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THE FASHION OF FILM: HOW CINEMA HAS INSPIRED FASHION PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Amber Jane Butchart | 224 pages | 08 Sep 2016 | Octopus Publishing Group | 9781784721763 | English | London, United Kingdom 25 Most Iconic Fashion Moments In Film However, since then various factors have enriched and diversified fashion's interaction with film. First, there was—in the wake of Audrey Hepburn 's successful collaboration with the then young and relatively unknown Paris couturier Hubert de Givenchy from Sabrina onward—the growing use of fashion as opposed to costume design on a number of key movies. Third and a far more contemporary factor is the rise in celebrity culture and a burgeoning interest in movie stars, what they wear both on and off the screen. From the s through the s, relatively few fashion designers demeaned themselves by working for moving pictures. It was Givenchy's collaboration with Hepburn that changed everything. Called in reputedly at Hepburn's behest, Givenchy's first film costumes were the ball gowns in Sabrina. The details of this story are muddled because Givenchy's account of his input in the film at times directly contradicts the version proffered by the film's overall costume designer, Edith Head. Head, who had designed the costumes for Hepburn's Oscar- winning role as the princess in Roman Holiday just the previous year, was clearly hurt by the star's—and director's—decision to acquire an actual Paris wardrobe for Sabrina. In The Dress Doctor , Head comments: "I had to console myself with the dress, whose boat neckline was tied on each shoulder—widely known and copied as 'the Sabrina neckline'" Head and Ardmore , p. Elsewhere, Givenchy queried Head's claim to the bateau neckline design. This claim by Head that she intentionally occupied the middle of the road crystallizes the difference between the couturier and the straightforward costume designer. While the couturier might be more expressive and daring when designing for the screen, costume designers opted for safer styles that remained secondary to character and narrative and never, as the Hollywood director George Cukor commented, "knocked your eye out" Gaines and Herzog , p. The inherently spectacular quality of Givenchy's designs for Hepburn is frequently accentuated by the nature of the narratives the costumes serve. In both Sabrina and later Funny Face , the story revolves around the Hepburn characters' Cinderella-esque rags-to-riches tales, transformed from a chauffeur's daughter to a millionaire's wife in one, bookshop assistant to an icon of glamour and sophistication in the other. The joke in Funny Face —in which Hepburn's character models clothes on a Paris catwalk—is ultimately that, for all the appeal of high fashion, Hepburn is happiest and most iconic when dressing down in black leggings, turtleneck, and flats. There have been other significant collaborations between stars and designers—Adrian's partnerships with Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford , or Jean Louis's designs for Doris Day 's comedies of the late s and early s—and following these, couturiers contributed more regularly to film costume design. Giorgio Armani later became the most prolific couturier costume designer, working on a number of films, ranging from American Gigolo to the remake of The Italian Job However, the way in which Armani has approached costume design—and this holds for several classic designers such as Nino Cerruti, Yves Saint Laurent , Donna Karan , Calvin Klein —is in a likewise classic way. His costumes occupy a traditional, servile role in relation to the narratives and characters they serve; they remain stylishly unobtrusive and do not "knock your eye out," as arguably Givenchy's extravagant ball gowns for Hepburn do. Cinema's most popular couturier costume designers, it seems, are those who follow the underpinning conventions of costume design. From the s onward, a schism has become increasingly apparent between the classic and the spectacular look in film. Fashion is a craft, a poetic craft" Saint Laurent , p. The "art" of fashion in film would be exemplified by the film work of Jean Paul Gaultier, who has designed costumes for various art-house movies including The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and Kika In both, exaggerated versions of Gaultier's signature styles—his cone bras, his use of corsetry as outer clothing, his asymmetrical cutting, his persistent predilection for classic tailoring alongside much more radical designs—are evident with a pervasive, more nebulous interest in creating outlandish costumes in their own right. Gaultier's designs are intrinsically fashionable and extend the boundaries of costume and style as Chanel once explained, there is an essential distinction to be drawn between "fashion," which is ephemeral, and "style," which endures. In Kika , the smooth surface of classicism—exemplified by Victoria Abril's black bias-cut dress—is ruptured by radical flourishes, such as the prosthetic breasts bursting out of it. The creation of self-consciously spectacular costumes less "over the top" than drawing attention to themselves in whatever way has persisted through a variety of eclectic movies. Gaultier's own wardrobe for Luc Besson 's The Fifth Element is incontrovertibly spectacular; the clothes are ostentatious, wildly colorful, eclectic and, again, overtly sexual, as in Leeloo's artful stretch-bondage gear. Once more, these costumes flagrantly come in the way of character identification as one cannot help but notice them, and in their very styles asymmetric, clashing and man-made fabrics, they proclaim their ephemerality. This is only one, obvious, use of the spectacular; other more subtle examples from within contemporary film of costumes that draw attention to themselves and so intrude upon the seamlessness of the classical narrative form would be The Talented Mr. Ripley , Far from Heaven , and Dolls The cardigan trimmed with thick, swirling braid that Cate Blanchett is wearing when she bumps into the only slightly less ostentatiously dressed Paltrow is a further example of a costume's overt fashionableness being used to prevent the spectator's unthinking identification with the characters and the scene. Fashion and it is important that the character Blanchett plays here is a textiles heiress creates an alternative dialogue between text and spectator. However, it is perhaps not altogether surprising that the dominant tendency in cinema has been to follow the Armani route, using fashion to denote stylishness and class but not to be too spectacular and so interrupt the flow or balance of a scene. For The Italian Job , Armani's costumes are used, very traditionally, as a means of interpreting character. So, Donald Sutherland's sensuous, unstructured wool coat and warm turtleneck sweater serve as coded references to his innate charm and old-school heist-master values he has had enough of the criminal life and the "job" at the start of the film is meant to be his last before going straight , while Mark Wahlberg's tighter-fitting, slightly spivvy black leather jacket quickly makes him out to be eager and on the make. Armani had used a similar system of typage for the four protagonists in The Untouchables —the friendly father-figure in chunky knits, the nerd in a coat slightly too big, the cop from the wrong side of the tracks in his rather-too-jazzy brown leather jacket, and the dependable leader again in his flowing Armani coat and tailored three-piece. The dressing of Gwyneth Paltrow in many of her films conforms to a similar pattern. These designers, like Ralph Lauren before them, exemplify a specific kind of safe but sophisticated New York fashion. Like costumes in Hollywood's heyday, the clothes in these films accomplish the easy, unobtrusive creation of Paltrow's characters' social identity. The straight lines, modern fabrics, and neutral colors do more than suggest the characters' fashionableness, they mark them out as coming from a specific milieu, in much the same way as Head's costumes for Grace Kelly in her Hitchcock films of the s Rear Window, Dial M for Murder, To Catch a Thief had done. The refined, slightly aloof elegance of Grace Kelly could perhaps have been expected to make a bigger impact on fashion itself than it did. The relationship between fashion and film is a two-way process: fashion designers get involved in films in part to showcase their designs and perhaps influence fashion outside cinema along the way. Armani, for example, has denied that his film designs are product placement, although the association with movies is a tidy way of giving his designs exposure. Films, even the less clearly fashionable ones, have frequently influenced fashion. There are multiple examples throughout cinema history of items of clothing in films making a significant intervention into fashion on the street. Some films such as Michelangelo Antonioni 's quintessentially s' Blowup are notable as "time capsules" of the fashions of their times, while others might add a look, a garment, or accessory to the contemporary fashion scene. The latter are more intriguing, as they are actively rather than passively engaged with fashion. Sometimes, though, the precise reason for a film having a significant impact on fashion might remain elusive; it simply captures the zeitgeist. An early example of a single garment changing the course of fashion occurs in It Happened One Night in which Clark Gable takes off his shirt to reveal that he is not wearing an undershirt underneath reputedly because he felt that taking off another shirt would prove ungainly. The clothes and hairstyles worn by glamorous movie stars, both on and off the screen, grabbed the attention of American and European moviegoers and launched countless fashion fads. The influence of Hollywood on fashion began during the silent film era, which ended in the late s.

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