Fashion and drugs always went along well and with this statement I’m not referring to the consumption of illegal substances among some of the main players working in the industry, from designers and models, to PR agents and journalists.
I’m in fact referring to those fashion trends spawned by some subcultures in which drugs were instrumental. In some cases films turned into vehicles to spread these trends.
In Italy most directors used too many stereotypes to portray drug-related cultures.
Crimes or visions connected with drugs appeared in many poliziotteschi or gialli, but such films hardly showed plausible drug scenes.
Some of these films were also connected with the world of fashion: in La morte accarezza a mezzanotte (Death Walks at Midnight, 1972) by Luciano Ercoli, Valentina (Nieves Navarro), a beautiful fashion model living in a modern flat overlooking Milan’s Duomo, has a vision of a young woman being brutally murdered with a spiked glove while she's under the influence of an experimental drug. Yet such films never manage to inspire specific trends.
A few years before Ercoli’s film, Fellini had tried to visualise an LSD vision in "Toby Dammit", his segment of the Poe-inspired film Histoires Extraordinaires.
The title character, played by Terence Stamp, is an actor arriving in Italy to shoot the first “Catholic Western”, who is haunted by a young girl playing with a ball (an image lifted from Mario Bava’s Operazione Paura, 1966), who represents the devil.
In his hallucinated state, Damnit also takes part in an awarding ceremony that includes a fashion show with models wearing the creations of a fictitious designer called Bourget.
The models walk down the runway wearing extravagant designs with bizarre names such as Queen of Sheba, Fontane Romane (Roman Fountains), Cathedrale Engloutie (Sunken Cathedral), Umiliazione (Humiliation) and Imperiosa (Imperious).
Some of the ideas for the metal and plastic costumes, designed by Piero Tosi, and inspired by experimental fashion trends from the 60s, were later on recycled in the catwalk show for another film by Fellini, Roma.
In later years the catwalk show and the main themes of "Toby Dammit" inspired a patchwork outfit by Karl Lagerfeld for Fendi, yet the costumes featured in this film didn’t generate any specific fashion trends for one main reason: they were mainly inspired by fashionable creations (including Paco Rabanne's) from those times.
Conservative forces in Italy didn’t allow directors to develop too well the fashion and drug connection and, for this reason, foreign films in which drugs appeared in conjunction with criminal behaviour turned, in many cases, into style Bibles.
Hard to believe it, but the Neapolitan camorristi, adopted new styles and looks inspired by films, modelling themselves on the main characters out of The Crow and Matrix, though one of their favourite style reference remained Tony Montana in Scarface (who turned into
an inspiration also for some menswear collections), while Camorra women favoured female bodyguards dressed in yellow like Uma Thurman in Tarantino’s Kill Bill (check out Gomorrah: Italy’s Other Mafia by Roberto Saviano, transl. by Virginia Jewiss, Macmillan, to read further about the Camorra and the styles the criminal organisation borrowed from films).
One of the best films that proved instrumental in inspiring fashion collections remains Slava Tsukerman’s Liquid Sky (1982).
Despite its bizarre plot, this sci-fi tale of addiction among Lower East Sides junkies, models, punks and losers with a subplot featuring some mysterious aliens feeding off the substance junkies secrete at the point of orgasm, is still considered as highly inspiring by fashion designers, make up artists (remember the scene featuring Marcel Fiévé’s fluorescent make up?), photographers and music bands.
The visual power of this cult film stands in the iconic mix of influences Marina Levikova opted for in her costumes that, inspired by pop art, fashion trends and Kabuki theatre (the Noh mask in the film was courtesy of industrial designer Gennadi Osmerkin, son of Russian painter, graphic artist and stage designer Alexander Osmerkin), provided endless inspirations for different collections (check out also the interview with Levikova taken from YouTube and embedded in this post).
Liquid Sky featured some rather clever dialogues about fashion as costume (Owen: All your costumes are just participation in some kind of phoney theater (...). It's a freak show. Margaret: Oh, are you trying to say that your blue jeans weren't theater? Owen: It's not the same thing. Margaret: So your professor wore a three-piece suit and blamed you for your jeans (...) And he didn't understand that his suit was also a costume. You thought your jeans stood for love, freedom and sexual equality; we at least know that we're in costume.) and what it means to be "fashionable" ("I was taught that to be an actress, one should be fashionable, and to be fashionable is to be androgynous. And I am androgynous not less than David Bowie himself. And they call me beautiful, and I kill with my cunt. Isn't it fashionable? Come on, who's next? I'll take lessons. How to get into show business: be nice to your professor. Be nice to your agent. Be nice to your audience, be nice…”), yet the film wasn't to be considered as a commentary about society.
Russian director Igor Voloshin managed instead to use in his drama Nirvana (2008) outlandish costumes to symbolise a spiritual conditions in which his characters lived in (you can watch
Nirvana on Mubi in Russian with English subtitles for €3, just click here).
Nirvana follows the vicissitudes of nurse Alisa (Olga Sutulova) moving from Moscow to St. Petersburg and ending up in the same building where two drug addicts, bartender Vel (Mariya Shalaeva) and her boyfriend, Valera also known as “The Dead Man” (Artur Smolyaninov), are staying.
At first Alisa and Vel seem to be very different one from the other, but Valera’s kidnapping changes everything and soon they become friends.
As they travel through the criminal underbelly of St. Petersburg, the two young women wear extreme styles, New Wave make up and extravagant motorcycle helmets.
Their style - that could easily fall into the gothic cyberpunk category - represents a symbol: wearing outlandish clothes, clashing colours and an abundance of jewels and make up, compensates the emptiness of the characters' souls, a void caused by contemporary society and historical events, while heroin is a way to fill up their veins.
Costume designer Nadezhda Vasilyeva and make up designer Anna Esmont created in this film a sort of post-apocalyptic Russian
version of Liquid Sky, with no aliens but with enough alienated
characters.
Though Alisa is a nurse she seems to wear extreme make up and hairstyles even on her
job, while to visit her home patients she often wears a black coat with leg of mutton sleeves that contrasts with the environments surrounding her.
Throughout the film Alisa mainly wears two very simple dresses with a blown up print of a woman's face that recall the dresses in high-tech fabrics from Lanvin's Spring/Summer 2007 collection.
Alisa's look also finds some fashion references in Richard Nicoll’s silk T-shirt dresses (from his Autumn/Winter 2010-11 collection) with iconic prints by punk visual artist Linder Sterling (famous for iconic photomontages like the one for the cover of the Buzzcocks’ debut single “Orgasm Addict”).
One of the subcultures linked with drugs that generated lasting fashion trends is definitely the rave and acid house culture.
Books have been written about it and about its endless fascination with ecstasy, with the first E parties taking place in London in 1985, the year in which the first article on MDMA also appeared on The Face.
A couple of years after that first article, smiling crowds in baggy sweatshirts, dungarees, and string of beads were happily dancing at Danny Rampling's club night Shoom in the Fitness Centre gym near Southwark Bridge or at Paul Oakenfold and Ian St Paul's Future at the Sanctuary.
In this Dionysian ritual of dance that seemed to provide people with some badly needed relief during Thatcher's third term, a sort of happy fashion was born with people wearing anything two sizes too big, smiley T-shirts, dungarees, baggy trousers, sweatshirts, shorts, bandannas, cycling masks and white gloves.
This kind of dressing down, this anti-style or lack of style, was compared by critics to the anti-language of a marginalised social group (The Sunday Times wrote in October 1988 that the hordes frequenting the clubs "were not the regular designer-label disco-music devotees, but a hotchpotch of traditionally marginalised adolescents").
Indeed acid house turned into a reaction against anti-yuppies clichés and snobby exclusivity.
If you want to explore again those years, check out the exhibition “RAVING '89” by photographer Gavin Watson at London's Space until 19th June.
Watson's photographs have been exhibited widely and are also available in book format collected in the volumes “Skins” (1994, U.S. edition 2001), “Skins & Punks” (2008) and “Raving ‘89” (2009).
The images in the exhibition perfectly document the best and worst times of the rave and acid house culture, and are also captivating reminders of a precise point in time when the British government was suddenly scared by this scene built on drugs, music and anti-elitist fashion as it feared it may have generated a "deviant" subculture capable of threatening the status quo.
After all, every subculture breeds its own moral panic and every moral panic is stereotyped by a specific drug and, let me also add, by specific fashion trends.
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Nice article on it.Thanks for sharing it.
Posted by: Roy | August 06, 2012 at 12:09 PM