New York Fashion Week kicks off tomorrow, but the rush to find more connections between film and fashion in the collections for the next Autumnal season has already started a few days ago.
Sofia Sizzi (who worked at Gucci, Calvin Klein, Michael Kors and Jason Wu) will launch during New York Fashion Week her own brand called Giulietta that - as many of you may have guessed - takes inspiration from Federico Fellini.
Film producer Stephanie Danan and screenwriter Justin Kern have instead turned into designers and will be launching Co, a knitwear line, accompanied by a short directed by Daryl Wein and starring Élodie Bouchez.
More cinematic references will obviously resurface here and there on the London, Milan and Paris runways, yet I often have the feeling that this film and fashion connection has been turned in the last few years into the favourite sport of the fashion industry, interested in exploiting the power of cinema to sell (via new means of communication from mobile phones to iPads) rather than to create something truly lasting and memorable.
To get away from the most mediocre aspects of the fashion and film connection (one of the most annoying connection being the “cinematic” trend advertised by some agencies as the "in" trend for the Spring/Summer 2012 season for menswear and knitwear designs...) I took refuge in the world of a '60s Italian film entitled Le streghe (The Witches, 1967).
Produced by the late Dino De Laurentiis, the film was essentially a way to reintroduce his wife Silvana Mangano on the big screen after a period of absence.
The Witches is indeed divided in five episodes all starring Mangano, but directed by five different directors, Luchino Visconti, Mauro Bolognini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Rossi and Vittorio De Sica.
From a fashion perspective each of these episodes features some wonderful costumes by Piero Tosi, but also extraordinarily vivid colours.
In the first episode, “La strega bruciata viva” (The witch scorched alive) by Luchino Visconti, Silvana Mangano stars as a famous actress envied by her “friends” who take advantage of the fact she’s not feeling well to remove her wig, make-up and mink eyelashes to cynically laugh at her imperfect beauty.
In the second episode, “Senso civico” (Civic Sense) by Mauro Bolognini, Mangano is a rich and elegant lady who, pretending to take to the hospital a man wounded in a car crash (Alberto Sordi), uses him instead to run on the roads and reach her glamorous appointment on time without being stopped by the traffic lights or the police.
In Pasolini’s episode a widower with a comical name (Ciancicato Miao - Italian actor Totò) looks for a wife with his son Baciù (Ninetto Davoli), finding her in a magical alien-like deaf and dumb girl with green hair who keeps on helping them even after she dies.
Nunzia a proud Sicilian woman causes instead a feud of major proportions in the fourth episode, “La Siciliana” (The Sicilian Woman), and, in the fifth, a bored wife dreams of stripping in stadium.
The costumes donned by Mangano and the other actors in the film perfectly reflect the mood and atmosphere of each of these episodes.
There are some extraordinarily glamorous furs and sequinned gowns in the first episode in which Visconti also introduced towards the very end a man with a Louis Vuitton portfolio folder bag used as his own signature (the director often used Louis Vuitton accessories in his films since they carried his own initials – check out this post to know more about the Visconti-Vuitton connection).
Pasolini’s episode is essentially a surreal and comic tale, based on the fairy tale "Il buro e la bura".
The best thing about this episode is the use of bright and contrasting colours: Ninetto Davoli stars as Baciù a young man with bright orange hair who wears throughout the film an azure top and orange trousers, while Mangano is Assurdina (her name meaning ‘the little absurd one’…) his green-haired mother wearing a green dress, azure tights and red slippers.
All the characters move in a set in which red and orange prevail. The story is indeed told from an alien-like point of view that mirrors the title of this episode, “La terra vista dalla luna” (The Earth seen from the Moon).
The bright colours and intense chromatic scale enrich Pasolini’s tableaux vivants, giving them a powerful dimension.
The colourful costumes of the main characters also distinguish them from the rest of society, characterised by dark colours, and Assurdina and Baciù end up representing everything individualistic and extraordinary in a boring and uniformed society.
Funnily enough Baciù's look is also very fashionable: colour is a key of many menswear collections for the Autumn/Winter 2011-12 season. We have actually seen azure blue resurfacing in Hermès’ chunky knits (with orange - the house's signature colour - used for the sole of classic Oxfords) and bright orange trousers appearing in Louis Vuitton’s collection.
The final episode of Le streghe, “A night like any other” by Vittorio De Sica, is unanimously considered as the most bizarre film Clint Eastwood ever took part in (it also features an irresistible score by Piero Piccioni who wrote the music for the Visconti episode as well; Ennio Morricone wrote instead the score for Pasolini’s).
Reduced to a domestic slave by her estranged husband (Eastwood) in real life, Giovanna (Mangano) finds refuge in her dreams in which she is not an obedient wife, but a glamorous diva in brightly coloured designer clothes, a revengeful vixen clad in a black PVC dress matched with a spiky headdress and the sensual mistress of the most popular anti-heroes of very fashionable ‘60s Italian comics, from Diabolik to Kriminal.
The episode culminates with Giovanna - clad in an amazing black satin dress with a colourful billowing cape formed by strips of fabrics knotted on her shoulders - dreaming of stripping in a huge stadium.
As she undresses, Giovanna reveals underneath the black satin dress more colourful dresses layered one on top of the other, in green, yellow and red, the same nuances of her cape, a terrific trick that concludes this film with a kaleidoscope of colours contrasting with Giovanna's grey and depressing existence.
You can watch the film live in streaming here, but I'm also embedding it at the end of this post as I'm sure that you will find some of the colour combinations (and looks!) really striking (and Italian speakers will definitely laugh out loud while watching some of the episodes). Hope you enjoy the film! (With many thanks to my brother for lending me an old VHS tape I used for the screen captures).
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Comments