100 Years of the Fashion Film: Frameworks and Histories. By: Uhlirova, Marketa, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body

From Digital Culture & Society

100 Years of the Fashion Film: Frameworks and Histories. By: Uhlirova, Marketa, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 1362704X, Apr2013, Vol. 17, Issue 2

Fashion film, in fact, has a long-winded history blooming from the emergence of cinema in the early 1900s however, this particular coupling of fashion and the moving image had not seen greater advancements until later on in the 1990s. Uhlirova, outlines fashion film in the context of "broader intermedial practices and discourses of fashion, cinema, art, and the new media" (p.138). She explains that the necessity for the fashion film as impart of the tendency towards "temporal experience and greater mobility" in which case the fashion film had made it's way to viewers via multimedia forms that encouraged an emphasis on hybridity. Uhlirova makes a clear connection to the fashion film aesthetics with that of the techniques used in early cinema. In addition she also makes note that the current state of the fashion film is linked with the digital advancements of moving image production and dissemination practices online. Moving forward, Uhlirova calls on the work of Natalie Khan's Cutting the Fashion Body: Why the Fashion Image is No Longer Still (2012) in which Khan's outlook regarding the digital space and its encompassing of fashion element is drawn upon from the work of Lev Manovich. Manovich's concept of digital's "permanent presence" as Khan regards the fashion image of our contemporary times "is not only animated in the digital realm but also constantly renewed and caught in the here and now" (p.139). With fashion imagery becoming more formulaic discussions surrounding the aesthetics and spectatorship are atrophied however, Uhlirova is interested in the history of fashion and the moving image to trace fashion film's key characteristics "so as to understand the motivations and practices of today's fashion filmmakers within a larger framework of close interactions between fashion and different moving image cultures since the emergence of cinema" (p.139). With the ties fashion has to both society, art and promotion Uhlirova attempts to consider all of these making it imperative to mention time movement, and change "have been vital to the presentation and representation of fashion since before the beginning of cinema" (p. 139). Filmmakers, fashion and art historians, photographers and trends in cinema are all considered. Newsreels and "cinemagazines" created a platform for the mediation of fashion in which visual consumption as well as calculated attention seeking tactics were similarly used in World Fairs and department stores. It is here during the 1910s and 20s that the marriage between cinema and fashion was formed as a "soft-sell" strategies as a part of the commerciality of fictional films. With a few exceptions in earlier years, the production and behind the scenes of fashion houses was not generally showcased, as Uhlirova suggests that the fashion industry may have found the film industry to be too "democratic, industrial and unsophisticated" (p. 140) however, 30 years later in the late 1950s into the 60s the fashion and the moving image became experimental going further than just showcasing what the clothes looked like on or how they moved on the body more towards a mobile and fragmented display of the body.