Previous posts on this site looked at the influence of cinema on fashion and in particular at how specific costume designers who created iconic looks for the silver screen many decades ago, still influence contemporary catwalk shows. Yet a recent trend has revealed a strange kind of obsession: cinema borrowing from fashion in a kind of bizarre way.
Some examples? Well, though children will see in the Tooth Fairy in Dreamworks' new film Rise of the Guardians an exotic multicoloured feathery creature, a sort of eerie half-human, half-hummingbird hybrid, fashionistas will probably see her as a model in Thierry Mugler’s "Chimera" dress (Autumn/Winter 1997-98) that featured elements calling to mind amphibian creatures, fish, birds and mammals.
Italian director Pappi Corsicato recently presented at the Rome International Film Festival (until 17th November) the film Il volto di un'altra (literally: Another Woman's Face), a bitter and surreal comedy about plastic surgery taking place in a private clinic for wealthy people.
Bizarrelly enough, though Corsicato's nurses look a bit like Marc Jacobs' Louis Vuitton nurses, the director actually explained that one of his major inspirations (I woud add for both some looks and some scenes in the film) was Steven Meisel's photoshoot for Vogue “Makeover Madness” (circa 2005), mixed and combined with other films, soaps and grotesque theatre plays.
There is also a third and final example that somehow really worries me: apparently Minnie Mouse has decamped to Paris for the local Fashion Week, or rather she dreams of doing so in a short entitled “Electric Holiday”, created by Disney for US department store Barneys (screened in the shop yesterday and accompanied by an entire campaign featuring Disney characters turned into anorexic caricatures of themselves in fashionable clothes...).
Poor Minnie ends up in this (allow me to say rather nigthmarish) dream meeting a host of obnoxious fashion-related characters including Lady Gaga, Carine Roitfeld, Franca Sozzani, Anna Dello Russo and Sarah Jessica Parker. At a certain point Minnie even spots Steve Meisel strangely looking as if he were directly lifted from one of Josie Borain's early pictures.
You may think that there is nothing wrong in these connections between film and fashion, yet they somehow show a dangerous trend, that may actually highlight how the film industry is lacking key professional figures such as real costume designers with a vision (please note: costume designers and not stylists....). Indeed, if you think about it, Corsicato uses some of the moods for the Vogue shoot not as a critique but to recreate the sets for his film, while Minnie's sole role seems to initiate children to fashion by luring their mothers into a fabricated dream.
Cinema implies fiction, fantasy and imagination, even realistic films or movies taken from real stories imply a fictitious element, but what happens when the movie industry turns to fashion to create a dream, a story, a vision or even a character? Maybe the time has come to concentrate on training a few excellent costume designers rather than producing every year too many new and mediocre fashion designers.
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But still, it's looking good. Real good. I love it when the idea of Movies meet up with Fashion, it surely will be a huge blast. Tons of ideas floating around, the potentials are limitless. It's quite a magnificent thing to witness.
Posted by: frog onesies | November 16, 2012 at 05:35 AM