Conceptualizing the Fashion Film: The Issue of Sustainability in Fashion and the Fashion Film Festival

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University of Amsterdam

Research Master’s Thesis in Media Studies

Conceptualizing the Fashion Film

The Issue of Sustainability in Fashion and the Fashion Film Festival

Janneke van der Linden

ID 10189998

jcjvanderlinden@gmail.com

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Abstract

Fashion and film have had a mutual attraction throughout history, but it is only since recently that the two words have substantially come together to indicate a new genre. Whilst the use of the term is becoming more popular, a definition of what a fashion film is remains ambiguous. By tracing the relation between fashion and film, this thesis conceptualizes the upcoming fashion film and interrogates its connection to one of the fashion industry’s current issues and hot topic of sustainability. A case study of three fashion films shows how fashion transcends the sartorial object through the creation of fashioned worlds, in which deeply emotional engagement becomes integral to fashion. This promotes a sense of emotional longevity in fashion, which is a condition for more sustainable consumption. An analysis of fashion film festivals emerging worldwide then shows how this festival format and international network can further enhance and push a mentality of sustainability within fashion.

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Introduction

“If not us, who? And if not now, when?” asks a pervasive voice-over. Running for his life, an African-American boy is followed by the police. The voice continues: “Is racism alive? Absolutely. Will you be underestimated; will your efforts be undermined? Absolutely. And guess what? You got to try.” A handheld, blurry camcorders shows fragments of the boy’s world in an African-American neighborhood – playing basketball with friends, stunting on motorcycles, dancing in the street, getting robbed from his sneakers. Set against a back drop of civil unrest, the short film 11x HUMAN (John Merizalde, 2015) explores questions around modern racism, black on black crime, and police brutality. It was one of the first fashion films I saw on the big screen when I visited Fashion Cinematic’s event Telling Tales – “an evening of networking, film screenings and an exclusive panel discussing the advent of the fashion film narrative,” in partnership with London College of Fashion

and the Berlin Fashion Film Festival.1 Apart from the value of the boy’s shoes, the film does not

emphatically give much importance to fashion, and so I was left wondering why it got curated. Showing off fashion or clothing is not the central focus of the film, and there is no explicit commercial message to buy certain products either. It was only through the panel discussion afterwards that I found out the film was commissioned by the clothing brand AKOO. This made me think about in which direction the use of film as a medium by the fashion industry was going, if it was no longer a moving variant of fashion photography, able to show garments in motion and to capture all of their different qualities. This came down to a seemingly simple question; what is a fashion film, and how does it relate to fashion as a creative practice and industry?

The use of the terminology “fashion film” has recently become more widespread within various on- and offline spaces. The fashion film has developed into a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon that finds a platform through both online communities and social media, as well as a growing international network of fashion film festivals. Whilst fashion has always been important in cinema, with clothing and costume design forming an important aspect of the overall aesthetics of film, it has only been since the rise of digital culture that fashion has emerged as a prefix for film. Within the new parameters of the digital network, vice versa cinema as a medium became important for the representation of fashion. The Internet provided the possibility for fashion to be shown in motion – which former printed material like fashion magazines could not do – opening up new ways for fashion imaging within both artistic and commercial contexts.

Whilst the fashion film phenomenon has increasingly grown over the last decade, so has the interest of scholars and academics for the study of the relationship and diverse connections between

1_{“Fashion Cinematic Presents: Telling Tales.” Berlin Fashion Film Festival. 2016. The Berlin Fashion Film} Festival. 23 December 2016. < http://berlinfashionfilmfestival.net/blog/fashioncinematic>.

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fashion and film. Research not only regards the recent emerging of collaborations between filmmakers and fashion designers or brands, especially in relation to the digital (Breward, 2003; Khan, 2012; Needham, 2013; Uhlirova The Fashion Film Effect, 2013), but also costume design as a spectacular element within film and a means of creating identity (Berry, 2000; Bruzzi, 1997; Uhlirova Birds of Paradise, 2013). Other studies concern fashion in film with regards to space and aesthetics, creating “fashioned worlds” (Bruno, 2011), the similarities between the fashion show performance and film as a medium (Evans, 2011), and the interaction between celebrity culture, fashion, and film (Gibson, 2012). The interest in fashion within film studies thus reaches a wide spectrum from to the beginning of cinema to recent developments in relation to digital culture and technology – raising the question of what defines a “fashion film,” which will be explored throughout the first chapter.

As a cultural phenomenon, the fashion film is in direct connection with developments within fashion. In the field of fashion studies, social and environmental issues as a result of the exponential growth of (cheap) mass fashion production have brought up ethical questions regarding the industry. Commissioned by/for fashion brands/designers, fashion films necessarily consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or inexplicitly, engage with these matters by shaping certain perspectives on fashion. A critical study of fashion films therefore cannot ignore their relation to these questions which concern issues with the production and consumption of fashion. Whilst fashion imagery often presents fashion within an aura of glamour, the industry also has an – often well covered up – ugly side. Indeed, the definition of “glamour” according to Merriam-Webster is “an exciting and often

illusory and romantic attractiveness” or even “a magic spell,” 2_{masking the alienated production}

mechanism behind the clothes we wear, and which are, often times, much less glamourous. What seemed like a seamlessly sealed image of beauty and desire, has occasionally been broken by the flaws of the fashion industry. One significant happening was the collapse of the Rana Plaza in 2013, a factory in Bangladesh producing fast fashion goods for Western clothing chains, killed 1,129 workers and injured more than 2,500. The news caught worldwide attention through popular media and put into question the ethics of the clothing industries. The buzz gave rise to a more widespread awareness about issues of social and environmental ‘sustainability’ within fashion production and consumption – a term then quickly taken up by the industry, causing general misunderstanding of its core principles.

Sustainability has become a hot topic within fashion studies and beyond, including environmental studies, geography, urban studies, landscape architecture, sociology, anthropology, and economics – accounting for many different interpretations and conceptualizations. For fashion studies, the challenge has been to address issues around waste, recycling, fashion design, and the

2_{“Glamour.” Merriam-Webster. n.d. Merriam-Webster. 11 November 2016.} <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/glamour>.

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way in which fashion is (re)presented in relation to environmental exhaustion and social ethics. Within my reading of the fashion film I interrogate the connection between the emergence of the fashion film and the growing attention for issues around sustainability within fashion culture and the industry. How is the fashion film positioning itself within this rapidly expanding (fast) fashion culture, and how does it relate to the increasing public awareness of the industry’s impacts on the environment and the exploitation of workers? Notions of “sustainability” and “sustainable fashion” have now been widely adapted by fast fashion chains, for example H&M’s “Conscious” line and Zara’s collection “Join Life,” intended to create distance from the horror stories. However, to what extent are these brands’ claims valid, and what does the “popular” understanding of sustainability-related terms truly mean for mass fashion production and consumption?

The second chapter will therefore consist of a critical analysis of “sustainable fashion” culture. Here I will research the essence of sustainability within the specific context of fashion by focusing on the relationship between clothing and wearer. To make this connection I will borrow fashion theorist Kirsi Niinimäki’s notion of “emotional longevity” in order to theorize the profound product-person relationship that is needed for clothes to acquire personal meaning and significance, wherefore they are less easily replaced. This concept will prove particularly useful in relation to how (fashion) film as a medium emotionally plays upon the spectator’s senses through the paradigm of fashion. Hence I will explore how film as a medium is interesting for the development of fashion towards a more sustainable paradigm, and in particular how the contemporary fashion film is reshaping perceptions of fashion.

Finally, in the third chapter, my aim is to explore how the uprising fashion film festivals can integrate this question of sustainability within fashion even further, in order to enhance an actual shift in fashion consumption and corresponding mind set. Over the last couple of years, fashion film festivals have quite suddenly mushroomed all over the world, creating an internationally connected physical platform for the fashion film. Since fashion films are mainly intended for an online audience, the festival proposes a whole different kind of film festival that no longer mainly evolves around the actual films themselves. Instead, it is more about everything around them, from panel discussions to masterclasses and art installations to networking events. By analysing the fashion film festival and its evolutions over the last decade, my aim is to argue how the format is capable of pushing sustainability matters within fashion from the inside-out, instead of an external imposition on the industry in the context of activism.

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Chapter 1: Conceptualizing “The Fashion Film”

"If fashion can be said to be cinematic in its social and visual effects, then cinema is also very clearly a primary product of the aesthetic and technological processes of 'fashioning.'"

– Christopher Breward (132)

1.1. The First Fashion Film

The “fashion film” is quite an ambiguous concept, category, or genre. It seemed to be the “logical” follow-up of fashion photography, after fashion illustration, that came with the invention of cinema, even though the explicit use of the term “fashion film” only came later when cinema entered the digital age. The first use and popularization of the term “fashion film” was probably on Nick Knight’s online platform “SHOWstudio” sub-titled “The Home of Fashion Film,” established in November 2000. Film, as a new technology, opened up different spectacular possibilities for the representation of fashion. Instead of proposing static images of posing mannequins, as was the case with early fashion photography, film allowed to picture the presentation of fashion in motion. However, SHOWstudio’s pioneering idea of live broadcasting fashion shows, creating motion pictures and stimulating interactivity within the fashion field was not received with open arms as the site struggled for an audience as well as collaborators in the fashion industry:

“In hindsight, our ambition to create genuinely progressive fashion media was far too ahead at that stage. Even the most experimental and visionary stylists and photographers would tell us, ‘Oh, I don’t really use computers,” and some didn’t even have an e-mail account,” said Martin [chief editor of SHOWstudio.com from 2001-2008]. “We were banging our heads against a brick wall in many cases” (Young 1).

Instead, since the beginning of cinema until the early digital age at the turn of the millennium, moving imagery of fashion had mainly consisted of filmed fashion shows and parades. Therefore, the first of what could be considered a “fashion film” in that it focusses on the depiction of the fashion object, is the filmed fashion show Fifty Years of Paris Fashions 1859-1909 (Gaumont, 1910), because it is the first film that explicitly focusses on fashion (in motion) as a subject (Leese 9). But this was also the case for early fashion-related commercials, such as Warner Corset Advertisement (Méliès, 1910s) for Mystère corsets. It was only with the emergence of the digital world that the what we now call “the fashion film” started to distinguish itself from mere fashion commercials or the filming of existing fashion-practices such as the fashion show. The form of the

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contemporary fashion film is therefore hard to compare with any earlier appearances of fashion on screen, even though fashion has always been an important element throughout the history of cinema.

Hence it is questionable whether the first fashion films were simply the first films that focussed specifically on fashion. A film such as Annabelle Serpentine Dance (William Dickson and William Heise, 1895), which shows Annabelle Moore dancing her famous serpentine dance, owes its name to the transforming shapes and colours of her flowing dress whilst she is dancing. The spectacular quality of the new film medium was created and amplified through the ever-evolving forms of Moore’s dress in movement, as the garment is a fundamental part of her performance. Even though not explicitly about fashion, as the focus is rather on the practice of dance, the success of Annabelle Serpentine Dance has to be assigned to the qualities of her dress in motion through her dance performance. Ontologically, film and the serpentine dance actually owed their spectacular quality to the same artistic formula, namely the interception of light by a fabric (of the dress/the celluloid/the film screen) in order to create new forms (Lista 99). This was enhanced by the emergence of colour, both in textile and cinema (Uhlirova 21). In fact, it was only with the development of technological processes in other industries, especially the textile industry, that one started the application of colour in film not only for aesthetic or narrative values, but also because they were fashionable or new, inextricably linking early fashion and film culture (Hanssen 108-9). There is also something to be said for Fifty Years of Paris Fashions 1859-1909 as the first fashion film. This is because the fashion show as an event was, in a way, already quite cinematic in itself. The performances of the mannequins walking down the catwalk is in fact very similar to the acting style that characterizes early silent films. When comparing the first ever film La Sortie de l’Usine (Louis Lumière, 1895) with mannequins modelling in early fashion shows, like Caroline Evans has done in her book The Mechanical Smile (2013), one can observe that both are centred around human motion evolving in front of the spectator, and that they are focussed on the visual pleasure and fascination that is derived from this movement, rather than a focus on narrative and psychological depth (247). The development of narrative would only become more important later

when the pure excitement around the spectacular quality of cinema had calmed down.3_{With the}

invention of film, one could argue, it would be a logical next step to capture the fashion show in moving images since it seemed so compatible with cinema.

In sum, what is crucial is that none of these films where at the time of creation seen as “fashion films,” even though one might now argue that they could be seen and labelled as such. Fifty Years of Paris Fashions 1859-1909 mainly focussed on documenting the fashion show and portraying fashion in an aesthetically pleasing way in order to reach more potential customers, but it didn’t

3_{Caroline Evans draws more detailed parallels between the fashion show and the early cinema of attractions in} her chapter for Fashion in Film titled “The Walkies: Early French Fashion Shows as a Cinema of Attractions” (118-9).

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explicitly explore the film medium to show fashion differently. Warner Corset Advertisement did use medium-specific qualities like the construction of (simple) narrative through inter-titles, but main objective was selling a product rather than adding something to the corset as a fashionable object. Also Annabelle Serpentine Dance was oriented around the practice of dance that was only encouraged by dress (and not particularly fashion). All of these films are very different from the contemporary interpretations of the fashion film that is strongly connected to the birth of the internet world and digital cinema. Even though clearly different, there is still no real consensus on which exact set of characteristics make up a fashion film, as the medium remains open and is still inventing itself.

1.2. Why Fashion Film?

Before coming any closer to grasping an understanding of this highly hybrid idea of the contemporary fashion film, it is important to first take a look at the terms that structure its discourse. Even though similar, “fashion film” is often confused with “fashion in film” or even “costume film.” Indeed, whilst the vast majority of all films portray (fashionably) dressed personas, this doesn’t mean they are fashion films. Practically all human beings wear clothing, whether occasionally or usually, either for biological (temperature) but mostly for cultural reasons (personal and communal identity and rules). In her book The Social Psychology of Clothing (1990) Kaiser addresses clothing as a material production that fulfil our physical needs for protection and functionality — whilst fashion is a symbolic production. This makes it inevitable that all films representing dressed human bodies also include the kinds of material pieces, most often textiles, that people wear to cover (certain parts of) their bodies, directly placing the portrayed personae in a socio-cultural context. This is also true for adornment, which is, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, ‘the act or process of making someone or something attractive by decorating.’ Like wearing clothes, the cultural practice of modifying one’s appearance for aesthetic reasons is done globally, and is therefore without saying ever-present in film culture. Clothing and/or adornment determine a certain style of dress, two terms that are rather similar but not quite. I would define dress as a particular type of public bodily appearance that is created through clothing and/or adornment as part of a communal socio-cultural construction, whilst style refers to the larger philosophy that motivates a certain way of dress or appearance of people (or things) in order to assimilate or differentiate individuals within the same specific socio-cultural milieu, wherefore style is an ongoing ensemble over a longer period of time.

Both terms are, however, still different from fashion. For instance, a film could picture stylishly dressed personas, but that doesn’t by definition make it a fashion film. For example, few would agree that the overwhelmingly stylistic coherence of Nazi dress in Triumph des Willens (Leni

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Riefenstahl, 1935) would classify it a fashion film despite its uniforms being designed by the now still popular high fashion brand Hugo Boss. Fashion, besides being “a popular way of dressing during a particular time or amongst a particular group of people,” needs something more, namely “the business of creating and selling clothes in new styles,” and cannot exist without the entirety of the industry that has as business objective to continuously create and sell new trends in dress, wherefore it is constantly in fluctuation (Merriam-Webster). Besides, fashion as a term can be used to refer to many different kinds of material and non-material cultural products like houses, music, automobiles, scientific theories, philosophy and recreation. What they have in common, Roach-Higgins and Eicher argue, is that fashion is never without either a positive or negative value judgement depending on the position within a fashion cycle of introduction, mass acceptance and obsolescence, wherefore not all dress can qualify as fashion (3). Because it is a cycle, fashion is bound to change constantly as it is always dissatisfied with its current form. Fashion therefore endlessly reshapes and mixes elements of past fashions, repeating itself in similar waves that are never quite the same.

Costume, in turn, places past fashion trends in its historical context, as it is always about dress that has been in fashion before the present moment, or that has remained the same for a significant period of time, such as traditional dress codes. As past fashion trends have the potential to come back into fashion, costume could, depending on time and place, also be fashion. But the objective of costume is to quote a specific moment or period in the history of dress that is unanimously recognizable as belonging to that specific past, even though later time periods may have paraphrased it. Overall, while all of these terms refer to bodily apparel, they differ in their motivation to do so, and only fashion specifically is connected to the generating heart of a multibillion dollar industry. In turn, it is only fashion that fundamentally needs the connections with other media, such as photography and film, in order to exist, as ‘it is everything that goes around clothes that makes them fashion,’ (re)creating a certain ideology that is able to sell the material products that are told to be its representatives and necessities (Hoskins 10). A fashion film is thus always — more or less directly — connected to the commercial fashion industry, wherefore it necessarily contributes to the operating of the business that is fashion. This doesn’t exclude the idea of the fashion film as a means of artistic expression, but does always include its artistic qualities in the commercial business that is a necessary condition for the existence of fashion. It is much less connected to the film business, since most fashion films are publicly available online on free video platforms like Vimeo and YouTube, wherefore the films don’t generate any income through the traditional venue of cinema.

But there is, notably, also a difference between “fashion film” and “fashion in film.” In short, “fashion film” uses film as a medium to creatively frame and express artistic ideas inherent to fashion, whilst “fashion in film” rather employs fashion as an artistic or attractive spectacular expression to enhance the creative quality of a film. In practice, however, these two may blur, as

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the creative expression of the fashion (designer) and film (maker) can be intertwined and mutually influential. This is also because, as Leslie explains, both fashion and film are obsessed with movement, which both artistic expressions can amplify through the use of the other medium: “Film is a medium of movement and so provides a perfect vehicle for showcasing cloth’s mobile propensities. In turn, cinema needs the drama of movement” (34). Another way to distinguish the two, is that “fashion in film” mainly refers to feature films screened in cinemas, whilst “fashion films” typically have a video-like format that is only between one and fifteen minutes long, and which can mainly be seen online. Still the “fashion film,” just like the feature film, is ‘a commodity that can be consumed in its own right,’ independently from the fashionable object(s) present in it (Uhlirova 121, 2013). This is because the fashion item actually represents a bigger brand vision, philosophy or ideology that is being reflected by the fashion film — it’s mainly communicating a certain idea, aesthetic and feeling. It is about ‘putting across the value and identity of a brand,’ as Niccolò Montanari, fashion film consultant and one of the co-founders of the Berlin Fashion Film Festival argues (Capper n.p.). As a matter of fact, fashion films wouldn’t even necessarily need the physical object that is fashion in order to communicate this. Some fashion films even completely exclude the object(s) it wants to sell, as is the case with Danny Sangra’s film Saturday Night Cosmic Breakdown (Danny Sangra, 2015) for Ray-Ban. In an interview with Fashion Cinematic4_{he said:}

“All the crew and actors kept asking ‘where’s the product?’ I said, ‘there isn’t any.’ Some brands just want to show their attitude to creativity.” With an increasingly media-savvy audience, viewers simply don’t buy into overly product-placed films anymore. Indeed, the fashion film is clearly different from fashion commercials as it wants to distance itself from explicit advertorial messages. Like I mentioned before, the fashion film has to be desirable to watch for its own purpose, as one would want to see any other film, unlike commercials that might have a negative connotation and that are often avoided as much as possible. Instead, the aim of the fashion film is to create (the illusion of) ‘a more authentic experience than conventional advertising’ since the online spectator/user is in control of what to view and how (Uhlirova 121).

Hence “branded content” like the fashion film accounts for more creative freedom for the filmmaker compared to more traditional advertising and the creation of so-called look-books. As a result, it transforms the way we consume fashion since the fashion film can also be looked at as art, and so ‘is able to circulate autonomously from the fashion business’ (Needham 110). I will elaborate further on the relationship between fashion, film and art in the following section, but for now I just want to make clear that the fashion film mainly circulates through online platforms that are not directly dependent from the same industry. Films viewed on video platforms are shared across the

4_{Fashion Cinematic (http://www.fashioncinematic.com) is an online platform for fashion filmmakers to showcase} their work.

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web through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter or blogs, that do not necessarily operate directly in cooperation with the fashion industry itself. Though the fashion film, as desirable content, stimulates the operation of these distribution platforms, in return creating a growing audience for fashion films. Here again there is a major difference with more traditional advertising, since the fashion film is not solely distributed by the brand’s advertising agency, but also largely by the consumers themselves — that is, the consumers of the films, and potentially of the products connected to them — through online sharing culture, which also embeds them in non-commercial contexts.

Overall, the fashion film thus distinguishes itself through its intrinsic connection with the fashion industry, finding in film a new medium to extend the practice of fashion. With the digital world becoming increasingly prominent in a globalized world, online film has become an important means of communicating and promoting fashion brands’ values. As a medium, film is able to address ideas, values, and issues differently from photography — the medium that has dominated the public representation of fashion for over half of the last century. Therefore, the use of film has become a way for fashion brands to stand out from the image-dominated fashion landscape. It has been an attempt to go beyond fashion as superficial in quite a literal way, since it is what is seen on the exterior surface of our bodies and the film screen. It has slowly developed towards more narrative storytelling instead of “display,” which will become clearer throughout this chapter. In short, besides communicating fashion brands’ objectives for commercial purposes, the fashion film has as a surplus value that it is also ‘a consumable artistic product in itself’ (Evans 80) as a result of a brand’s desire to stand out. This allowed for more creative freedom for directors, which is enhanced through the fact that fashion films are made by a variety of different creators. Consequently, “fashion film” has been employed as an umbrella term to refer to the different ways in which filmmakers have sought to create desirable content for fashion brands, as an extension of their philosophy and fashion as a creative practice.

1.3. A Multifaceted Genre

Overall, whether described as ‘a very recognizable trend in contemporary fashion culture’ (Needham 105) or ‘an independent genre’ (Khan 236), the fashion film appears to be “(…) an umbrella term or uber-genre that accommodates, and breaks down the boundaries of, a great variety of existing genres” that all have in common a certain Fashion Film Effect. Marketa Uhlirova has introduced and described this “effect” as ‘a presentation of clothing as an elastic, polymorphous and unstable entity’ through a ‘unique, emotionally charged layering of two materials, namely the sartorial and the cinematic.’ However, she continues, this makes the corpus of the fashion film rather vague, as it cannot be defined by criteria such as formal and physical properties, or mode of

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production — even a clarification by its most “obvious” property, the fashion object itself, is not that simple, since for example atmospheric videos that accompany fashion shows are not necessarily of or about fashion, but only become so in the right context (121). In his chapter on the contemporary digital fashion film, Needham has proposed a number of “categories” of the fashion film that are made by different kinds of filmmakers and with slightly different objectives: “the boutique film” used by e-stores, “the designer’s film” associated with the creative individual or brand, “the authored film” created by a known film director, and “the artist’s film,” which is a brand-funded feature created by an established artist, and is therefore intentionally related to the art world (107).

I would argue that the “boutique films” are those fashion films that focus more explicitly on the exhibition of clothing and other fashionable objects in order to showcase their various qualities, and are therefore closest to the so-called fashion “look-books.” Since the potential online customer cannot physically see and touch the product, these kinds of fashion films are useful, if not necessary, for providing more detailed information about the garment when it is actually being worn, wherefore buyers are able to decide better whether they would like to purchase the item. This type of fashion film is thus mainly functional and sales-oriented, and therefore often the least artistically experimental of all. It is closest to the filmed fashion show and even the more traditional advertisement format.

“The designer’s film” is created by the fashion designer him/herself, for example in order to support their fashion shows, to portray the creative process behind the designing of clothes and accessories, to create an ambience in their shops, or even to incorporate moving imagery in the designs themselves. Starting in the 1980s, some designers even replaced their entire fashion shows with moving images, which both creatively and economically wasn’t a bad move at all (Uhlirova 145). It shows that fashion is not only about the piece of clothing, but about the underlying ideas, ideals, feelings and ambiences around it. Film here provides the practice of fashion with different tools for expression and experimentation.

“The authored film” serves to associate a reputed name and style in the cinematic world with a certain fashion brand. These are high-budget productions that are typically commissioned by luxury/high fashion brands. For well-established directors, the fashion film genre is economically, but certainly also artistically interesting since there are no fixed parameters of what a fashion film should be. To name but a few widely known directors who have made fashion films: Roman Polanski and Wes Anderson for Prada, David Lynch for Dior, Park Chan-Wook for Ermenegildo Zegna, Harmony Korine for Proenza Schouler and Sean Baker for Kenzo. These fashion brands emerge themselves in these great (popular) cinematic universes in order to add value to their own identity.

“The artist’s film” is quite an explicit expression of the fashion world’s obsession with art. Fashion designers and brands often don’t want to be associated with fashion, but rather with art, as

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“fashion” doesn’t only refer to original and beautiful designs that intrigue and inspire. It is therefore crucial to make a distinction between high fashion (i.e. haute couture and ready-to-wear) and mass-fashion (i.e. fast mass-fashion). High mass-fashion designers largely determine what is mass-fashionable and are highly influential, wherefore they are allowed relatively great creative freedom, whilst fast fashion designers largely imitate such designs and are typically employed by producers who largely restrict their design choices, given that the focus is on imitation, low prices, and short production cycles rather than originality and quality (Haug and Busch 331). Since fast fashion is much more omnipresent in the everyday street landscape, “fashion” has obtained some negative connotations such as imitation, unoriginality and blandness as fast fashion chains all seem to produce the same kind of (copied) fashion. This practice has come with a great variety of social and environmental problems that are now increasingly tied to the term “fashion,” and so these matters will be addressed extensively in the following chapters. For now, it is important to make clear that the term “fashion” is associated too with fast and cheap, which is obviously not what couture brands aspire to. More than fashion, art is associated with high culture, exclusiveness, durability and above all innovation and originality, which is what high fashion needs in order to exist. It thrives through the constant creation of desire for objects, and the more (financially) unreachable, the more intense the desire gets. Since there seems to be a general “malaise” to see fashion as art, incorporating the practice into another form of art — that is, cinema as “the seventh art” — is a plea for seeing fashion as an artistic expression. The fact that fashion film genre is being addressed by various artists from different artistic fields then reinforces the argument that fashion can be a valid means of creating art.

It is important to keep in mind that the distinctions between these “categories” are not fixed, and that a fashion film could easily belong to more than one of the categories Needham distinguishes. However, it seems to me that he forgets one important group of fashion films that don’t quite fit into any of these four categories, namely the ones made by often relatively young, aspiring filmmakers who are neither a designer, artist, nor famous (yet), but who are simply exploring and experimenting with the genre. They mostly start to work for small debuting brands or (online) magazines, or just for their own portfolio, which is why I would house these fashion films under a fifth sub-category that I would name “the experimental fashion film.” These are the kind of fashion films that have only really emerged over the last couple of years. The addition of this sub-category would be in line with Khan’s distinction between large- and low-scale budgeted films, as the four types Needham distinguishes are relatively high budgeted compared to the films of beginning filmmakers. Khan also argues that high budget fashion films are more likely to make use of widely accepted classical Hollywood conventions, whilst low-budget productions would typically account for more ‘edgy’ fashion films (237-8). This is useful for smaller brands that need to create their own voice and vision that will distinguish them from the bigger established fashion houses. Still, this distinction is not an absolute one, as especially the artist’s film could be both

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high-budget and experimental, but I think it is useful to make these distinctions as it helps to grasp the diversity of the interpretation of the “fashion film.” Also, since recently, fashion film festivals have also included a selection of films that come from a music video background, or that are focussed on “beauty” (for example, make-up) or “lifestyle” in general. This once again illustrates that the fashion film is situated somewhere between a great diversity of other hybrid genres, and so questions what is meant by “fashion” in the first place.

1.4. An Aesthetics-Based Approach to Fashion Film

On February 18th 2016, I attended Fashion Cinematic’s “Telling Tales,” a symposium/fashion film screening kicking off London Fashion Week, which focussed on the discussion of the development of the fashion film through the assemblage of different people from both the fashion and film

industry.5 The debate started with a distinction between two “trends” or “sorts” of fashion film that

stood out according to Jordan McGarry, head of content for Vimeo (one of the main popular platforms for the distribution of fashion films), which are in line with the division Uhlirova makes in the introduction of the book Birds of Paradise (26). First McGarry mentioned those fashion films characterized by an experimental and impressive quality of visuals. This is how the fashion film made its debut, in a way as a moving extension of the fashion photoshoot. Secondly, the panel pointed out to what they called a more “sophisticated” and “evolved” kind of fashion film that rises above the visual surface and incorporates (short) narratives, moving more towards (narrative)

cinema and away from photography.6 Even though the distinction between narrative and

non-narrative fashion film is certainly a valid one, as this feature is not directly addressed by the sub-genres described earlier, it is debatable whether the narrative fashion film is an advanced version

of the non-narrative one. In an explicatory video7 for SHOWstudio, which is the first platform

especially launched for the distribution of the fashion film, founder Nick Knight argues that a fashion film’s narrative is already in the piece of clothing that is central to the film. Therefore, he

5_{Present were Stephen Whelan (head of White Lodge Productions), Vicky Lawton (creative director of Hunger} Magazine), Raven Smith (editor of NOWNESS), Niccolò Montanari (co-founder of Berlin Fashion Film Festival), Jordan McGarry (head of content at Vimeo), Nick Ede (creative director at EdenCancan) and Nilgin Yusuf (head of media production at London College of Fashion).

6_{In another interview Niccolò Montanari also argues that since 2012, through an increasing number of} submissions for the Berlin Fashion Film Festival, he has seen the genre change and develop from an aesthetics-focused approach to a more storyline-based one (Capper n.p.).

7_{SHOWstudio. "SHOWstudio: Thoughts on Fashion Film - Nick Knight." YouTube. 4 July 2013. 6 April 2016.} <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOBZMS9Bhr0>.

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says, it is simply great fashion that makes a good fashion film, since the fashion designer created a certain vision wherefore the fashionable object is already rich with narrative. So for Knight it doesn’t seem logical or necessary to put yet another narrative on top of that, which results in more abstract fashion films that are quite impressionist and close to video-art. No matter how abstract, there is always a narrative. Together with the possibility of digital manipulation techniques, the fashion film is finding new ways of communicating fashion designers’ visions inherent in their creations. And because the medium is yet so undefined and still inventing itself, it is able to do this with more creative freedom than the fashion show or fashion photography, which are already defined by a more or less fixed set of parameters. What makes the genre interesting is that it is approached by filmmakers from many different backgrounds who all have a different take on what the film medium is or should be.

This visual-oriented form of fashion film however seems to have its roots in the early cinema

of attractions8 where clothes mainly functioned as a spectacular element in film because of their

‘inherently kinetic and expressive qualities and strong potential to enchant the senses’ (Uhlirova 102). Gunning uses the term “cinema of attractions” to refer to “[t]he drive towards display, rather than creation of a fictional world; a tendency towards punctual temporality, rather than extended development; a lack of interest in character “psychology” or development of motivation; and a direct, often marked, address to the spectator at the expense of the creation of a diegetic coherence (…)” which he argued dominated early cinema in general, even “…those films which also involve narrative, detouring their energies from storytelling to display, either by including outright attractions (…) in a “non-continual” fashion that interrupts narrative coherence…” (36-7). This was the case for example when European filmmakers in the 1920s included dance scenes, or so-called “oriental fantasies” in narrative film as an excuse or justification for presenting unusual and visually spectacular costumes to attract the spectator’s attention (Toepfer 234). Uhlirova too stresses that one of the ways in which the cinema of attractions was able to capture the viewer’s attention was through the use of clothing and costume in a “…sartorial theatre of ever-changing shapes, volumes, designs and textures; of materials mingling and layering; of light shimmering over reflective surfaces that provides cinema with bewitching moments of perceptual richness and sensuality” (16).

As I briefly mentioned earlier, the invention of colour in both film and textile has certainly helped to amplify the spectacular qualities of the sartorial object in film, and contributed to early cinema’s ‘transcendence of its masculine appeal’ and the generation of a female audience (Musser 41). From the 1910s, this resulted in yet another integration of fashion in cinema, namely the

8_{"Cinema of attractions" had first been theorized in 1967 by André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning. Two} fundamental essays were published in 1986, first Gunning's "The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant- Garde" published in Wide Angle, and secondly a collaboration paper with Gaudreault: "Le Cinéma des premiers temps: un défi à l'histoire du cinéma?" published in Gendai Shiso.

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“fashion newsreel” that later evolved into the “cinemagazine,” which became the most popular format for displaying and promoting the latest fashions whilst also offering sartorial advice to women (Uhlirova 142). Being rather explicitly advertorial, the fashion newsreel functioned as a kind of live ‘try-on’ of fashion designs, suggesting ways to wear what piece of clothing for what occasion, making the women with a critical “shopper’s eye” project their own figures in the designs shown (Herzog 134), similar to the earlier described “boutique film.” Over the course of the 1910s and 1920s, women came to be seen as the primary consumers of cinema, meaning that there was an overlap in the target markets of film and fashion (as well as cosmetics industries), resulting in the emergence of a culture of cross-promotion including Hollywood ‘tie-in’ labels, product placement and extensive use of fashion publicity for upcoming films, which created the idea of cinema as a “fashion guide” that transcended the fashion newsreel only (Berry, Sarah xv). This then stimulated pioneering film companies, like Pathé and Gaunt, to use the attraction of fashion in order to appeal to the desires of the modern (female) consumer (Breward 132).

Because of the (mainly commercially motivated) integration of costume and fashion in more mainstream cinema, the fashion newsreel in turn started to incorporate simple narrative plots too, mimicking the melodramatic scenarios of the main features, whilst at the same time allowing for an experimental approach to the featured costumes (Breward 132). A mix of Hollywood-influenced narrative with more experimental visuals might have been the result of the fact that ‘during the interwar period not only established filmmakers, but also fashion photographers started to show an interest in the moving image’ (Uhlirova 144). Where the cinema of attractions thus positively made use of fashion, stimulating the sales of new styles, fashion in turn also helped to sell film as a medium. Overall, the debate remains how film can sell fashion the best and the other way around; either by means of spectacular exhibition or functionality. Or in other words, “(...) whether clothes should perform a spectacular as opposed to a subservient visual role in film; and whether those same costumes should remain functional intermediaries to narrative and character, or stand out as art objects in themselves” (Bruzzi 8). Though not specifically on fashion, this dialectic between the visual and the plot/action in film has been around since cinema’s silent era (Uhlirova 26).

In another chapter of Birds of Paradise, Leslie equally underlines the similarity between the spectacular qualities of both cinema and fashion: “Cinema bombards the senses, displaying a heightened attention to visual and aural sensuous effects: sound, light, gloss, texture. Likewise, fashion induces an intensified level of sensory stimulation” (31). On a different level, the fashion film reminds of the cinema of attractions because of its means of exposition on online platforms – that is, Paola Voci has argued, because online small-screen cinema moves away from ‘the concentration/absorption model developed by dominant narrative cinema and instead connects with the early cinema of attractions, both developing in fluid and unregulated environments where attraction, distraction, and intervention all play crucial roles’ (2). She hereby underlines that both the cinema of attractions and “online small-screen cinema” don’t simply rely on the generation of

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pleasure, but are also engaging the spectator in thought-provoking ways with the moving image (15). Indeed, with the increasing amount of audio-visual material shaping today’s world, I think there is a growing curiosity and demand by the media-savvy spectator/user for deeper reflection upon the different visual landscapes that construct our experience of (virtual) reality.

Overall, there seems to be a general tendency of fashion filmmakers shifting the debate around the role of fashion in film from a visual attraction towards narrative storytelling, also to specifically address certain issues within the fashion industry. That is, a fashion film should provide a perspective on fashion and life(style) in general that convinces the viewer/consumer of a brand’s virtue. In other words, it should present a solid and sustainable brand philosophy, and therefore consciously position itself within the overall fashion landscape and industry. Herein fashion can either be subversive to the overall course of the film, or it can function more independently from the plot, creating a dialogue between fashion and the film. In the next chapter I go deeper into the question of how fashion film is moving from an aesthetics-based approach (that has its roots in fashion photography) towards a reinvention of “sartorial narration.”

1.5. Appropriating Cinematic Narration

“Sartorial narration” proposes a different kind of filmic storytelling through fashion that is not simply “supportive” of the film’s plot and action. Instead, fashion creates its own narrative. In other words, ‘it is about dress functioning independently of character and narrative, an admiration and acknowledgement of clothes in spite of the more general trajectory of the film, going against the normative clothes-body relationships that understands the former to be subservient to the latter’ (Bruzzi 34). This new cinematic interpretation of fashion seems to be the result of fashion’s increasing prominent role in modern consumerist societies, infusing these sartorial objects with meaning and diverse connotations wherefore it becomes rich in narrative and signification in different (filmic) contexts and universes. Without this independent role for fashion, we would still be speaking about fashion in film, as I made the distinction earlier. The desire to develop a kind of star-status for the clothes (and brand) themselves instead of just for the characters wearing them, expressed itself through a different use of costume design in film that wasn’t only based on the film’s narrative (Bruzzi 6). Bruzzi mentions as an example The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (Peter Greenaway, 1989) in which characters change outfits (designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier) when they appear in another filmic space with a different mise-en-scène, without motivation regarding the film’s overall narrative course. As a result, the clothes “(...) fulfill a star-like role, processing through the film as arbitrary signs which precede rather than follow character” (Bruzzi 10). Gibson, who wrote specifically on celebrity culture and film, gives two other, more recent, examples of this: the “transformation-through-shopping” films Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990) and The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006) in which ‘fashion itself has become a star,

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indeed a celebrity,’ on top of the overall narrative of the film (90). Instead of just the clothing, these two films seem “fashioned” in the sense that the aesthetics of the mise-en-scène is fundamentally interconnected with the sartorial object. This aesthetically pleasing “style” of the film can, independently from the film’s narrative, be enjoyed in itself. That is, because characters or narrative no longer need to ‘justify’ the integration of eye-catching fashion in film, it can simply be admired for its aesthetic qualities only. In a way, this is how fashion in film started to “speak” for itself, and would create its own distinct voice within the cinematic world, forming a dialogue with the overall course of the film.

Fashion may even be a fundamental means through which a filmic world comes into being, as is for example the case in A Single Man (2009), directed by fashion designer Tom Ford. Another example is the recent The Neon Demon (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2016), which tells the story of a young orphan moving to Los Angeles to start a modelling career. Interestingly, this horror-classified film is narratively inspired by the downsides of the fashion and modelling industry, treating subjects such as the abuse of (underage) models, arrogance and superficiality (to quote character Robert Sarno, a fashion designer: “Beauty isn't everything, it is the only thing”). At the same time, fashion transcends narrative by manifesting in a particular neon-aesthetics, creating stunning images that sometimes don’t serve any purpose other than themselves. This attention towards fashion beyond a focus on character’s dress or narration is one of the conditions for fashion film’s existence. That is, if fashion were dependent on character and/or narrative, it could have never in itself generated an interesting cinema and distinct genre. The narrative fashion film may thus appeal to a broader public than solely people interested in fashion specifically, since fashion has become an independent element of cinematic world-creation in which anything can happen. This is in line with Khan’s argument that the contemporary fashion film addresses the viewer as spectator rather than as consumer which, like mentioned before, has also been suggested by Uhlirova and Evans who have argued that the fashion film has become a ‘commodity’ in itself (236). Khan explains that unlike fashion advertising, the fashion film doesn’t solely rely on the discourse of commodity fetishism as a means of promoting consumption, but rather aims to break down boundaries between consumption and representation by relying on cinematic language like editing and the introduction of narrative, making it less about the spectacle of the sartorial object and more about the aesthetic experience of the viewer (237). This is because, Uhlirova argues in The Fashion Film Effect, the fashion film has a greater degree of autonomy from the fashions it displays or connotes, as it is less concerned with social and psychological processes of identification, persuasion and reassurance than is the case in more conventional advertising (121). Whilst Khan describes this as a shift from consumption-based looking to spectatorial engagement, Needham instead proposes a merging of the two in which consumption and spectatorship collapse into each other (106). Like early cinema, the contemporary fashion film is really trying to sell itself. That is, the cinema of attractions was mainly interested in selling film as a medium: it wanted to show off cinema’s spectacular potentials, which was done in

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one way through the employment of fabric on moving bodies, which in turn also had commercial benefits for the fashion industry. Similarly, the contemporary digital fashion film is equally interested in portraying fashion in motion, on the one hand to show off a new exciting way of showcasing fashion, but on the other hand to encourage the new innovative qualities of the medium that has come along with the digital world too. In a way, “…fashion film is the fashion industry’s response to a general video trend we’ve seen in other industries” and that will most likely dominate the future’s Internet traffic (Capper n.p.). The fashion industry needed to find a way to stand out from the audio-visual “noise” that is created in the contemporary (and future) digital environment. Beyond the fashion film as “spectacle,” and it being simply an attraction-generating medium with commercial purposes, it has come to be seen as a truly artistic expression too that tempts to go further than simply creating impressions.

In all, the contemporary fashion film hasn’t only developed into a useful tool to stimulate consumption, either of garments or of the audio-visual object in itself, but has on top of that fundamentally changed our notion of fashion as a moment in time (Khan 236), made possible through the digital environment it exists in. Digital spectatorship offers the spectator access to any

given frame at any given time, offering the viewer a “permanent present,”9_{which in turn has an}

impact on how we perceive the ephemeral nature of fashion since it suggests that fashion is constantly renewed and at the same time caught in the here and now (Khan 238). In other words, the fashion image is no longer tied to a specific moment in time of when it was first published. Instead it now circulates in a digital environment where it can easily be called back anytime, and so co-exists in a continuous stream of images that doesn’t per definition form a linear history, but an interactive present. This also means that the digital citizen is now more involved in the meaning-making of fashion (imagery) in more engaging ways than before, as ‘the (digital) screen has become a key point of contact for the experience of fashion culture as a whole’ (Needham 103). As a result, besides changing the way we look at and perceive fashion, the digital fashion film contributes to the way fashion trends advance, since the choice of which pieces of clothing are getting exposed is now also complicated by the question whether ‘the clothes look good on screen rather than wear well’ (Needham 104). As the fashion film is becoming a more and more influential commodity on its own too, what is considered as fashion also needs to be interesting for the digital screen and the virtual environment it is embedded in, making the practice of fashion more interrelated with the overall digital (audio-)visual world.

In this first chapter I have explored the different notions of “the fashion film” as an umbrella term to describe a multi-faceted genre, still growing and developing. Much of the confusion around what a fashion film is probably has to do with the fact that it encapsulates many different pre-existing

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genres, wherefore different filmmakers with varying background make diverse interpretations of what the genre is or should be. For the sake of this thesis I suggest to define the fashion film as typically a short film that is inspired by fashion, either by featuring it and/or (re)creating the overall feeling or philosophy of a certain fashion item, brand or movement. It is deeply embedded in the digital world and proposes a medium for experimentation with the possibilities of fashion as both an industry and an art form and practice. As a result, fashion film goes beyond the simple portrayal of fashion objects, and becomes part of fashion as a practice itself.

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Chapter 2: Issues of Sustainability in Fashion and Film

My aim in this second chapter is to make visible the connection between the emergence of the fashion film, and the rise of “sustainability” issues within the fashion industry. I start with an historical overview of the emergence of fashion in the early modern society and the rise of capitalism, and go on to sketch the problematic fast fashion landscape it has created nowadays. In order to understand the reaction of “sustainable” fashion to some of the fast fashion industry’s issues, the meaning of the term “sustainability” is deconstructed, forming a critical eye upon “sustainable” and “ethical” fashion movements. Sustainability, however, concerns an interdisciplinary field of study of which fashion is only one element, and concerns a balance between maintaining environmental health, economic welfare and social justice across many domains. That is, sustainability studies’ goal is ‘to demonstrate the historical and material interdependence of human and natural systems’ (Wood 13). Hence sustainability within fashion is interrelated with an ongoing chain of industries, social and environmental regulations, cultural phenomena, and artistic expressions, creating a complex and constantly changing set of systems. This chapter is confined to the contemporary fashion film and its possibility to awaken a perception of fashion that implies more sustainable production and consumption.

This “sustainable” conception of fashion functions on two different emotional levels. The first is a collective level, driven by a feeling of social and/or environmental responsibility, which becomes part of fashion’s symbolic meaning (of being an ethical consumer) and therefore creates a

positive user experience.10 The second level is more personal, and proposes a more “durable”

alternative to the short-term emotional satisfaction generated by fast fashion consumption. Explaining how this is related to the process of attachment in person-product relationships, I will introduce the concept of “emotional longevity” with the help of fashion theorist Kirsi Niinimäki. I then make the connection with cinema by showing how the principles of “emotional longevity” are picked up and supported by its medium specific qualities, and manifest in the fashion film.

In order to illustrate my argument on how fashion film can in fact support a mentality of sustainable fashion consumption, I will focus on three different types of fashion films as case studies. The first is Desula (Andrea Pecora, 2016), a fashion film-documentary made for NOWNESS that quite directly touches upon the emotional relationship with clothes. The second, The Worst Crime Is Faking It (2016), is a fashion film by Nick Knight, founder of SHOWstudio and coming from a fashion photography background, in which he proposes a different approach to fashion film based on observation rather than direction. Whilst the first two films are coming from

10_{Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky have described the influence of clothes on the wearer’s psychological processes} with the term “enclothed cognition,” and concluded that it is determined by both the symbolic meaning and the physical experience of wearing clothes (918).

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a more fashion-oriented context, De Djess (2015) has a more cinematic background and is directed by Alice Rohrwacher. In the end, I hope to have demonstrated through close analysis how a highly diverse type of fashion films are in fact promoting “sustainability” in fashion in various implicit and explicit ways.

2.1. Fashion, The Child of Capitalism

Fashion was born, as Elizabeth Wilson has put it, as “the child of capitalism.” That is, capitalism provided an environment in which formerly established social relations were disrupted, which was necessary for the phenomenon of fashion as a means of class indication to emerge (13). In his article on the relation of the empire of fashion with the rise of capitalism in eighteenth-century France, Sewell explains that ‘the production and consumption of fashionable goods put into place an indefinitely reproducible and expandable recipe for enhanced capital accumulation’ (84). Now that the social construction of society was no longer fixed but became “liquid,” anyone from the lowest classes could (theoretically) work himself up on the socio-economic scale (and the other way

around).11_{As Marx and Engels famously described in The Communist Manifesto (1848), capitalism}

‘swept away’ social life that was characterized by ‘fixed, frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices,’ and instead ‘melted all that is solid into air’ (38). This created a more ‘competitive social context’ in which ‘dress’ was transformed into ‘fashion’ (Sullivan 32). In order to maintain their status, fashion was then used by the upper classes to distinguish themselves from the lower classes. Since the working classes aspired for a higher position, they (slowly) adopted the fashions of the elite. In turn, before they could do so, the upper stratum had already passed on to something else. This “top-down” process of fashion trends had already been described by German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel in 1904, in which he stresses that fashion is both “(…) the imitation of a given example and satisfies the demand for social adaptation (…)” whilst also “(…) it satisfies in no less the degree the need of differentiation (…) on the one hand by a constant change of contents, which gives to the fashion of to-day an individual stamp as opposed to that of yesterday and of to-morrow, on the other hand because fashions differ for different classes (…)” (133). Even though his core argument on social adaptation and differentiation is still relevant, the “top-down” dynamics of fashion has slowly changed and become more complex over time.

Whilst in the early capitalist period of the 19th_{century being “fashionable” could only be}

afforded by the higher classes, from the second half of the 20th_{century fashion truly become}

‘fashion for all’ (Rouse 278). As a result of globalization, the production of garments was outsourced to competing developing countries with the lowest wages, wherefore the prices of

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readymade garments dropped to a minimum. Also the introduction of ‘piece wages’ raised the level

of surplus value12 extracted from the production of every piece of clothing, whilst at the same time

increasing the exploitation of workers because ‘the quality and intensity of the work which went into making the clothes was now controlled by its very form of payment’ (Marx 697). Other than

that, the fast fashion industry is estimated to be one of the largest polluting industries in the world.13

Its ecological footprint is difficult to control because the industry consists of a long and complex chain of supply and production that include the growing and harvesting of raw materials, textile manufacturing (weaving, dying), the construction of the clothes (sewing, embroidering), shipping, retailing, and the garment’s afterlife (recycling, waste processing), taking place in different countries and governed by various businesses and (the lack of) laws.

The Ethical Fashion Forum (EFF), a well-established not for profit network that focusses on social and environmental sustainability in the fashion industry, states that already “in the 1990’s more and more pioneering fashion designers and entrepreneurs began to be concerned about the environment and the people behind their collections,” with issues around exploitative sweatshop labour conditions and environmental damage as a result of the fashion industry being widespread

in the media.14_{As a result, “from the beginning of the 21}st_{Century an ethical fashion movement}

began to gather momentum,” with the EFF being established in 2004. However, these movements have only gained wider public attention since recently. Many aspects of the clothing manufacturing

industry have been, and are still remained hidden15_{from consumers by the ‘the fetishistic effects of}

branding, markets, distance and routine’ (Sullivan 41). This has created an image of the fashion world as “glamourous.” In this (illusionary) world, (cheap) clothing consumption has become self-evident, as is perfectly expressed by Andrew Morgan, the director of the crowdfunded documentary

12_{Marx has developed a formula for capitalist exchange, M-C-M, in which the capitalist invests a certain amount} of value (M) to buy labour power (C) in order to create a product (M) that exceeds the initial invested money by the capitalist. The workers therefore create surplus value for the capitalist since they are only payed the amount necessary for them to live, the ‘socially necessary labour time’ or SNLT (Marx 248-57). The amount of surplus value was raised with the introduction of piece wages since

13_{“Fast Fashion is the Second Dirtiest Industry in the World, Next to Big Oil.” EcoWatch. 2015. EcoWatch. 4} September 2016. <http://www.ecowatch.com/fast-fashion-is-the-second-dirtiest-industry-in-the-world-next-to-big--1882083445.html>.

14_{“Our Story.” Ethical Fashion Forum. 2004. Ethical Fashion Forum. 1 September 2016.} <http://www.ethicalfashionforum.com/about-eff/our-story>.

15_{See for example the first edition of the Fashion Transparency Index created by Fashion Revolution, a not} for profit Community Interest Company based in the UK, analysing the production chain of forty of the biggest global fashion brands (selected on annual turnover).

“Fashion Transparency Index.” Fashion Revolution. 2016. Fashion Revolution CIC. 2 September 2016. <http://fashionrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/FR_FashionTransparencyIndex.pdf>.

Conceptualizing the Fashion Film: The Issue of Sustainability in Fashion and the Fashion Film Festival

University of Amsterdam

Research Master’s Thesis in Media Studies