Fashion Media

It is important to distinguish between fashion, dress and costume, particularly when analyzing their relationship to films and their role within in films. Whilst there is considerable academia written on each of these three, reduced to their most basic;
- fashion is a discourse that holds commodities and markets at its crux
- dress is located within ethnicity and anthropology, embedded within kinship, class and society 
- costume is the fabrication of an overall appearance of a character or performer through the employment of both fashion and dress. 

Cinema is the ideal marketing tool for fashion. Collaborations and exclusively commissioned couture designs for films can be traced as far back as the likes of Paul Poiret’s dressing of Sarah Bernhardt in her costumes for Queen Elizabeth (1912) and Salvatore Ferragamo’s commissioning as official shoemaker for the film The Ten Commandment (1956). Such collaborations offered designers a public platform to disseminate their designs, and were integral in establishing a designers reputation and brand. Chanels current status of success can be attributed to its cinematic revival of the 50s and 60s, where by Coco Chanel employed the cinema to reach out and re-establish her fashion house. 

Fashion film is a genre in itself and can be divided into 3 distinct sectors;

1) Fashion Film in place of catwalk- demonstrated by McQueen’s live streaming of  Spring/Summer 2010 'Plato's Atlantis'

2) Fashion Film as installation- as shown by Burberry’s celebrated 2011 digital “Holographic” fashion show.

3) Fashion Film as art/architecture- first seen by Ralph Lauren and Drive Productions collaboration in 2010 of 4D architectural projection mapping, creating a sensory experience, including sound (music), touch (breezes) and smell (fragrance).

4) Fashion Film for cinema audiences- generally narrative base, big budget affairs involving major fashion houses and renowned producers such as Dior’s collaboration with David Lynch to produce Blue Lady Shanghai (2009), a 16-minute film noir production surrounding the mysterious appearance of the featured Dior handbag, starring Marion Cotillard. 

Blue Lady Shanghai

Like most fashion films Blue Lady Shanghai is extremely mythological and plays on the idea of film adding time whilst in time and fashion existing within time creating a great sense of nostalgia and memory. The film noir element furthers this notion of time caught in time establishing a sense of uncertainty and dreaming as it immerses the audience in the hyper-reality of 19^th century Shanghai and positions us as observers of a bygone era. The credibility of Lynch as a producer means the film acts as a vehicle for establishing the luxury label Dior within the Chinese market as a real and authentic product which in turn creates a nexus between good and bad, playing on ideals of eastern orientalism as touched on by John Berra (2012).

Ultimately Fashion Films come down to the marketing or promotion of an object or garment, which we as the audience are positioned to desire. As such fashion films are designed to immerse the audience in their productions creating highly attractive fantasy worlds or magic, beauty and luxury. 

Sources

Sue Osmond, Guest Lecture at UTS (13 June 2013)
Vicki Karaminas, Guest Lecture at UTS (14 June 2013)
Berra J, 2012, Blue Lady Shanghai: The strange case of David Lynch and Dior, Film, Fashion and consumption, Volume 1, Issue 3