive media installations to creative media hacking by today’s children).

Marketa Uhlirova | Central Saint Martins  

SUMMARY OF PANEL DISCUSSION: How do we make sense of fashion film’s dramatic rise in the digital age? How does it operate within the fashion industry as well as in wider popular culture? Does it have value beyond commercial application? This panel will debate varying approaches to fashion film today, examining how it is framed by online media platforms and festivals internationally. More broadly, it will ask how the moving image has impacted the fashion industry so far.

BIOGRAPHY: Marketa is Co-investigator on the Archaeology of Fashion Film project. She is a Senior Research Fellow in Fashion History and Theory and Director of the Fashion in Film Festival at Central Saint Martins, which explores the common ground between the worlds of fashion, cinema and art. Her film programmes have been hosted by arts venues internationally. She has edited several Fashion in Film's publications, including Birds of Paradise: Costume as Cinematic Spectacle (2013), and Marcel L'Herbier: Dossier (2014, with Caroline Evans), and her articles (incl. several on fashion film) have appeared in publications including Aperture, Fashion Media: Past and Present, AnOther and Fashion Theor