Touching Textures Through the Screen:
A Cinematic Investigation of the Contemporary Fashion Film
Name: Simone Houg Supervisor: Dr. M.A.M.B Baronian Student Number: Second Reader: Dr. F.J.J.W. Paalman Address: University of Amsterdam
Master Thesis Film Studies
Phone Number: 26 June 2015 Email: Simone_houg@live.nl Word Count: 23709
Abstract
The contemporary fashion film emerged at the beginning of this century and has enabled fashion and film to enter into an equivalent relationship. This symbiotic relationship goes back to the emergence of both disciplines at the beginning of the twentieth century. The fashion film is a relatively new phenomenon that is presented on the Internet as a short film, made by fashion designers and fashion houses that optionally collaborate with well-known filmmakers. The fashion film expresses itself in many forms and through many different styles and characteristics, which makes it hard to grasp. In the case studies on the fashion films commissioned by Dior, Prada, Hussein Chalayan and Maison Margiela, concepts such as colour, movement and haptic visuality are investigated, in order to demonstrate that by focusing on the fashion films' similar use of these cinematic techniques, a definition of the fashion film can be constituted. The fashion film moves in our contemporary society; a society that is focused on ideas of progress, increased mobility and other concepts that characterise a culture of modernity. These concepts evoke feelings of nostalgia and the fashion film responds to this by immersing the spectator into a magical, fictionalised world full of desired garments, objects and settings. The ‘aura’ that surrounds the fashion brand is expressed by letting the viewer fully participate in this fashioned world.
Table of Contents
Introduction...07
1. From ‘Film and Fashion’ to ‘the Fashion Film’...11
Fashion Newsreels... 12
Film as Transmitter... 14
Themes, Seating Plans and Cabines... 15
Rise of the Mass Consumption... 16
The Contemporary Fashion Film... 18
Modernity and the Fashion Film...22
Conclusion...23
2. The Fashioned Worlds of Dior and Prada... 24
Lady Blue Shanghai... 24
Nightly Mysteries... 25
Bodily Movement... 28
Erotic Touch... 29
Lady Grey London... 31
Eroticism, Textures and Fabrics... 32
Clothes as a Second Skin... 33
Colour as the Évocateur of Desire... 34
Prada: Leather, Luxury and Art Patronage... 34
A Therapy: A Furry Haptic Sensation... 35
Italian Nostalgia and Authenticity in Castello Cavalcanti... 37
A Desire for the Past... 40
Conclusion... 41
3. Conceptual Fashion Films: Hussein Chalayan and Maison Margiela ... 43
HUSSEIN CHALAYAN... 44
Ideas and Narrativisation... 45
Veiling and the Gaze... 48
Transforming the Moving Image and the Human Body... 49
MAISON MARGIELA... 52
Substituting the Fashion Show... 53
Communicating the Message... 55
Depth and Motion... 57
Conclusion... 58
Conclusion: Dressing the Fashion Film... 60
Introduction
Fashion and film seem to be inextricably connected in the current era. The use of the medium of film to display, promote and sell fashion is widely incorporated in the marketing strategies of major and smaller fashion brands, large fashion chains and couture houses. Equally, fashion is also present in film: for example, in collaboration with Italian designer Miuccia Prada, the costumes of The Great Gatsby (Luhrmann, 2013) included designs from the Prada and Miu Miu archives. But the relationship between fashion and film goes beyond simply utilising film for fashion and fashion for film. The contemporary fashion film is a genre that has experienced an explosive growth in the current digital era. These short films, lasting from one to approximately fifteen minutes, are continuously available on the Internet and they can be viewed at any time from any place: at home, in class, in shops, or at (fashion) film festivals. These fashion films distinguish themselves from fashion commercials broadcast on TV in various ways, such as their length (they can be considered short films), their viewing space (The Internet) and their content and style (there is no specific product placement).1 Fashion films are presented in a variety of guises. In 2012, the Italian filmmaker Carlo Lavagna gave the viewer a glimpse into the world of the fashion house Valentino in his film L'Unico. He recorded the making of a Valentino's haute couture dress in a poetic sense and followed the dress from the designers' drawings to the eventual presentation of it on the runway. Images of women sewing complex patterns onto the dress are accompanied by serene music. These gentle scenes are in stark contrast to a fashion film made by the British filmmaker Ruth Hogben and the fashion designer Gareth Pugh for Pugh's Autumn/Winter 2015 collection. The film was used as a prelude to Pugh's fashion show and is featured by dark, horror images. We see a woman that starts cutting her long blonde hair with a large pair of scissors. In the next scene we see her wearing a black and white outfit as she starts putting red paint on her body and face, applied in the shape of a cross. After this she disappears into flames of fire. Ominous music accompanies the disturbing scenes. When the film ends, models appear on the catwalk, wearing similar outfits and are covered in red paint, as if they just walked out of the fashion film. These two fashion films seem to be completely different, which can be explained by the fact that the fashion both designers create is radical different. Valentino is known for its romantic, feminine designs while Gareth Pugh's designs are more experimental and play with the shapes of the human body. Although at first sight there can be found little similarities between these two examples that are both considered to be fashion films (they both depict clothing from known fashion designers), there can be found more parallels between these and other fashion films when they are analysed more closely.
1Product placement is an advertising technique that companies use to promote their products by
This thesis will examine the connections and relationships between fashion and film. By tracing the emergence of both discourses, forms and their connections with mass media and modernity, an in depth exploration of their corresponding concepts will be given.I will investigate how fashion and film developed in parallel, always exchanging shared
characteristics, which has led to the intertwined connection expressed within the fashion film genre. This investigation of the fashion film through the exploration of cinematic concepts, will demonstrate that the fashion film is a complex, interdisciplinary phenomenon that has many underlying references to art, history and our contemporary culture - aspects that are perhaps not so visible at first sight.
This research has an interdisciplinary approach. The fashion film will be investigated from the perspective of both fashion studies and film studies, where the latter will be more emphasised due to the educational background of this thesis. The presence of fashion in film is a remarkable research field. Researchers have made major contributions by exploring dress in cinema (Bruzzi 1997; Street 2001; Munich 2011), which deserves much attention when researching the relation between fashion and film. But this research will not focus on fashion
in film, but rather on the exact opposite: film in fashion, in other words cinematic concepts
that can be found within the fashion context.
In the first chapter the similarities between fashion and film’s concepts will be investigated. I will look closely at the emergence of film and fashion and how cinema, from the beginning, has shared many affinities with fashion. It will be argued that these two fields went through a coherent development in the twentieth century and it will be demonstrated how these linear developments eventually resulted in the emergence of the fashion film. Characteristics and cultural contexts of the fashion film will be researched; different findings, definitions and descriptions of the genre will be outlined.
The following two chapters provide current examples of fashion films. The first part will focus on fashion films created by the two major fashion houses Prada and Dior. These fashion films will be analysed using concepts that find a shared background in film and fashion - namely colour and movement. Their use of renowned film directors is important in this case, since the choice for a certain director influences the representation of the fashion house.
The couture house Dior made an interesting cinematic project around the launch of the Lady Dior bag. Since these bags come in several colours, they linked each colour to a different city in the world and let well-known film directors produce short films about these bags, all starring the actress Marion Cotillard. Lady Rouge (Jonas Åkerlund, 2009) was followed by The Lady Noir Affair (Olivier Dahan, 2009), a year later Lady Blue Shanghai (David Lynch, 2010) was released and the last in this series, Lady Grey London appeared in 2011 (John Cameron Mitchell, 2011).
Prada has also asked several well-known filmmakers to produce short fashion films. Wes Anderson, in collaboration with Roman Coppola, has produced two fashion films for Prada: the triptych Prada Candy and Castello Cavalcanti in 2013. Roman Polanski was hired by Prada to make A Therapy, starring Ben Kingsley and Helena Bonham Carter in 2012. To give a greater perspective on the use of film and its techniques within the fashion industry, the third chapter will focus on relatively few conceptual designers. These designers have a closer connection with art world and are often asked to show their creations in the museum setting. The role of film and the context of art within their creations, play a significant role. Their use of film, therefore, also differs from the major fashion houses, but still the cinematic features pervade their creations. The British/Cypriot designer Hussein Chalayan is a conceptual designer who uses film throughout its creations: not only in a physical way by using the medium of film to represent his clothing, but also in a more abstract or immaterial sense, where cinematic concepts flow through his collections. An example is his film Afterwords, which was made during the launch of the eponymous collection of Autumn/Winter in 2000.
The conceptual designers’ use of film will be analysed by focusing on the presence of cinematic concepts such as colour, movement, narrative and special effects. These cinematic concepts provide guidance through the collections of these designers. Their conceptual approach to fashion has ensured that they are at the forefront of using new technologies and that they are able to make “intellectual” sometimes critical - ideas tangible in their
collections.
These concepts also are visible in the work of the conceptual fashion house Maison Martin Margiela who recently changed its name to Maison Margiela. The designs of the
maison (they clearly indicate that the creations are made by the whole team behind Maison
Margiela and not just one designer) are approached in an avant-gardist way and some features are recognisable through each collection. In the creations, the conceptualisation of time and its view on the human body are visualised, just as the designs include of
trompe-l’oeil and deconstructed clothing. In their radical, non-mainstream approach of fashion, the
medium of film is placed in an experimental dialogue with the creations. Maison Margiela uses film to substitute their fashion shows, to represent the house’s style, characteristics, and the production process.
The embracing by well-known fashion designers and houses of film as a medium that has many similarities with the fashion industry, uncovers the ever-present relationship between these two art forms. Both have evolved in a cultural context of modernity and mass consumption. The use of specific cinematic techniques such as colour, movement and haptic visuality ensure that both fashion and film are treated equally. The desired garments, textures, fabrics and objects become the most central and significant feature in these films. They evoke
the feeling to be touched, and this, as I will argue, enables the spectator to create an emotional relationship with the things represented on the screen.
Chapter I. From ‘Film and Fashion’ to ‘the Fashion Film’
Fashion and film emerged almost simultaneously as industries at the end of the nineteenth century. Both discourses actually existed earlier2, but at the end of this century some
important changes took place. Cinematic experiments took place before the Lumière brothers showed La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon in 1895, but still it was one of the first shows
where an audience paid to view the film. Fashion experienced the same transformation. Back at the French court of Louis XIV, reputable tailors already designed costumes, but an
important shift in the relationship between the tailor and the wearer occurred at the end of the nineteenth century. Tailors did not stay attached to one costumer only, but became
independent entrepreneurs who opened their own businesses in large cities like Paris. Clients had to visit their salons and therefore the tailors’ designs were accessible for a larger part of the population (English 5-12).
From this simultaneous rise at the end of the nineteenth century, fashion and film have shared concepts and features that enabled both industries to express themselves. In her article ‘The Walkies’, Caroline Evans asserts that the “French fashion show [...] had many affinities with the “cinema of attractions”, in particular with the féeries and trick films of Georges Méliès from around 1903” (Evans 2011: 110). The “cinema of attractions” refers to the first period of film from 1895 to approximately 1906 or 1907. Tom Gunning, one of the first researchers that used the term “cinema of attractions”, explains that this cinema wanted to show something rather than being a device for storytelling. In early cinema, actors have a relationship with the spectator, since they look into the camera to connect with the audience (Gunning 64). The trick films of Méliès show that cinema itself could be seen as an
attraction and, according to Gunning, depicts the “magical possibilities of cinema” (65). Evans argues that these features can also be applied to the first fashion shows. In these films, the fashion shows were “presentational rather than possessing a narrative: the mannequins were being looked at as if they were attractions rather than characters with a thoughtful personality”. The gaze from client to model also has affinities with the cinema of attraction’s direct addressing of the spectator (Evans 2011: 118). Gunning demonstrates that early showmen exhibitors had a great influence on the display of the film: they were able to re-edit the film and, for example, add music, sound effects, or explanations after they had purchased it. Evans also sees this phenomenon appear in the fashion shows, where clients could ask the
2 The exact emergence of both film and fashion is questioned and interpreted variously by scholars.
According to the dominant discourse, film’s emergence is linked to the viewings of the Lumière brothers. But media archaeologists such as Laurent Mannoni and Thomas Elsaesser declare that predecessors of film could be found in the ‘pre-cinematic’ period. Within fashion theory too, discussions take place about which periods should be referred to as fashion. Some state that in the Egyptians’ costumes a certain fashion could be found, while others suggest that the beginning of fashion should be associated with the opening of the first couture house by Charles Frederick Worth (See for example Valerie Cummings 2004).
mannequins to stop to take a closer look at the clothes. In that sense the designer could be seen as a kind of scenographer, directing the models in the same way a director of a film would do (Evans 2011: 119). Another cinematic element that is revealed in fashion shows is the fascination with the human body in motion. Like early film, fashion shows emerged from the desire to show clothing into movement, something that was found more important than to elaborate questions of psychological depth, narrative or truth (Evans 2013: 247).
These cinematic characteristics were not only visible in fashion shows, but also in other fashion utterances like the fashion journalism and the fashion newsreels that arose from the 1910s. Evans demonstrates that film language entered fashion journalism, suggesting that fashion journalists looked at fashion and fashion shows in a certain way that was influence by the cinematic viewing mode (Evans 2011: 111). She quotes several reviews from magazines, including the French magazine Femina that referred to the forthcoming fashion of the 1910 fall as ‘a veritable cinematograph of tomorrow’s fashion, and the French Fantasio magazine describing the well-dressed people in the Bois de Boulogne as ‘an admirable cinema’ (Evans 2013: 249).
Fashion Newsreels
Characteristics from the “cinema of attractions” were also visible in the fashion newsreels that were produced from the 1910s. Before the 1910s, these newsreels on fashion did not exist. The only available images of fashion came from the reports on Bois de Boulogne or Longchamp, which showed us the latest fashions worn by the French jetset who accidentally walked through the screen (Teunissen 32). Elizabeth Leese is one of the first to investigate these fashion newsreels. One of the earliest fashion films described by Leese is Fifty Years of
Paris Fashions 1859-1909, which was shown in London in 1910. This film was well received
and made it possible to bring high fashion from Paris to a wider audience (Leese 9). From the 1910s Gaumont and the Pathé brothers started to make their own fashion reports. In the beginning, these reports lasted not more than one minute and were shown among other news items. These items were successful and became independent newsreels lasting about ten minutes. Pathé became one of the leading production companies of these fashion newsreels, showing the coming fashion in their weekly released Pathé Animated Gazette (Evans 2013: 66).
These reports stood out because they were the only reports in the newsreels that were in colour (Teunissen 32). The short fashion films were ideal for experimenting with colouring techniques like Kinemacolour, Pathécolour and the later Eastman colour process (Leese 9). The use of colour in these fashion newsreels was important because it gave the garments a realistic look and colour created a spectacle for its viewers. The clothes were colourised with great importance for detail, showing the willingness to make the clothes a haptic sensation.
‘Haptic visuality’, in the context of contemporary film studies, is a term coined by the media theorist Laura Marks. She describes this concept as “a kind of looking that lingers on the surface of the image rather than delving into depth and is more concerned with texture than with deep space (quoted in Barker 35). The creation of a haptic sensation within these fashion newsreels is important, since the spectator is not able to touch or to view the clothes as they would in [three-dimensional] reality. The representation on the screen needs to invite the viewer to touch; a tactile relationship between the viewer’s skin and that of the film needs to be provoked.
Besides this realistic and tactile function of colour, Eirik Frisvold Hanssen argues that colour is used as a visual material of desire that “signified the social identity, emancipation and social mobility” (Hanssen 118). The clothes were displayed in settings where the social milieus were clearly made visible. The sets were indeed full of luxury and colour where not only the garments were desired, but also the whole environment surrounding it (Hanssen 115).3
The emergence of the fashion newsreels is in line with the evolving desire of
capturing the body in movement. José Teunissen explains in her book Mode in beweging: van
modeprent tot modejournaal, that the display of the human body in motion developed
alongside the emergence of photography and film. Furthermore the general fascination for movement that marked the beginning of the twentieth century meant that the body was often depicted in motion. Fashion prints already existed from 1770 but became accessible to a wider audience from 1830 in fashion magazines. These illustrations showed the clothes in great detail, but the feminine body was depicted in a frontal, static way. This depiction fitted the dominant fashion of that time: the bodies were literally ‘stuck’ in the corsets and thick layers of skirts (Teunissen 9 and 11). When photography became standardised in fashion magazines from 1890, the photos mainly imitated the static fashion drawings that were used before. Teunissen names two people in particular who had a great influence on bringing the body into motion. Firstly, she refers to the French photographer Henri Lartigue, who shot photos of fashionably dressed women in action, walking at the horse races in Bois de Boulogne. Secondly, fashion designer Paul Poiret, who reformed the dominant fashion by removing the corset (Teunissen 19). Poiret also experimented with film, taking footage which he made himself, with him on a promotional tour through the United States to substitute live fashion shows (Leese 10; Evans 2011: 120). The transition from fashion drawings and photography to fashion newsreels therefore made fashion more mobile, both literally and figuratively speaking. Built on the ideas of Roland Barthes’ Système de la Mode (1973),
3 In the recently released and beautifully illustrated book Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (2015), an
important contribution is made to the studies of early color film images and its techniques. See Fossati, Giovanna et al. Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015.
Nathalie Khan refers to fashion photography as a medium that captures a specific moment in time (Khan 238). Barthes declares that photography holds on to the past and is imbued with stillness, immobility and death, while as Khan argues, the fashion film “makes it possible to interact which each instant within the fashion circle” (238). Besides this interaction, these fashion films were able to show the passing of time, to show the garments in movement and reveal details from different kinds of angles. This made them more lively and directed attention through the use of colour, therefore showing them, as Uhlirova notes, as “living organisms” (Uhlirova 2013b: 123).
The fashion newsreel shares characteristics with the fashion show and the cinema of attractions. In the 1910s the narrative of these fashion films depicted the daily activities of the middle class woman, but this changed during the 1920s. The short fashion films from this period have a more presentational feature: the models on the screen directly address the spectator, like in the cinema of attractions (Hanssen 116). This presentational aesthetic is combined with simple narrative stories: fictionalised situations are alternated with images of static, posing models looking into the camera. This seems to evoke unrealistic stories, since the narrative literally stops - pausing for a couple of seconds - to show the garments in more detail. But according to Eivind Røssaak, the change from a moving to a static image instead creates sensation. He shows that digital techniques today still make use of this combination. For example in The Matrix (The Wachowski Brothers, 1999), frozen images manipulate time and movement (Røssaak 324). The still images in these fashion newsreels provoke the same feelings in the viewer as with the frozen, so-called “bullet time effects” in The Matrix: “The Wachowski brothers are fascinated not by immobility, but by its effect on a moving body, and this effect is explored through the process of isolation, both technically and aesthetically, to achieve the most intense figure of sensation” (Røssaak 329).
As Marketa Uhlirova explains, throughout the 1920s and 1930s the style of the fashion newsreels did not change much. During the Second World War the genre persisted, serving as entertainment among other news items which were mostly war related (Uhlirova 2013a: 143).
Film as Transmitter
One of the main purposes of the fashion newsreel is that film serves as a transmitter to transfer high fashion to a mass audience: “it […] introduced the mass of consumers to everything from the aristocratic glamour of Paris” (Hanssen 112) and Evans describes this phenomenon as bringing “the image of haute couture to a wider audience through the very process of promulgating its mystique and aura of exclusivity” (2001: 285). Film participates in a system that is visible in fashion and firstly described by German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel in 1904. Simmel observes that fashion is a product of class
distinction and therefore the fashions of the higher class are never identical to that of the lower class (Simmel 133). He considers this system a vicious cycle that is still at work today:
Just as soon as the lower classes begin to copy their style, thereby crossing the line of demarcation the upper classes have drawn and destroying the uniformity of their coherence, the upper classes turn away from this style and adopt a new one, which in its turn differentiates them for the masses: and thus the game goes merrily on.
(Simmel 135)
The lower classes imitate the latest fashions of the upper classes, and film functions within this system as a transmitter: film makes it possible for the lower classes to copy their styles and which results in the change of style of the upper classes. Previously the lower classes needed to read magazines to mimic the style of the elite, now film accelerated the adoption process and therefore it could partly be held responsible for the rapid changes within fashion. Evans notes that before the newsreels entered the fashion world, film and the fashion show evolved separate from each other, but nevertheless they drew upon many of the same historical antecedents (Evans 2011: 114). Their corresponding reliance on the same historical concepts shows that from already from the emergence of both fashion and film resemble each other. But although it seems that fashion first distinguished itself from film since it was meant to be for only a small group of clients, this was not the case. According to Evans, the emergence of the fashion show was an effect of French haute couture being a global export industry: selling the ideas of the Parisian high fashion to North American buyers who produced simplified forms on mass scale (Evans 2013: 2).
The fashion newsreel can be considered as one of the first forms where the
intertwined connection between fashion and film is made explicit. The concepts that form the basis of cinema, for example movement, spectacle, colour and narrative, are visible in these newsreels. And as we shall see later on, many characteristics of the fashion newsreel share similarities with the contemporary ‘digital’ fashion film, and therefore the fashion newsreel can be considered one of the predecessors of the current fashion film.
Themes, Seating Plans and Cabines
Gunning demonstrates that from 1913 a narrativisation of the cinema took place. He notes that the direct addressing of the spectator became taboo and cinematic devices were not used to reveal the new techniques and tricks of cinema, but were meant for the support of other purposes: namely that of the dramatic expression to develop the psychology of characters and their fictionalized world (Gunning 68). While narrative storytelling took over cinema, this cinematic concept also found its way into fashion and was combined with the element of
spectacle of the cinema of attractions. Elsa Schiaparelli was the first designer to give each collection a certain theme that resembled a (film) genre, the collection was accompanied by a fashion show that included spectacle, music, lighting, dance and stunts (Evans 2001: 289). One of the shows described by Evans is the Commedia dell’arte show of 1939. Commedia characters like a Harlequin, a Columbine and a Pierrot were used to create a fictionalized world (Evans 2001: 291). In 1952, Schiaparelli also instructed a film company to transform her own courtyard into a fairytale setting, where mannequins danced to Brazilian music (Evans 2001: 291).
Cinematic devices were actually visible in all the utterances of fashion. Dior
introduced the seating plan for its fashion shows in 1947, where people were required to sit in a particular place. This seating plan has affinities with the cinematic experience, since the viewer is obliged to sit in a certain place to watch the show. For instance, the apparatus theory developed by Jean-Louis Baudry in 1970, investigates the central position of the spectator within the cinematic environment. According to him, the movie theatre is a closed off space, in which the viewer is “chained” and “captivated”, and can only look at the images represented to them on the screen (Baudry 44). Within this cinematic mirror-screen a paradox is visible: it reflects images, but these reflected images are not “reality” (Baudry 45).
Through this mirroring effect a false ‘reality’ is created as the spectators identify themselves with characters represented onscreen. This secondary identification is useful within the fashion show. When the show begins and the lights go down, the visitors of the fashion show are forced to look at the spectacle unfolding in front of them. A mirroring effect is created when the spectators identify with the models and their appearance. This can serve as a proper advertising tool, as they are enchanted and captured by the “reality” created in front of them.
Another striking similarity with film is present in the juxtaposition of the Hollywood studio star system and the system of the cabines where models were attached to certain fashion designers. A cabine (literally, a studio) consisted of a number of models who worked for one couturier. Each cabine had its own rules and codes concerning humour, language and tradition (Evans 2011: 293). Each couturier therefore developed a recognisable walk (the “Dior Walk”), pose (the famous “Chanel pose”), or signature look that characterised the designer. Simultaneously, the large film studios in Hollywood hired actors and actresses who signed exclusivity contracts during the 1950s. They were given distinctive personas, for example the actress Marilyn Monroe, who was presented as a ‘blonde bombshell’. Actresses were allowed to only work for that studio and the way they represented themselves had to meet with the codes and rules of the studio. This similarity shows that fashion and film did not only have shared historical antecedents, but even in the systems of the fashion and film similarities were present.
Rise of the Mass Consumption
So far, we have seen that film found many ways to penetrate fashion. An important function of film was the transmitting of the haute couture fashions to the mass market, which
eventually would end up copying their style. But from the 1960s the borders between high fashion and low confections clothes started to blur and thus the function of film in fashion changed too. In the 1960s, London became an important city within the fashion world. In Paris, a clear demarcation between haute couture and ready-to-wear clothing was visible, while in London the distinction between “high” and “low” fashion was questioned. With the emergence of British designers like Mary Quant4 - who was partly responsible for the current fashion shows’ speed and style - the boundaries between garments for the mass and luxury market were blurred. The democratisation of fashion also became clear with the rise of the
prêt-à-porter (ready-to-wear) and menswear collections, made by reputable designers during
the 1960s. Yves Saint Laurent designed his first prêt-à-porter collection for women in 1966,
which made his clothes available to a much larger group of consumers (Evans 2001: 298). In the 1980s Thierry Mugler was one of the first designers who broke with the convention of having invited guests only, attending fashion shows. For his 1984 Autumn/Winter show, instead of only inviting important buyers, journalists and celebrities, Mugler made half his tickets available to the general public (Evans 2001: 301). The differences between haute couture fashion, prêt-à-porter collections and the mass market became less significant and the function of film as a medium transmitting high fashion to the wider public became less important.
From the 1980s fashion designers cautiously opened up to the medium of film. They started incorporating videos in their shows and retail spaces. Furthermore, designers started to experiment with film and in the Spring of 1990, Rifat Ozbek, Jasper Conran and Antony Price all chose not to put on a live fashion show. These designers are known for their interdisciplinary approach of fashion: their designs are inspired on other art forms such as performance art and music. For both creative and economic reasons, these designers substituted their shows for videos (Uhlirova 2013a: 145). In collaboration with the English filmmaker John Maybury, Rifat Ozbek created a "Fashion Video" in 1989 that resembled a music video; it was even broadcast on MTV. A two minutes video showed models dancing to up-tempo music against a psychedelic backdrop.
Still, the overall positive disposition towards the use of film in fashion continued to be limited to experimental designers. Conceptual designers like Hussein Chalayan and Maison Martin Margiela produced video installations and films from the end of the 20th
century that will be discussed in detail in the third chapter. These films and installations
4 The British fashion designer Mary Quant (1934) was an important figure in the youth fashion
supported the themes of their collections and were shown during their fashion shows, or indeed substituted these shows completely. The experimental use of film continued until the beginning of the twenty-first century and it was not until the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century that digital fashion film evolved into its current form, becoming a mainstream phenomenon within the fashion world.
The Contemporary Fashion Film
In 2000, British fashion photographer Nick Knight launched the website SHOWstudio, an interactive fashion platform that calls itself “The Home of the Fashion Film”. Filmic
experiments related to fashion can be found here, often made in collaboration with renowned designers like Martin Margiela, Viktor and Rolf and Alexander McQueen. SHOWstudio gave fashion films the opportunity to function in a new environment, namely the digital world. It took some time before the fashion world fully accepted the use of digital techniques. For a long period, the fashion industry seems to have preferred the cinematic over than the digital. This is evident in, for example, the fashion film Thunder Perfect Mind made by Jordan and Ridley Scott for Prada in 2005, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival (Uhlirova 2013a: 150). In the film the model Daria Werbowy is followed through the streets of Berlin, reciting a poem through a voiceover. There is no dialogue, only a jazzy soundtrack that guides Werbowy and the viewer through the city, meeting younger and older women that happen to be Werbowy herself. The preferences for the cinematic become apparent from the fact that the film was premiered in a cinematic environment and that it makes use of (experimental) cinematic devices.
The reluctance to use digital media in their marketing and advertising strategies can also partly be linked to technological limitations (Uhlirova 2013a: 150). Since the embracing of film within the fashion world happened only recently, it makes sense that the acceptance of the digital media took some time. The embracing of the medium film had to overcome all kind of obstacles, where one of the biggest challenges was to convince fashion designers of its importance. These films have to prove their value beyond simply being a medium to transmit fashion. They have to convince the fashion world that they have much more to offer to various aspects of fashion.
Uhlirova identified two reasons for mainstream acceptance at the end of the 2000s. First, the substituting of live fashion shows for films became more common (Uhlirova 2013a: 151). Maison Martin Margiela presented their Fall/Winter 2004 show in a film made by the English actor and director Nigel Bennett that was viewable in nineteen different bars in Paris (Uhlirova 2013a: 151). Viktor and Rolf created a film for their Spring/Summer 2009
collection that showed a fashion show only accessible online. In this film, all creations are worn by one model, Shalom Harlow, and the show lasts for about ten minutes. The fashion
press was especially attracted to Gareth Pugh’s Fall/Winter 2009 womenswear collection in which he replaced the elite fashion show by a film. A critic described the effects of Pugh’s substitution of a live fashion show on the website Style.com:
Pugh presented his new looks in mesmerizing video form. And in that context, his clothes made perfect sense in a way that they haven't always on the runway. While the 2-D format meant it took a visit to the showroom to appreciate the texture of Pinhead outfits carpeted with fine spikes like a lethal fur, it did allow for a chance to see the clothes in movement, whipped into aerodynamic shapes on screen by an elemental wind. (Tim Blanks, Style.com)
This review mentions some important effects as a result of using film as substitute for clothing. On the one hand, Blanks appreciates the fact that the garments can be seen in spectacular movement. But on the other hand, he also points to the limitations of the use of film, since he felt the need to visit the show room to “appreciate the texture”.
The second reason that gave the fashion film mainstream acceptance was the fact that large fashion brands/houses invested bigger budgets in fashion films. By making them available online among other media like television, cinema and retail spaces, they became accessible to a large audience (Uhlirova 2013a: 152). Reputable film directors like Martin Scorsese, David Lynch and Wes Anderson lent themselves to major fashion houses like Chanel, Dior and Prada by producing short films that were released online.5
As we have seen, the fashion film appears in all shapes, sizes and styles. These films can be literal translations of live fashion shows that are published online and they emerge in all different kinds of shapes. In her article “The Fashion Film Effect”, Uhlirova tries to define the fashion film as a specific genre. But she admits that it is difficult to describe the fashion film, since “it borrows and combines conventions of other genres and modes of production, including music video, avant-garde and experimental cinema, video art, documentary film, dance film and commercial” (Uhlirova 2013b: 120). She describes the fashion film as “a simultaneous exploration of the properties of cinema and fashion” (123) by linking both disciplines’ interest in movement and rhythm. She refers back to the intertwined relation between fashion and the cinema of attractions as described earlier in this chapter. According to her, if we want to define the fashion film as a genre, we have to let go of our standard ideas about a genre, and accept that it is “fluid and sometimes self-contradictory” (Uhlirova 2013b: 122). Gary Needham attempts to define the digital fashion film by dividing the films
5 Martin Scorsese directed Bleu Chanel: The Film in 2010 for Chanel; Lady Blue Shanghai is a short
film by David Lynch made for Dior in 2010 and Wes Anderson directed respectively Prada Candy and
into four sub-genres or types: the ‘boutique film’, which has been made primarily for e-stores; the ‘designer’s film’ which is associated with the creative designer or brand; the ‘authored film’ created by a known film director and finally the ‘artist’s film where a fashion brand has funded a fashion film that is created by an established artist (Needham 107). But again he notes that these sub-genres are not static, sometimes overlap and share
characteristics, which will become apparent when analysing the case studies in the next chapters.
Nathalie Khan researches the presence of ‘digital’ within the fashion film. She describes examples of contemporary fashion films, which according to her “break down the boundaries between consumption and representation, by relying on cinematic language” (Khan 237). The combination of cinematic conventions within the digital world has different consequences. First of all, the notion of time changes since the digital image makes it possible for fashion to have a “permanent present”. This concept by Lev Manovich explains that digital images are not restricted by time or space and therefore they are always accessible (Khan 237). This “permanent presence” means the fashion film can be watched at any time and in any space the spectator demands. This gives the mass audience increased access to the high fashion that was unreachable before. Uhlirova sees this space mainly as a “distracted milieu”, where the spectator is easily distracted from the images presented to him/her on the screen, since it is not shown in the cinematic experience setting of Baudry mentioned previously (Uhlirova 2013b: 126). Another consequence of the presence of cinematic concepts in the digital world is the changed position of the viewer. Khan argues that a shift from the viewer as consumer to the viewer as spectator occurs through the use of cinematic conventions as narration and editing (Khan 237). Gary Needham refutes Khan’s argument by saying that instead of a shift from consumer to spectator, there is a merging of consumption and spectatorship (Needham 106). He describes the fashion film as “a digital moving image that produces hybrid modes of engagement in which old and new media, and activity and passivity, productively merge” (Needham 106). In my view, the fact that the fashion film is shown in a digital environment is subordinate to the cinematic characteristics of the fashion film. In our contemporary society the digitisation is one of the latest technologies and therefore it is an interesting platform for (fashion) brands to present their products on. The viewing mode and audience might be changed; this does not mean that it has had much influence on the content of the fashion film.
These descriptions of the fashion film show the complexity in attempting to define the fashion film, since it renders itself in many different forms and places, even if there are some recognisable features present in the majority of these films. Most of the time, they are released online, often on a brand’s website, YouTube, or on fashion film related sites like SHOWstudio. The films last between one and approximately fifteen minutes and therefore
they can be called short films. Although the themes of the films differ, they all transfer the ideas of the fashion house, designer or specific collection. Sometimes these translations can be quite literal, as for example in the Viktor and Rolf film mentioned before, which
resembles a live fashion show. But it also can be more abstract, as in the short film Blue de
Chanel made by Martin Scorsese for Chanel in 2010. In the latter, a fictionalised narrative
tells the story of a man, seemingly a criminal/vampire figure who chases a woman, who in the end turns out to be an undercover journalist. That the film promotes a perfume for men, becomes clear only in the lasts seconds, where the product is explicitly shown. But within the story itself, the perfume is never shown or mentioned. The use of known film directors by major fashion brands is another feature that seems to characterise these short films. Besides Martin Scorsese, Jean-Pierre Jeunet also produced a short for Chanel, just as David Lynch and John Cameron Mitchell lent themselves to Dior, and Roman Polanski and Wes Anderson collaborated with Prada. More conceptual designers like Hussein Chalayan or Maison Martin Margiela collaborated with other known artists, photographers and graphic designers to produce their fashion films.
Moreover, these films blur the boundaries between art and advertising. Clothes or products are often not presented through a presentational mode, but are interwoven into the narrative, or in some cases not even mentioned at all. Fashion films do not appear on TV or in stores, but on the Internet, which has as effect that not all viewers are potential buyers. The blending of art with advertising raises the question of whether these films can be considered art, or rather an advertising strategy that uses ‘artistic’ features to sell products. Fashion positions itself in this ambiguous position wherein the distinction between art and commerce is blurred. In her article on this topic, Melissa Taylor demonstrates how fashion brands' collaboration with the art world through for example cultural sponsorship, or shops being designed by well-known architects, question the dominant discourse on fashion being just a commercial product (Taylor 451-453). The fashion film seems to thrive on this ambiguity: there is no presence of a clear commercial purpose in the film and this is exactly what these fashion brands want to express. In his praising review of the film Castello Cavalcanti(2013) of the director Wes Anderson, Christian Blauvelt mentions the few references to Prada in this film and how this evoked the ambiance that we find regularly in fashion films: "Prada certainly understands one thing: sometimes it takes a spoonful of auteur artistry to help the advertising go down" (Blauvelt, BBC.com). According to Uhlirova, the fashion houses' motivation for producing these fashion films is that they can connect with a greater base of consumers and therefore make the brand more accessible than otherwise elite shows. The easy access through the Internet and the artistic value that predominates the fashion film thus enables it to overcome the dominant distinction between art and commerce, and this requires the fashion film to be evaluated by means of a new value system.
Modernity and the Fashion Film
In defining the fashion film, researchers have put much emphasise on the effect of the digital on the fashion film. The spectator’s experience, position and notions of time change. But as Uhlirova notes, the fashion film is a hybrid, fluid, ‘umbrella term genre’, that is sometimes even self-contradictory. Since these fashion films are produced on behalf of the fashion world, approaching the fashion film from a fashion theory perspective cannot be left
unremarked. For instance, Evans explores the relationship between fashion and modernity in her book Fashion at the Edge (2003). In defining modernisation and modernity, Evans uses two terms that have been raised by the American philosopher Marshall Berman.
‘Modernisation’ is explained as “processes of scientific, technological, industrial, economic and political innovation that also become urban, social and artistic in their impact (Evans 2003: 7). And in relation to this, ‘modernity’ refers to “the way that modernisation infiltrates in everyday life and sensibilities” (Evans 2003: 8). In her book she namely focuses on the change in sensibility that took place in the nineteenth century caused by late eighteenth-century industrialisation. Ulrich Lehmann and Elizabeth Wilson have researched the similarities between fashion and modernity. Lehmann recognises the etymological affinities between the French words modernité (modernity) and mode (fashion).6 Wilson links
modernity to features as speed, mobility, mutability and ideas of progress that are present in a certain zeitgeist rather than a defined period in time (Wilson 9). Wilson also links modernity to mass production and technological developments entering everyday life (10) and Evans relates these ideas to contemporary fashion. Our current era is marked by the rapid technological developments and globalisation. These changes are visible in the fact that fashion has to be different every season, but it also can also be seen in other ways. Wilson demonstrates that in modernity, where thinking forward is aimed, the idea of nostalgia is also present: “the magic of the world has been lost” (10). Fashion utters these nostalgic and reflexive feelings in a remarkable way, which has been explained firstly by Walter Benjamin as the Tigersprung. He describes fashion as taking a ‘tiger’s leap’ through its own history, taking elements from the past in a non-chronological way that causes friction and reference simultaneously in the present when it is represented in the new garment/design (Benjamin 261). Evans names this ‘ragpicking’ (a term describing a fashion designer’s technique): it refers to Benjamin’s idea of fashion that remixes elements from the present and past (Evans 2003: 11). Fashion’s approach to the past differs from other decorative and applied arts that rely on historicism, and this might explain the incomprehensibility that reigns around fashion. Situating film and in particular the fashion film within this context, Wilson’s notion of the nostalgic feelings that are present in the culture of modernity, comes into play again.
According to her, the longing for the past is accompanied by the presence of tradition and superstition. Cinema is the main medium through which the ideas of magic and the irrational can be explored and exploited (Wilson 11). This creates a remarkable paradox since cinema is a typical art form within the industrial period, but relies on the opposite concept of irrationality. These irrational and magic features are clearly present in the cinema of attractions, where tricks and phantasmagorical effects are basic concepts, but also
contemporary cinema where the spectator is pulled into an ‘other world’ which contains clear features of these irrational, magical aspects. Fashion can be viewed from the same
perspective: it is a product of the industrial society, but it also relies on irrational aspects and can be seen as the “field for the expression of fetishism and magical impulses and beliefs” (Wilson 11). The fashion film thus is able to pull the spectator into a magical world full of desirable objects and garments.
Conclusion
The fashion film exists as a combination of two industries that have phantasmagorical features and function within a culture of modernity. The complexity in defining the fashion film because of its fluid, contradictory sense is partly caused by the role of fashion within this genre. Fashion uses the concept of ‘ragpicking’, where elements from the past are remixed into a new design in the present. The fashion film does exactly the same, since it combines all kinds of cinematic devices: concepts of the cinema of attractions are used next to
narrativisation and is combined with characteristics from, for example, music videos or experimental films. The cinematic features of colour and movement marked one of the first collaborations between fashion and film in the fashion newsreels of the 1910s. This chapter has demonstrated that the fashion film is the uniting of two industries that have moved next to each other, relying on the same techniques and have cooperated from the beginning to get the most out both discourses.
In the next chapter contemporary fashion films will be analysed and, as we shall see, these cinematic features still play an important role. The use of colour can refer to the fashion brand and the director at the same time. Their visual style, movement and the haptic
sensation created by these two cinematic features are used to depict the clothes and environments in this film as living organisms.
Chapter II. The Fashioned Worlds of Dior and Prada
In the previous chapter I have looked at the connection between fashion and film, two fields that both emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. It became clear that both fashion and film relied on the use of cinematic concepts such as colour and movement. These elements are still present in the contemporary fashion film. In this chapter, some of these contemporary fashion films will be analysed and the focus will be on the cinematic concepts that were highlighted in the first chapter, namely colour, movement and emerging from this, the haptic sensation. Based on these analyses, it will be suggested that the contemporary fashion films, in order to create a world in which fashionable characteristics such a fabrics and textures are brought to life, that they make use of concepts such as colour, movement and haptic visuality. The choice for a certain filmmaker will contribute to the creation of this world. These
directors are known for their significant styles, and it will become evident that their styles are in agreement with the fashion brands’ signature looks. The first part of this chapter will focus on two films made for the Lady Dior bag campaign, namely Lady Blue Shanghai (David Lynch, 2010) and Lady Grey London (John Cameron Mitchell, 2011). The second part will investigate A Therapy (Roman Polanski, 2012) and Castello Cavalcanti (Wes Anderson, 2013) that were made for Prada.
Lady Blue Shanghai
The Lady Dior Bag was created in 1994 and emerged from the desire to design a bag that had an instantly recognizable look. Its first name was Chouchou (darling, favourite) but its name changed to Lady Dior as a tribute to princess Diana (Dior.com). Lady Blue Shanghai and Lady Grey London both feature the French actress Marion Cotillard, who has been “the face” of the promotional campaign of the Lady Dior bag since 2008.
The two films are part of a larger series of fashion films that support the Lady Dior campaign. The other three films focus on other colours of the bags, namely black in The Lady
Noire Affair (Olivier Dahan, 2008); red in Eyes of Mars by Lady Rouge (Jonas Åkerlund,
2010) and multicolours are present in L.A.dy Dior (John Cameron Mitchell, 2011). Lady Blue
Shanghai and Lady Grey London both depict a certain colour and city that represents the
Lady Dior bag. The choice for these two films from this series was motivated by the films’ depiction of colour, movement and the representation of fabrics and textures, which all refer to certain characteristics of the brand Dior, and to a certain extent, as I will argue, they also represent the styles of the directors. The collaboration between the Dior fashion house and these filmmakers will give new perspectives on the use of the clothes and settings in these films in order to bring them to life on screen.
film was available online at the Dior website after its release and can still be found on YouTube. In the opening credits of the film, the words “Dior presents Lady Blue Shanghai” are visible and Shanghai by night is shown in the background. In the first scene we see Marion Cotillard (her name is not mentioned) walking into a hotel lobby. As we follow her through the hotel corridors, we hear music getting louder as we come closer to her room. When she enters the room, she turns off the record player and as she does this, we see a flash at the other side of the room and the room is filled with smoke. A blue, leather bag appears from the smoke. Cotillard immediately calls the front desk to tell them there is someone in her room, and they send up two men in suits. They search the room, but cannot find anything suspicious. The two men in the suits ask her if the bag is perhaps a gift from someone she has met before. She tells them she arrived only yesterday and she does not know anyone in Shanghai. But then she starts reflecting back on what she did that day. Cotillard tells them she visited the Pearl Tower. In a flashback we see the Pearl Tower, and she explains to the two men that she feels she has been in Shanghai before and describes what see saw:
buildings, a narrow flight of stairs and that she heard music. Her flashback is visualised as we see her enter a red room, where she sees another man in a suit (that matches the suits worn by the two men) and they kiss each other. When they hear people entering the building, they escape from the red room and run through Shanghai until they eventually end up at a roof that has a view over Shanghai. He tells her he cannot be with her and that he loves her, as he walks backwards, giving her a blue rose before disappearing. Then we turn back to the setting in which Cotillard is being interrogated by the two men in suits. She carefully walks towards the bag, opens it, and finds the blue rose inside. In analysing this film, the focus will be on the use of colours (especially red and blue) and the bodily movement of the characters. It will become evident these cinematic elements refer to both Dior and Lynch’s themes and styles.
Nightly Mysteries
In Lady Blue Shanghai, colours, textures and movement are significantly present and interconnected with each other. In her book on touch and the cinematic experience, Jennifer Barker discusses the concept of ‘the skin’ in her first chapter. According to her, the viewer
and the film both have a ‘skin’. She follows philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of
‘flesh’ by saying that the skin is “a mode of perception and expression that forms the surface of a body […]” (Barker 26).7 The skin here functions as something that is in between the film
7 In Phenomenology of Perception (1962), Maurice Merleau-Ponty gives the body a central position
within perceiving the world. According to him, we perceive and experience the world through our bodies and thereby Merleau-Ponty determines the dominant discourse on the distinction between the subject (the for-itself) and the object (the in-itself), which forms the basis of the work of philosophers such as Jean-Paul Satre. In perceiving the world through our bodies, an interconnected relationship
and viewer; it connects the inside with the outside; it conceals and reveals at the same time. Like Merleau-Ponty, she questions the distinction between object and subject within
cinematic experience, as she both sees the film and the viewer having a mutual experience of engagement (Barker 34). In the relationship between the film’s skin and that of the viewer, they touch each other’s skin, but the boundaries between them are not blurred. This touching is therefor a pleasurable, and erotic activity. Both the film and the viewer communicate their desires, and according to Barker, these desires are “not only for the other but for themselves, in the act of touching” (Barker 34). The viewer's desire to touch the film's skin, and vice-versa, is described by Laura Marks as “haptic visuality”. She describes this concept as “a kind of looking that lingers on the surface of the image rather than delving into depth and is more concerned with texture than with deep space” (Marks quoted in Barker 35). It focuses on the erotically charged interaction between the film and the viewer. The exact opposite way of approaching the viewer is done through ‘optic visuality’, where things are observed from a distance and “a separation between the viewing subject and the object” is evoked (Barker 58). I will investigate whether haptic visuality is present in Lady Blue Shanghai. One of the purposes of the fashion film is to make the clothes and the constructed world presented by the director and in this case Dior touchable, to overwhelm the spectator with haptic sensational feelings and desires to feel interconnected with the objects and setting presented in the film. The distinction between subject and object needs to be put aside in order to create a tactile relationship between the viewer and the fashion film.
Colour, as I wish to examine, creates a haptic sensation. The title of the film refers to the colour blue. Besides the Dior bag being blue, this colour has multiple functions within this film. Blue features in the opening credits of the film, where the skyline of Shanghai is shown with blue rippling water and a dark blue coloured sky. The blue sky refers to the time of day in which the film is set, namely at night. As in several of David Lynch’s films, the night has specific meanings. For instance, in Blue Velvet (1986), most of the scenes are situated at night, and it is in these scenes, that the protagonist Jeffrey, played by Kyle MacLachlan, is subjected to the most terrifying experiences. In his book on David Lynch, Michel Chion mentions the importance of the night in his films. Lynch uses the night in a theatrical way, by “putting out the lights or shutting the curtain”, and the “darkness unifies and fuses what light separates” (Chion 186). This theatrical depiction of the night is also present in Lady Blue Shanghai. In the hotel room of Cotillard and the red room later in the film, the windows and light from outside are not visible because curtains, of made of a thick red fabric, are draped in front of the windows. When the two men in suit search her room, we
see one of them walking into several rooms and after he has checked them, he switches off the lights. When the camera focuses on Cotillard by showing a close-up of her face, we hear the man, pushing aside one of the curtains, and closing it before the camera turns back to the man. By not allowing any light in the room, the dark blue night outside is made to seem mysterious, and perhaps frightening.
The mysterious feelings evoked by the colour blue are also important in the relationship between Marion Cotillard and the Dior bag. When the bag suddenly appears in the room after several electrical flashes and smoke, we as a viewer, anxiously gaze at the bag through from Cotillard’s point of view. This shot is followed by one from the direction of the blue bag, which ‘looks’ back into the scared blue eyes of Marion Cotillard.
The last important object is the blue, silky rose. While a red rose normally represents love, the colour blue connects the rose with the night. The silkiness and softness of the rose is depicted in the final scene, as Cotillard caresses the blue bag with the rose inside, embracing it as if it is the man she loves. The transition between the flashbacks of Cotillard and reality are depicted through shots of Shanghai such as bridges and buildings that are illuminated by blue light. In these dream sequences, she meets her lover at night, but they cannot stay together. The blue bag replaces the man she cannot be with, and the blue rose inside symbolizes his love for her.
In Lady Blue Shanghai, the colour blue is juxtaposed with the colour red. Red can obviously be considered as the colour of love. When Cotillard meets with the man, first in a flashback, later in the present, in her hotel room, the bag is depicted as a surrogate character of the man; the colour blue and red dominate the setting. In her flashback she is in a room with red walls, red curtains and a red carpet. Her hotel room resembles this room, as it also has large red curtains and the blue bag is positioned on a red carpet. The “Red Room” is a typical Lynchian feature that he has used in several films and series, including the series Twin
Peaks (1990-1991), where this room is part of the dream world of the main protagonist,
special agent Dale Cooper.
The colour red is in contrast with the blue of the night, bag and rose. The effect of “colour juxtaposition” in film is investigated by Natalie Kalmus. Both red and blue are primary colours, and when these colours are placed side-by-side, they do not get fused but instead emphasize themselves. Colours can also be divided into “cool” colours, such as blue, and “warm” colours, such as red. When these colours are juxtaposed, the red can feel “warmer” (redder) and the blue can be perceived “cooler” (more-blue) (Kalmus 26). In the scene where Cotillard and the man are standing on the roof of a high building, she touches his check with her red (Dior) polished nails. The red appears redder, because it is in contrast with the blue night at the background.
The use of the colours red and blue are significant for Lynch’s cinematic style. The colours pink and black accompany these colours. David Lynch’s distinctive colour palette shares many similarities with the key colours of the Dior house, which are red, blue, grey, pink and black. In this short film Lynch emphasizes the Dior grey by letting Cotillard wear a grey skirt suit. Her grey outfit merges with the yellow couch on which she is sitting, as the textures of both the suit and the couch have the same pattern. The black suits worn by the men who search her hotel room resemble the tuxedo worn by her mysterious lover. These black suits emphasize the stiffness of the bodies, to which I will return later when discussing movement in this film.
The ambiance created in Lady Blue Shanghai is characterised by a specific use of colour, whereby red and blue are the most important ones. David Lynch uses colour instead of lighting to create contrast, which has as effect that the setting and objects depicted in these colours are emphasized even more. The blue bag is in contrast with the red carpet; the red nails of Cotillard touching the skin of her lover at night. In the end, colour forces the viewer to focus his/her gaze at specific objects within the film.
Bodily Movement
Another cinematic element that creates a haptic sensation is movement. David Lynch’s depiction of the body is characterised by presenting the body as a “primary mass, the lower limbs attached to the trunk as a single, oblong, stiff […] column” (Chion 163). This stiffness seems to predominate in Lady Blue Shanghai. When Cotillard enters the hotel lobby, she walks in without moving her body parts except her legs and one arm; almost like a military march, which in addition, has many affinities with a fashion parade (défilé). Her stiff movements match the clothes she is wearing: a tight, grey textured skirt suit that does not
Figure 1. Marion Cotillard meets her mysterious lover. The red curtains match the red wallpaper and no windows or natural light are shown.
allow her move exuberantly. The two men who search her room are depicted as primary masses, since they only move the required parts of their bodies. They stand in front of Cotillard, only moving their mouths. These stiff, inexpressible bodies are in contrast with the scenes in which Cotillard and her lover meet. After meeting each other in the red room, they hear people entering the building and run through the streets of Shanghai. This is visualised by a superimposition of the couple running, combined with images of Shanghai by night. David Lynch’s representation of the body functions well with the representation of the Dior garments. The stiff movements and depiction of the body as a primary mass allow the viewer to look at the clothes in great detail. The resemblance between the bodily movements in this film and that of models on a catwalk makes it possible for the viewer to gaze at the clothes as if she/he was a visitor of a fashion show.
Erotic Touch
In enabling the viewer to touch the film’s skin, the viewer needs to lose himself in the image that is presented to him on the screen. This desire to touch evokes a certain erotic tactility, which is not only expressed by Cotillard, but also by the film itself. This can be done through the use of point of view shots of desired objects, which creates a certain tactile pleasure. When we as viewers look from a point of view shared with Cotillard at the blue bag as it appeared all of a sudden in the room, we as viewers look back at Cotillard from the blue bag’s point of view. Another cinematic technique used in the film to arouse an erotic desire for certain objects and persons is the use of transitional shots. In these shots, objects are not being desired through point of view shots of the characters, but the camera itself focuses on the objects it desires (Barker 41). When Cotillard is walking down the hotel corridor, a close-up of her feet is given. This close-close-up lets the viewer focus on the Dior heels, moving through the hotel corridor on the crunching red carpet.
In her article on the fashioned world in films of the director Wong Kar-wai, Guiliana Bruno states that fashion creates an erotic bond (Bruno 83). In the short film The Hand (Wong Kar-wai, 2004), a tailor designs clothes for a woman, but they cannot be together, and according to Bruno, these clothes enable a form of contact: they connect the designer with his beloved one. This is also the case in Lady Blue Shanghai: when Cotillard and her mysterious lover cannot be together, the blue Dior bag is a connective thread between them. By touching the bag, she is able to metaphorically touch him. In describing the film In the Mood for Love (2000), Bruno demonstrates that fashion in this film is constructed as “a tangible form of architecture, while lived space, in turn, is fashioned as if it were an enveloping dress, a second skin” (Bruno 87). This being the case, a reversible construction is created that connects the subject, objects and settings of the film (Bruno 96). Natalie Kalmus wrote in her article “Color Consciousness” the importance of “color separation”:
