A Philosophy of Fashion Through Film: On the Body, Style, and Identity 9781350157002, 9781350157033, 9781350157019

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A Philosophy of Fashion Through Film

Also available from Bloomsbury Adorning Bodies, by Marilynn Johnson Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World, by Daniel Herwitz Human Beings and their Images, by Christoph Wulf Noël Carroll and Film, by Mario Slugan

A Philosophy of Fashion Through Film On the Body, Style, and Identity Laura T. Di Summa

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Laura T. Di Summa, 2022 Laura T. Di Summa has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Marie Antoinette, 2006. Courtesy Everett Collection / Mary Evans All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-5700-2 ePDF: 978-1-3501-5701-9 eBook: 978-1-3501-5702-6 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To Micah, Bubu King

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Contents Acknowledgments

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Introduction

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Defining Fashion Fashion: An Item Performs Fashion and the New Fashion and Bodily Identity Performance and Style Fashion as a Performance and the Movies Conclusions: Toward a Definition of Fashion

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Repetition and the New Fashion: What’s New The Dynamic of Repetition and the New: Designing Fashion The Power of Repetition: Three Movies Cary’s Grey Lady Suit and the Promise of the Red Dress A Homage to Doug Sirk: Two Movies by Todd Haynes Twenty Qipaos Conclusions: Rethinking Repetition

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The Body Exploring the Body Fashion and the Body: Staring and Strategies for Aesthetic Exploration Furiosa’s Strength Black Panther: Carter’s Superhero Costumes, Worn Everyday Moonlight: The Gold Grill Conclusions: Aesthetic Explorations

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Contents

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Couture and Costumes Acknowledging Costume Design Costumes? Fashion and Costumes: Avenues of Conversation Phantom Thread: Filming the Couturier Fashion and Costume Designers: Tom Ford and Arianne Phillips Historical Accuracy and Imaginative Freedom: Dressing Marie Antoinette Thirty Years of Geoffrey Beene Conclusions: Two Industries

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On Fashion and Identity The Episodic Self: Fashion and Identity Narrative Identity and Its Shortcomings All Chanel: Personal Shopper McQueen: The Runway L’Année dernière à Marienbad: Fashion or Identity? Conclusions: Episodes and Fashion

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Closing Thoughts: A Philosophy of Fashion—through Film What Is Fashion? Moving Pictures and Moving Bodies Reassessing Identity Fashion, Off-Screen

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Epilogue

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Notes References Index

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Acknowledgments There are several people  I  must thank. Most of them do not know me but have walked past me in the streets of New York, Madrid, Marrakesh, or wherever  I  found myself since this project started. They are the true inspiration of my research, where identity and fashion cross. My colleagues, Pete Mandik, Lucia Munguia, Eric Steinhardt, and Elizabeth Victor have been among my closest friends even when friendship, with hugs and dinners together, was made impossible by the COVID-19 pandemic. You are a fantastic team. I am deeply thankful to my mentor, Noël Carroll, who has always encouraged my thoughts, even when poorly or awkwardly articulated. He knew I would have loved to write about fashion before I did, and, as is usually the case, he was right. My partner, Teddy Won, has helped me in innumerable ways. He always knows when I need a snack and when it is time to laugh. And no one makes me laugh as much as he does. But my deepest thanks go to Micah Hudson Yusun, my son. I was pregnant with him as I was writing these pages, and he is now trying to hit the keys, hoping, I both hope and wonder, for a few more words. He’s in charge of wearing the future.

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Introduction

As it often happens, academic interest is the product of many inputs and contaminations: from previous research to everyday events to personal experience. This is certainly true of this project which is tied to my academic interests in aesthetics and the arts just as much as it is close to my personal experience, life, and discoveries. Clothes make me happy, they always have.  I  have seen clothes as an integral portion of who  I  am since  I  can remember.  I  loved to dress up as a child, designed my clothes as a teenager.  I  loved my father’s collection of ties, his attention to sartorial design. In college,  I  shopped at vintage stores and saved money for a coveted pair of shoes.  I  changed style a million times but always loved a bold pattern.  I  travel for fashion, and  I  enjoy gifting clothes and accessories to those close to me, convinced of clothes, fabric, and cuts’ ability to communicate a portion of me while complimenting the people I love. I can go on. Fashion is multifaceted; reflecting on it has been an adventure and a challenge. An adventure because fashion has adventure at its core. It is about trying styles and garments; it is about change and conformity, rules established and broken. It is an adventure because fashion travels. It is inherently global. It is an adventure because of its relation to time, whether forthcoming, or an echo of the past. However, thinking about fashion is also challenging. The first challenge is fashion’s reputation in academia. While this is changing, fashion is often dismissed as superficial and futile, at least most definitely in my field of expertise, philosophy. Caring about fashion is

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also not particularly popular: while we should be wary of stereotyping, academics are not famous for their fashion sense. A second difficulty has to do with the role that fashion has in present-day society. Fashion is tied to consumerism, overly visible class discrepancies, exploitation of labor, and it is among some of the most polluting industries. Fashion, briefly put, raises an endless series of ethical concerns. Lastly, fashion is about dichotomies, making its definition elusive and prone to changes and constant readjustments. Fashion facilitates and hinders movement; it reveals and hides the body, signals individual identity but also enforces conformity, etc. I did my best to keep such challenges in mind and I addressed them when possible. However, while writing this book, I was determined to emphasize fashion’s positive sides, dynamism, and potential. A potential I see and examine by looking for a philosophy of fashion through the use of filmic examples. This book has two intertwined aims. The first is to provide a philosophical definition of fashion, one that would look at its constitutive characteristics.  I  do this by considering existing definitions, but primarily by using film to introduce new angles and perspectives centered on fashion’s connection to identity. The second is to contribute to the research in the philosophy of motion pictures by examining, through fashion, film’s ability to contribute to philosophical discussion. Allow me to succinctly introduce both, beginning with the latter. Starting in the 1980s with philosophers Noël Carroll and David Bordwell, the philosophy of motion pictures opposes traditional strands  of film analysis and pursues philosophical and cognitive research independently of existing theoretical paradigms. Differently put, instead of applying tenets from pre-existing theories (and especially psychoanalysis, semiotics, and Marxist interpretations) to “read” a film, philosophers following a cognitive approach rely on

Introduction

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the use of cognitive skills we routinely employ in the understanding of everyday experience to examine topics such as film’s definition, narrative unfolding, emotional valence, genre, relation to other arts, etc. Philosophical filmmaking encompasses different traditions and different approaches. There is film-as-philosophy, philmosophy, and there are philosophical filmmakers. Such a wide array of approaches combines continental and analytic views and puts together scholars from philosophy but also film studies and at times also critics and filmmakers. A relatively common use of film in connection to philosophy is to see a given film as a thought experiment: as a cinematic representation, through images, sound, and cinematography of a philosophical concept or idea. Films work pretty well as thought experiments, sometimes better than a detailed explanation of the theories themselves, which are often convoluted and not suitable for a non-academically trained audience. This is not a surprise. The history of philosophy is populated with intriguing examples and stories that carry deeper metaphysical, epistemic, and ethical meaning. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Descartes’ malicious demon, Hilary Putnam’s Twin Earth case, and Frank Jackson’s Mary’s room, among others, have helped virtually every student taking an “Introduction to Philosophy” course. The philosophical thought experiments I just listed are of course much more controlled than a movie, with a tailored and well-defined scope. They employ a basic narrative and incite arguments and counter-arguments (which, admittedly, not all movies do), but they share with movies a certain catchiness, the kind of catchiness that makes storytelling an effective form of teaching and learning. We can then conclude that, with suitable caveats, using film as a thought experiment is common practice when teaching philosophy,

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as the number of anthologies based on such a pedagogical approach shows. But the use of film as a thought experiment is not the only avenue chosen by philosophers interested in the relationship between the two areas. There are also cases, which I admittedly find more interesting, in which a film can do quite a bit more than act as an example of a received philosophical theory. For film can play an active role and, in some cases, show potential limitations, even objections to the theory in question. Robert Sinnerbrink makes such a case in his book Cinematic Empathy where he uses film to challenge traditional ethical theories: deontology, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and relativism. To this extent, film can be seen as capable of extending our moral compass, challenging received beliefs and values: broadly, film can show us how nuanced ethical reflection can be, and how difficult. It can show how siding with a character can alter our beliefs and moral standards (think, for example, of when we sympathize with evil characters such as Tony Soprano in The Sopranos or Walter White in Breaking Bad). Through narrative, it can question our expectations and how we build them. Through mood, tone, and cinematography, it can tint our perception of facts, values, and behaviors. The list can go on. But there is room to move further. In addition to making us stop on our tracks, to make us reconsider our values and the validity of existing philosophical theories and paradigms, film can also, I believe, actively “do” philosophy. We are moving to the most contested, but also most, promising collaboration between film and philosophy— the one I will privilege in this book. Whereas in the case of film as a thought experiment, the role of film is somewhat passive—it displays something, an existing theory, without engaging it with it directly—the use of film to “do” philosophy comes with a larger commitment. In the use of film as a thought experiment, it is us who are reading an existing theory into

Introduction

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it; when film does philosophy, instead, we attribute to film the ability to propose novel theories, effectively contributing to the breadth of philosophical inquiry. When it comes to the ability of film to do philosophy, I will side, as the reader will see in the next chapter, where I will further outline the connection between fashion and film, with a rather strong formulation, advocated by Aaron Smuts, according to which, for movies to do philosophy, one needs movies to act not just as thought experiments, as seen, but as active participants in philosophical conversation. Specifically, movies need to provide novel epistemic perspectives and do so by means specific to motion pictures (means that are distinct from the ones traditionally used by philosophers: lectures, talks, and generally, language-based articulations and explanations). Not every movie, of course, is capable of such a feat, and objections against movies’ ability to do philosophy have been raised. Nevertheless, I believe some movies can open new avenues of philosophical discussion, and they can introduce ideas, questions, and perspectives that had not been previously considered. In this book, I will argue that movies can provide us with a better understanding of the philosophical nature of fashion, its definition, and its relation to identity and its portrayal. They can through an aesthetic means specific of motion pictures: costumes. As the reader will see, the movies considered are varied in nature, genre, and period, from art films to Hollywood blockbusters, from nouvelle vague to contemporary independent cinema. The choice of such a broad range of examples is voluntary and intended to further highlight the broad and long-standing connection between film and fashion. But each of the movies discussed retains its aesthetic and theoretical independence: they are unique artistic products and offer unique insights into fashion. They should, to this extent, be looked

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at both individually and collectively. Individually, they are examples of aesthetic variety and ingenuity in the use of fashion and costumes at the service of the film’s overall meaning. First, as the portions of this book dedicated specifically to bodily identity show, they carry on existing philosophical work on body aesthetics. Secondly, as we will see toward the end of this volume, they contribute to a better understanding of narrative accounts of identity and the relation between such accounts and what is instead the notion of episodic identity. Collectively, they help me build what  I  take to be a comprehensive definition of fashion—film after film, chapter after chapter. There are several components to the analysis of fashion I propose in this book. First of all, attention is paid to what kind of object fashion is and its function. In my analysis, fashion is better understood as a performance. There is the performance of wearing it together with the aging of clothes as bodies age and morph. There is performance in the use of clothes for social, religious, and ritual functions. Furthermore, there is performativity in the way in which clothes tell a story about who we are, a point on which I will focus closely. In philosophy, much of the debate on identity and its expression is tied to a discussion on narrative. At the risk of banalizing the issue, investigating identity is often a matter of examining the stories attached to it, the stories to which we are the indisputable protagonists. Additionally, the importance of narrative connections is often further linked to our ability to uphold and embrace moral and socio-cultural values, values that, in this sense, derive from a sense of completeness, reflection, and understanding of the life (story) we are living. Because of such an emphasis on narrative, connecting fashion and identity may appear unlikely. Fashion is about change; it is tied to frequency and speed. It is about multiplicity rather than cohesiveness; at times, it is about masking oneself, thus acting as an obstacle

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to displaying identity rather than a help. But while skepticism in the relation between fashion, narrative, and identity is plausible and deserves to be considered, it is not in itself sufficient to deny a connection—and, as I will argue, a profound one—between fashion and identity. Defending such a position requires providing arguments in defense of two main points. The first, and most general, is that a narrative conception of identity may not be correct or not the only one. The second is that any notion of identity built exclusively on narrative, on the “stories we tell,” especially if we understand stories narrowly, as strictly propositional accounts, is inevitably going to ignore other essential ways of understanding identity. In response to the first issue, I will consider, as an alternative to narrative conceptions of identity, the feasibility of episodic identity, one that refuses to abide by the constraints of diachronicity and causality and that values individual episodes per se, without sacrificing their imprint on the recognition, creation, and establishment of values. A closer look at the nature of fashion supports both responses. On the one hand, fashion is a stellar starting point for a discussion of episodic identity. While we wear clothes every day, often without particularly thinking about them or their role in our lives, we also reserve garments for special occasions, “episodes” of our lives, or we retroactively connect significant moments to what we happened to have worn at that time. A specific style brings us back to a specific age, a year in school, a summer abroad. Fashion is episodic in all those instances in which it allows us to “try” something, where something may very well be a way of presenting ourselves, a way of being ourselves. On the other hand, thinking of fashion as a way of expressing who we are suggests looking beyond the ability to “tell a story” about our life experiences. It also suggests, even mandates, a reflection on identity as embedded and embodied: fashion is about bodies moving

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and acting in society—such sociocultural and political dimension cannot be overlooked. In particular, this volume will pay attention to the role of bodily identity and its connection to issues of gender, race, ableism, community, ethnicity, and more. The complexity of the relationship between fashion and the body and the importance played by “episodes” in the construal of identity become apparent in film. Bodies are shown to us through different angles, cuts; they are shown in detail through close-ups and in their entirety when the camera pans away. What is worn in a specific scene, an accessory, a gown, or a body adornment, can mark that scene’s significance in itself and in the overall context of the film. I will progressively build a definition of fashion through film analysis. Briefly, my definition of fashion sees it as a performance (and one that is not uniquely tied to clothes and accessories) which is concerned with the production of the new and that exercises its power in the discovery of an identity that is first and foremost tied to the body and to the social, cultural, and political reality that the body inhabits. Two essential points complete this definition. The first is that the relation between fashion and the new is built on an acknowledgment that the new in fashion works in combination with the importance of repetition: of repeating styles, of perfecting them through repetition. Without repetition, innovative aspects of fashion, as well as innovative looks, could not emerge. The second is that the discovery afforded by fashion, the experiments that characterize its nature, better fit, as seen above, an episodic rather than a narrative conception of identity. This is not to say that we cannot see any narrative development in fashion and in the display of the identity it promotes, but that what truly differentiates it from other ways of building and shaping identity is the force it can have episodically, as opposed to what it can tell us diachronically. In the first chapter,  I  will explore the performative nature of fashion and how performativity acts as the building block for the

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comprehensive definition I provide in the following chapters. I will look at fashion’s performative aspects with attention to everyday fashion and fashion choices, but  I  will also consider issues such as fashion as art—specifically the case of high fashion and runway shows—and reflect on the ways in which artists have used and incorporated fashion into their works. Most crucially, we will see how the performative nature of fashion is expressed in film, and film’s contribution in allowing us to recognize the importance of seeing fashion as an object that performs. The first addition to the definition of fashion  I  have just outlined, the critical role of repetition in the construction of the new, will be the topic of the second chapter. I will touch upon existing theories of fashion, and in particular Walter Benjamin’s understanding of fashion, and on recent criticisms of fashion: criticisms that see in “the new”—new collections, new styles, new garments, new trends—nothing but stale repetition: a repetition that is meant to fuel demand and consumerism. Responding to such criticisms and objections is not only essential to the definition of fashion  I  aim to propose; it is also a way of rethinking the role of repetition in the history of fashion together with its conceptual value. In the third chapter,  I  will focus on fashion’s relation to bodily identity. My analysis is rooted in the sociocultural context in which bodies are inevitably immersed with attention given to race, disability, and the overall concept of bodily explorations (as introduced by the burgeoning field of body aesthetics). I see the films analyzed in this chapter as effectively engaging in the aesthetic exploration of the body. They offer a positive message on how to better embrace the bodies of others and our own, past received and constraining standards of beauty. As mentioned earlier, the analysis of these films, in addition to helping me define fashion, should also be seen as a contribution to the philosophical investigation of the body; more specifically, the chapter suggests relying on film as a vehicle for the observation of bodies, and as the starting point for their interrogation.

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Not immediately concerned with the definition of fashion is instead the fourth chapter in which  I  explore a topic that, because of the focus on both film and philosophy, cannot be ignored: film costumes. There is fashion design, and there is costume design. The two share boundaries, but they are also markedly distinct. Scholars in film studies have not always acknowledged the role of costume designers, and not enough has been written on costume design. This lacuna is partly due to the glamorous contaminations of fashion into film, with designers such as Chanel, Armani, and Yves Saint Laurent offering their creations to the screen. But while it is undeniable that fashion designers have worked in film, we should not forget that most costumes are not created by fashion houses. Such concerns are acknowledged in the fourth chapter. The fifth chapter goes back to identity and considers the distinction between narrative and episodic identity and their relation to fashion. The great majority of the movies analyzed in this book follow a relatively orthodox narrative structure. The identity of the characters we encounter is tied to such a structure; in the same vein, the costumes I describe contribute to such a narrative and to character development. For these reasons, I am not entirely rejecting a narrative understanding of identity, nor am I claiming that fashion, and the ways in which fashion helps us shape our identity, has no ties to narrative and to the conditions that are often attached to narrative identity—as for example the significance of causal connections and the achievement of a sense of closure, albeit temporary. However, as the reader will see, the chapter veers toward a defense of fashion’s ability to convey identity through episodic narratives, thus defending an episodic conception of identity and what it is at times its crucial role in the making of who we are. I will also consider how fashion and costumes raise issues of authenticity, and the weight that experiments, mistakes, and masks have in the establishment of who we are.

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The sixth and last chapter includes closing remarks tying, one last time, the knot between film and by summarizing how film can contribute to philosophical inquiry. The chapter also includes a short addendum comparing costumes and everyday clothing, thus moving away from the clothes and accessories we meet in the movies and toward the clothes we wear off-screen—at work, at home, now. Such comparisons and parallels are meant to justify the validity of the arguments outlined in the volume and the proposed definition of fashion in light not only of film but also of the clothes we wear every day. This is just a brief and partial introduction to the concepts explored in this book. The definition of fashion I propose is progressive and moves, as fashion does, progressively. In part, I like to think of fashion, or, better, I like to think of what it is like to think about fashion, as a discovery for its study is not without surprises. Fashion is visible, is on the body, and it is theoretically, socially, and culturally connected to appearance, to what is on the surface. My goal is to show that such surface is in itself quite engaging and thought-provoking.

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Defining Fashion

Fashion: An Item Performs There are multiple ways of thinking of fashion, but perhaps one of the most effective ones, and,  I  believe, inclusive, is to think of it simultaneously as an item and as a performance: fashion is “to” fashion. The reasons behind such a statement are various and will become apparent as the book progresses, but they are all, collectively, based on the idea that fashion is something “we do,” a performance we embody and a performance that is intimately related to who we are: to our identity. This is, I maintain, one of the most effective ways of reflecting on fashion not only philosophically—in the sense  of investigating the arguments, grounding definitions, and logic of fashion—but also in relation to the discussion at hand and its connection to both the philosophy of motion pictures as well as film studies. But why performativity? The first answer to this question stems from a reflection on the kind of object fashion is. When thinking of fashion as clothing and accessories (which is, it should be noted, one but most definitely not the only way of thinking of it), it is hard not to see it as an item, an object we purchase and use, and an object that, inevitably, is made of something—for one cannot think of fashion items without thinking of their materiality. Nevertheless, such materiality is inconceivable if not as a performance. Fashion is fabric, sartorial design, and the set of inventions and innovations that punctuate its history—none of these are static. The study of fabrics

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and pattern designs runs parallel and complements the very study of our cultures and traditions. It is a matter, somewhat poetically, of dressing history, of giving it colors and design. The fabrics in which fashion items are made populate our cultural heritage: they remind us of traditions and rituals. They are even at times signs of economic change—nylon after the Second World War, sustainable fabrics nowadays. In many ways, the study of the material counterpart of fashion becomes a study of collective identity, of global trends, of the growth and evolution of societies—from the past to the present to the future. A second response to why performativity is indeed at the core of fashion is based on the functions fashion items are supposed to accomplish. Fashion is not furniture; it does not sit in a room. Clothes are not supposed to hang in a closet indefinitely; they are made to be transported and transported mainly by the body. Fashion must be worn; it is tied to the body, even an appendix of it, as Elizabeth Wilson has claimed (Wilson, 1985). We can justify this statement by looking at how fashion restricts the body, as in corsets or stiletto heels, but also enhances its performance, as in the case of athletic wear. Enhancing and impeding are both equally effective ways for fashion to make us aware of our corporeality and, in turn, of the connection between our bodies, gender, and identity (Bruzzi, 1997: 35–66). The performative nature of fashion is also tied to time. The time it takes for the body to grow, change, and age: the time of baby clothes, maternity clothing, the more comfortable items designed for a more mature audience, etc. There is the time of seasons and their collections. There are decades associated with iconic styles: flappers in the 1920s, hippies in the 1970s. Performativity further relates to instances in which clothes are collected as opposed to worn. In museum exhibits focusing on fashion, such as the ones hosted by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the display of mannequins is radically different from how sculptures

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or paintings are displayed. Museum visitors are given the impression of encountering the outfits, thus simulating the interactivity that characterizes clothing and our daily experience of them. A recent show at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, “Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams,” displayed Dior’s creation in what was indeed an oneiric fashion. His clothes, which in many ways exalted femininity while also allowing for a good deal of practicality—the New Look— were floating up in the sky, surrounded by flowers, they were made glimmer by light installations. There was music too; dresses could have started moving, dancing. Even someone reticent to embrace high fashion (and Dior specifically) would have recognized their timeless quality and their timeless performance. The idea, in these shows, is to imagine the collections come alive, move. But they also emphasize what they can do. In the Dior’s example above, what they can do, as the title of the exhibit indicates, is to make us dream— to guide our dreams. It’s perhaps a simplistic statement, for we often talk of “dreaming” of a specific garment, but here the message is a bit different. It’s the clothes that design our dreams, they are not what we dream of. In this sense, they act. Once again, they perform. The same is true of window displays, at least some of them. Here too, what we see are static objects: shirts, skirts, ties, handbags, etc. Sometimes they are on mannequins, other times arranged more creatively. When creativity is indeed exercised, window displays begin to share with museum exhibits the ability to display fashion as something inherently performative. Bergdorf Goodman’s ones are exemplary because of their ability to evoke narratives; suggesting imaginary worlds, within the specific context that is luxury fashion, in New York City, on 5th Avenue. They are far from constricting boxes for lifeless objects. Interestingly, Bergdorf Goodman’s displays are also performative in the sense in which we wait for them, as we wait for a conference, or a dance performance. New Yorkers and tourists alike “attend” to such performances every winter, during the holidays.

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They do it in a way that is similar to catching the Nutcracker, kids in tow. There is something almost ritualistic about them (and rituals are of course performances). Certain things need to happen, and they happen at a certain time. This is true, perhaps, even when we think of the window display of more day-to-day stores. Spring items announce the end of winter, heavy coats its beginning. It happens every year. Those displays, those clothes, remind us of seasons and seasonal changes—of the passing of time and the cyclical alternation of seasons. It is worth mentioning one more example where window displays can express the ability of fashion to perform, in this case, by providing us with socioeconomic commentary. I am thinking of Demna Gvasalia’s installation for Harrods during the winter of 2018 (and several subsequent ones around the globe). The creative director of Balenciaga and founder of Vetements, a much spoken of, if not entirely sensational “design collective,” Gvasalia filled the windows with clothes belonging to the store’s employees and further invited the public to donate their clothes to the installation. The message here is twofold: on the one hand, the installation reminds us that clothes move in parallel with our lives; they age with it, from being purchased to being discarded; on the other hand, the work delivers a criticism of fast fashion and the speed with which high-end stores such as Harrods move from collection to collection. Then, of course, the ultimate display of fashion items is in itself a performance: the fashion show. The 1990s and the emergence of the so-called “radical catwalk” are particularly significant. Designers such as Alexander McQueen—who does not remember his Spring 1999 show, where supermodel Shalom Harlow stood on a rotating platform while being spray-painted in neon yellow and black by a programmed robot?—Martin Margiela and his subversions of the rules of the catwalk (and in part of its commercial function) and Rei Kawakubu’s irreverent “Sleep” are hybrids crossing fashion, performance art, and sociopolitical commentary (Khan, 2000: 114).

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More recent examples follow, if not accentuate this trend. Fashion houses are increasingly being led, especially in the past couple of years, by exceptionally young designers rethinking their product’s commercialization (Instagram is better than Vogue) and interrogating and problematizing the space represented by the runway. Daniel Roseberry, appointed by Schiaparelli at only thirty-three years old, was on the runway of the 2019–20 Fall/Winter show in Paris, sitting and sketching as models walked past and around him. The runway, this example shows, is about movement and walking, but it is also the product of a lengthy performance that goes from the ideation and conceptualization of a garment to sketching, tailoring, and wearing. Furthermore, the 30 minutes allocated to each designer or fashion house are trackers of social, political, and cultural movements, with the past two years focusing on the #metoo movement and, in 2019– 20, on sustainable fashion (Friedman, 2020). Another way to see fashion perform is to examine its role in the arts.  I  am not referring to museums collecting and displaying fashion—a topic we have already briefly touched upon—but at examples in which artists use clothes, accessories, and their significance, to create a work of art. Fashion is here material used to create something other than fashion. This is a difficult topic and one  I  won’t treat in this volume as it inevitably leads to questions such as whether fashion can count as art and, if it is indeed an art, to the conditions under which a fashion item can be considered art. Because of the breadth of such topic, and because this section is only interested in providing examples supporting the claim according to which fashion is better understood when linked to its performative aspects, I am going to limit myself to cases in which the use of fashion in the arts is also intended to provide a commentary about fashion—to say something about what fashion is and does. Several artists could be mentioned. ORLAN’s career, the ways in which she has altered her body through plastic surgery, finding an identity thanks to cosmetic and aesthetic surgical procedures is a

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testament to fashion’s connection to beauty goals (largely imposed) and its impact on women’s body and sense of self. Lisa Anne Auerbach knits are strikingly similar to sweaters we would find in a store. They can and should be worn. For they carry political messages, knit along the hem of a skirt or on the front of a shirt—like a logo. Mari Katayama’s photography, is reminiscent of glossy photoshoots. Her frames, adorned with rhinestones, seashells, and gems complement the beauty of the photographs. And beauty is indeed what Katayama is trying to achieve. Born with congenital tibial hemimelia, Katayama had both legs amputated at the age of 9. Her self-portraits emphasize the beauty she carries despite her disability. She uses fashion and fashion photography to emphasize her beauty in the face, but also because of disability. Her work reopens the discussion on beauty and ableism and further enriches the relation between fashion and the body. Many more examples could be mentioned. I have selected the ones above because they share both the use of fashion items and techniques and a reflection on what fashion does. Perhaps the questions posed by such works, or so  I  believe, should precede an inquiry on whether fashion should be considered art. But, again, this is not a topic I care to or can treat here. Let me instead move to one more way and perhaps the principal way in which I will analyze the performative nature of fashion: fashion and film. The very focus of this book, and its emphasis on both fashion and film, reveals another way fashion items are seen as inherently tied to performativity: this is when clothes become costumes. Costumes do not have tags, and their creators are too often left in the shadows, but they are an essential component of the movie industry. Costumes have influenced fashion collections, and fashion trends are have at times been sparked by the movies. Costumes “perform,” they embody the personality of a character. As Deborah Nadoolman Landis, a costume designer, historian, and founding director and chair of the David C. Copley Center for Costume Design at UCLA claims,

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costume designers, while working within the limits imposed by the director, create a person, and a person wakes up and goes to work every day, has a life beyond the screen. When thinking of a costume, one is supposed to think of an entire wardrobe: from items that might have been passed over by a relative, to mundane ones, to the ones that can steal a look (Landis, 2012). Not only is then fashion in film related to the kind of performance we see enacted in a movie, but it is also about the kind of performance that life ultimately is.1 The list of ways in which fashion items display their performative nature does not end here. This book aims at displaying and describing such ways through the use of filmic examples. But,  I  believe, the plurality of such examples can be broadly summarized in this chapter by highlighting three crucial and intertwined concepts and areas of debate that strongly relate to fashion, performativity, and film. These concepts and discussions are particularly relevant because they illuminate the definition of fashion  I  aim to provide together with its malleability. Briefly,  I  believe the performative nature of fashion to be encapsulated and emphasized by: (1) As defended by Walter Benjamin, the identification of fashion with the new, and the obstacles and questions that such an identification raises, especially in the context of the contemporary fashion scene; (2) The intimate link between fashioning oneself and bodily identity, where clothes and accessories act as an appendix, a hindrance, an extension, and a comple/iment to the body; and (3) The relationship between fashion choices and the concept of style, especially when a style is embraced as a “personal style.” Let’s see what they amount to.

Fashion and the New Fashion, Walter Benjamin claimed, is the “eternal return of the new” (Benjamin, 1999: 544). Benjamin saw fashion as the emblem of modernity where modernity is seen as the curious age, which looks

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ahead and abides by the Kantian motto sapere aude. But fashion is not just a new object. It is the new in “us.” The production of the new gives one the possibility of choice, and through the choices one makes, identity is built. Fashion, differently put, offers us the possibility of manifesting who we are in ways that are fresh while also authentic. Novelty allows people to break away from the past, from already established choices and alternatives, thus opening the door to individual creativity. Benjamin is an acute observer of society, its culture, and its cultural shifts. Hannah Arendt referred to him as a “pearl-diver” because of his ability to collect and recombine his observations in poetic, suggestive ways; it is not hard to imagine Benjamin’s attention to be caught and influenced, during his years in Paris, by the creations of his time and by the changes in the history of fashion that characterize the new century. Fashion was revolutionary: clothes were not solely seen as functional; they were beginning to be perceived as artistic creations. At the end of the nineteenth century, designers such as Charles Frederick Worth and Paul Poiret opened the first fashion houses. They began to sew tags with the dressmaker’s signature to their creations, creations that, in turn, were given recognizable names, such as Poiret’s exquisite 1907 creation, the “Josephine.” A dress could sell a novel identity and could do it fast as collections became more frequent, following the accelerated rhythms of the urban lifestyle. In many ways, the connotation of fashion as the new and as the embodiment of novelty is still present. A prime example is the figure of the contemporary fashion designer, with some being celebrated in museums. Again, think of the numerous fashion shows hosted by the Metropolitan Museum, of collaborations between designers and artists, like the one between Louis Vuitton and Takashi Murakami, and institutions blending the two, such as Fondazione Prada in Milan and the Cartier and Vuitton Foundations in Paris.

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When looking at the fashion world, novelty can be seen in the emergence of conceptual clothing and its evolution from the 1980s until today: Martin Margiela, Rei Kawakubu, Comme des Garçons, Iris Van Herpen, and Harris Reed. Then, of course, the innovations brought about by fashion designers should be analyzed in relation to their times. Today, the culture of image dictates: think of Virgil Abloh, the creative director of menswear for Louis Vuitton and the founder of Off-White, and how he has made social media one of the best platforms for the expression of fashion culture. Even when we distance ourselves from the grinding clock of haute couture and fashion weeks, the duo of novelty and speed remains a staple of what fashion is. Look at fast fashion. Zara, H&M, Uniqlo, and American Apparel only mention some of the most prominent, promise to offer design and a seemingly interminable streak of new models at a low price. When it comes to providing something new and fast, fast fashion meets and surpasses haute couture. It is not a case, in this respect, that the two are at times known to blend as shown by collaborations between designers of the like of Moschino, Stella McCarthy, Karl Lagerfeld, and H&M, and by the fact that top designers like Prada, Armani, and Comme des Garçons also rely, for their sales, on what may be described as “fan-base” merchandise; Prada sport, Armani X, See by Chloe, Marc by Marc Jacobs, etc. are secondary lines that offer fashion items at a fraction of the price of the primary line while still delivering whatever sense of satisfaction may come from a logo (and the logo is often, in these cases, rather visible). The fashion trendsetter may look down at secondary lines, but they are the economic engine of a growing number of fashion firms and what guarantees fashion’s promise of novelty and speed. I favor such a characterization of fashion, and I believe it is relevant to its definition, but it should be noted that it has also come under scrutiny. A noticeable objection has been posed by Lars Svendsen

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(2006), who has provided an exhaustive analysis of fashion from both a philosophical and sociological viewpoint. Svendsen expresses his skepticism toward fashion’s ability to produce anything fundamentally “new”—a skepticism that, in turn, jeopardizes fashion’s status as representative of the spirit of modernity. He remarks that the new in fashion is not as revolutionary, rebellious, or innovative as one may think (or may have been).2 Today, the fashion industry is hardly interested in the new. It relies instead on both the recycling of previous styles—with designers typically re-proposing old collections3—and on a logic of supplementation “by which all trends are recyclable and a new fashion hardly aims at replacing all those that have gone before, but rather contents itself with supplementing them. […] the old and the new—or rather, perhaps, the old and the old—exist side by side.” (Svendsen, 2006: 33). The consumption of fashion is not, he argues, selective consumption: choosing a style is more about conforming to a certain pre-packaged “experience” than about defining (or discovering) who we are. The mechanism of rapid replacement that characterizes fashion fuels the frantic, fragmented, and irrational chase for a look, but such a plurality of possibilities should be unmasked as repetitive uniformity as yet another consequence of consumerism. It is hard to entirely reject Svendsen’s criticism, especially as it is hard to deny consumerism and its power, but  I  remain convinced that his analysis overlooks significant aspects in which fashion retains a connection to novelty thus still depending on the idea of the new for its definition. My response to his argument will be the center of the next chapter. Through filmic examples, I will emphasize how novelty, in fashion, does not always imply sheer creation, but the careful repetition of styles, a repetition that, however, does not fail to innovate. It is time to turn to the second way in which fashion items express their performative nature: by interacting with the body.

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Fashion and Bodily Identity The debate on personal identity initiated by Locke focuses, as known, on the events of one’s life and on our ability to retain them—the dynamic of recollecting, restructuring, and preserving memories; it is about the nature of consciousness and its relation to the values that ultimately make persons agents in the world. But while important, such a debate is silent when it comes to the physicality of identity and the very presence of the body. Fashion offers an opportunity to reopen the conversation and focus on bodily identity and its phenomenological significance. Feminist scholars have been the first to give attention to the body in relation to identity. Far from considering fashion a futile topic, they recognized and continue to recognize its impact on gender, its perception, and construction. The emphasis on the performative nature of gender, as described by Judith Butler (Butler, 1990: 134), helps see fashion as an agent in constructing our embodied identity. The discussion is complex. Fashion has not always enjoyed the best reputation, with several scholars pointing to how fashion objectifies the body, perpetuates patriarchy, and enforces impossible (and often unhealthy) beauty standards. At the same time, and especially in recent years, scholars have begun to look at fashion under a different lens, one in which fashion assumes more positive significance or is at least regarded as a prismatic topic and as something that should not be entirely demonized. After all, as Marjorie Jolles claims, fashion is about dichotomies and contradictions just as much as the feminist self (Jolles, 2012: 227–44). From the exploration of such contradictions, we can begin an assessment of the importance of fashion in relation to bodily identity. When looking at the constraints and limitations, both aesthetic and moral, imposed by fashion and its standards, it is impossible not to pause on examples of how fashion can mask identity and/or produce

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fictive, limiting, and segregating identities. Fashion advertising is hardly limited to the display of clothes; it also defines the body that is supposed to wear them. Pressure on looking perennially young and thin or toned and fit affects women of any age and is further amplified by social media. Elizabeth A. Wissinger and Amanda M. Czerniawski’s book on models (Wissinger & Czerniawski, 2015) discusses such issues. They analyze the culture of the “blink,” namely the visual culture imposed by social media, Internet celebrities, etc., a culture that forces extreme routines of body management where women need to “self-regulate” to conform to the white male gaze. They also focus on plus-size models, who, unlike what one may think, are equally disempowered and forced to follow some kind of imposed ideal of curviness, irony, and projected sexuality. Body image is also highly racialized, with a marked preference for white beauty standards. Intersectional literature by black feminist scholars, as well as Paul Taylor in his seminal work on Black aesthetics, Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (Taylor, 2016), discuss, for example, natural hair and straightening, which, as a practice, cruelly points to how African-American women who do not have what in intimate circles is defined as “good hair” (hair that is mostly straight and easy to comb and style) have to conform to looks more typically followed by white women in order to achieve “acceptable” standards of beauty. However, and without playing down the pervasiveness and problematics of these issues, we are also, with a glimpse of hope, finally noticing potential changes, changes that are made possible also by fashion. It is worth mentioning, to stay on the topic of hair, the Quann sisters, prominent Brooklyn-based fashion bloggers, who are vocal advocates of natural hair and black beauty. They are using fashion and social media to manifest their choice of natural hair and to express their identity and the sense of pride and recognition that follows from its assertion.

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Feminist literature on fashion also points to a more productive and critically engaged dimension of fashion. Samantha Brennan, for example, has written eloquently on the relation between fashion and recognition in the communication and display of sexual identity. In her attempt to challenge a certain feminist disdain for fashion, she re-interprets the “personal is political” slogan in light of the fashion choices that can help the expression of sexuality within the LGBTQ+ community (Brennan, 2011). Madison Moore, writing on the connection between “fabulous” outfits and queer Black and brown identity, has also convincingly defended the importance of fashion as a form of self-expression. To be fabulous is to go beyond gender; it is the creation of a social and political space that allows for creativity, imagination, and acts of radical transformation (Moore, 2018). The very world of social media, despite its foes, can give women meaningful opportunities for expression. In Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures, Reina Lewis highlights the importance of a growing sub-culture of young Muslim women who embrace traditional fashion by combining it with current trends and engaging in e-commerce. Balancing tradition and modernity, these women are gaining a voice they did not have, which, largely because of the internet and social media, is spreading globally. These examples are significant in a plurality of ways. First, because they display how fertile the terrain of feminist aesthetics is for further discussion on fashion. This is especially true when looking at the possibility of a broader discussion including race, minorities, and the analysis of disability in relation to the body, fashion, and identity. Secondly, and in connection to the previous point, because these issues, and the debates that ensue, are tightly connected to a discussion on how the performative nature of fashion can lead to the establishment of a personal style, and with it, of an identity.

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Performance and Style The relationship between identity and fashion can be greatly clarified if analyzed in connection to how we think about styles. Specifically, I believe that, in addition to styles that are regarded as hip or fashionable, and styles we embrace as members of a group (whether based on race, sexuality, or, as it often happens nowadays, on the kind of collective identities that fashion brands and trends have the power to create), there is something that can count and can be defined as a personal style. Because of their experimental nature, personal styles relate to a notion of personal identity that is interested and involved in an affirmation of an identity that is, first and foremost, characterized by exploration and discovery. To outline the contours of such a conception of style and its contribution to who we are serves a double purpose. On the one hand, it is a way of highlighting how fashion and fashion choices determine the personality and fate of characters in movies. On the other hand, it is a step toward a precise, comprehensive definition of fashion and its performative nature. In a nutshell, a personal style ought to be a style in which fashion is constitutive of identity: a style where fashion matters.4 In the most general sense, for a personal style to relate to identity requires an understanding of aesthetic choices per se. This can be seen in the broader appreciation of everyday aesthetic matters. Still, it must also reflect curiosity and engagement with the aesthetic choices that guide the fashion world. Attention to the narratives underlying the fashion industry, care for patterns, sartorial cuts, and fabrics, together with a sensibility for the multiple “performative” aspects of fashion, from when and how to wear a specific garment, to the ways it moves with the body, etc. are required components. For a personal style to connect to one’s identity, there needs to be an objective appreciation of fashion. Secondly, it is crucial to recognize the ability of aesthetic choices to affect other value areas. Specifically, fashion relates to identity and results in the affirmation of a personal style that can affect who one

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is when fashion is understood as an agent, and often a powerful one. Fashion has sociocultural power; it can be progressive, and it can be political. To understand fashion’s ability to make our moral compass shift is to give fashion a lot more than a decorative role. It requires attention and sensibility toward what fashion can do and potential hindrances as when fashion reifies moral codes instead of engaging with them in fruitful discussion. Lastly, it is crucial to see fashion not just as a vehicle for the expression of one’s personality but as something constitutive of it: because for fashion to be a mode of agency is not enough for it to reflect the basic traits of one’s personality—as conservative clothing may reflect a conservative nature, or flamboyant colors an exuberant one. Fashion must allow for the very discovery of aspects of oneself; it needs to play an active and often transformative role. To be clear, developing a personal style is not mandatory, nor is it the only or the privileged way to investigate, question, reveal, and display one’s identity. But in some cases, for some people, the possession of a personal style and the elaboration of a personal style abiding by the three conditions mentioned above is indeed a primary avenue of self-investigation and discovery. Personal styles change as the self changes, and, I maintain, the style itself changes the self: garments can have an active role in revealing something new or unexpected about who we are. This is, I believe, the case when thinking of iconic movie characters and a prominent standpoint from which to analyze, at once, fashion and movies. I will follow it throughout the book.

Fashion as a Performance and the Movies Focusing on the performative aspects of fashion is one of the critical concerns of this volume. As  I  have shown, such aspects can be observed when looking at the definition of fashion and its correlation

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to the production of the new, when considering fashion and bodily identity, and when reflecting on the relation between fashion, style, and identity. But in addition to analyzing these aspects of fashion, this volume is an exploration of film and specifically of how fashion choices and costumes can provide us with a better understanding of the nature of fashion while also contributing to the overall philosophical value of a film. To this extent, the following chapters can be seen, theoretically, as belonging to a hybrid collection of frameworks, including fashion studies, film studies, the philosophy of motion pictures, and the philosophy of fashion (with the latter just beginning to affirm itself). But why is such a connection both feasible and fruitful? There are several answers to this question. The first one has to do with a specific understanding of the philosophy of motion pictures. Inaugurated by scholars such as David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, the philosophy of motion pictures focuses on the cognitive value of film. It rejects the psychoanalytical, semiotic, and Marxist approaches privileged by most strands within film studies and what today has become known as film-philosophy (Bordwell and Carroll, 1996). Debates spurring from such a shift have touched upon the ontology of film, the classification of fiction and nonfiction, the relation between cinema and other arts, film and ethics, and the relation between film and philosophy, among others (Carroll and Choi, 2006; Carroll, 2006; Carroll, 2003; Currie, 2017; Currie, 1995; Gaut, 2010; Gaut, 1997; Livingston and Plantinga, 2009; Sinnerbrink, 2016; Sinnerbrink, 2011; Wartenberg, 2007). This latter point, the relation between film and its ability to convey philosophical content, is of particular interest for our purposes. As I briefly mentioned in the introduction to this volume, when considering whether film can convey a philosophical message, scholars have investigated the use of film as a thought experiment—after all, movies are often remarkable and

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accessible illustrations of complex philosophical theories—but also, more radically, film’s capacity to, so to speak, “do” philosophy per se. What is implied here is that film does not simply exemplify or illustrate pre-existing philosophical paradigms, but that film can advance new philosophical content. Specifically, I am here following the terminology used by Paisley Livingston (2006) and Aaron Smuts (2009) in their exchange on the topic of whether film can provide an epistemically novel contribution by means specific to motion pictures. Livingston expressed criticism of the ability of film to “do” philosophy—what he labels a “bold thesis”. Livingston’s criticism is based on “the problem of paraphrase,” on how to translate, how to identify a novel philosophical contribution in film, one that is unique of film or would not be better expressed through more traditional philosophical means, that is, an essay. How can we see the film’s contribution as coming from the film and not from our efforts to interpret it in a philosophical fashion? Is it just us interpreting it that way? And, again, why cinematic means and not a book or an essay? The first set of questions, pertaining to whether philosophical content comes from the film or our reading of it, is of epistemic nature. It has to do with the actual philosophical insights that can be gained from a film. The second, which instead narrows the focus to the means through which such a contribution is made, is of artistic nature—it pertains to the kind of art film is and the means it adopts. To say that a film can actually “do” philosophy is then a matter of providing an epistemic and artistic justification. To do philosophy, a film must abide by, in Smuts’ words, both an epistemic and artistic constraint; such criteria need to be in place for film to play an active role in philosophical discussion and analysis. When it comes to the epistemic criterion, Smuts highlights, what is necessary is not an entirely new contribution—a new groundbreaking philosophical theory. After all, few concepts can, in philosophy, be considered as such. It is sufficient to contribute a

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novel point of view, a new angle from which to analyze an existing theory, or perhaps a valid objection. But rather than through the use of propositional language, film needs to accomplish such a goal through means specific to the medium, as requested by the artistic criterion. While much has been done to explore film’s epistemic contributions,  I  find the research on how such contributions are delivered lacking. Scholars have focused on important aspects of film such as narrative and cinematography, with at times powerful analyses on the mood of a movie, as in Robert Sinnerbrink’s work on “cinempathy” and the ability of film to affect ethical value areas (Sinnerbrink, 2015). Still, several other aspects have not been sufficiently investigated. Analyzing fashion and costume choices in film is a way of bridging this gap. How is the use of fashion in film helpful in conveying a film’s message and philosophical content? The second reason for focusing on fashion and film is that both, in unique and significant ways, can shed light on the concept of identity. As seen, fashion can, in my understanding of it, actively contribute to the shaping of who we are. In film, character construction is a tool to encounter and contemplate our own identity and others’. Furthermore, a clear advantage of fashion and film in displaying identity is that such a display is visual. The use of a visual medium and the emphasis on look and appearance widen existing analyses of identity that are instead based on “inner aspects” of the self or on the stories and narratives one compiles. Furthermore, seeing characters and seeing outfits is also an invitation to consider body identity issues and an opening to a conversation on gender, race, and ability. Lastly, the ways costumes and fashion are displayed in film provides us with insights into both the history and evolution of fashion and into what, in this book,  I  am outlining as a philosophy of fashion. The spectrum of films chosen in this volume is vast and comprises independent movies, blockbusters, international, and avant-garde

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films. Analyzing fashion in these films confirms and further deepens our understanding of the nature of fashion, its performative nature, and its role in affecting and even building who we are. Before beginning such an analysis, allow me to recap some of the notions collected in this chapter: they will provide us with a definition of fashion that we will contemplate further and test in the chapters to follow.

Conclusions: Toward a Definition of Fashion The goal of this chapter was to sketch what  I  take to be the most relevant features of fashion. These features contribute to its definition as an object that is primarily understood through and thanks to its performative nature. The following chapters will support such a definition through filmic examples while also cementing the importance of fashion and costume choices in film’s reading, analysis, and interpretation. To summarize, I have pointed to three significant ways to observe the performative nature of fashion, ways that, as mentioned, are also the tenets for a definition of fashion. First, fashion retains a connection to the new and speed; in part, this connects fashion to the idea of creativity and experimentation, but also to an understanding of fashion as a vehicle that allows us to experiment with identity. Secondly, a definition of fashion is impossible without mentioning the body; fashion can act as a constraint but also as an affirmation of bodily identity, thus pointing to the duality and dichotomy that characterize the relation between fashion and identity. Lastly, the performance of fashion can be seen as a discovery; fashion knowledge, together with the crafting of an individual style, are not solely complements of an already established sense of identity—they are ways of researching and questioning it.

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More needs to be said on the kind of identity fashion can foster and reveal. The current panorama of identity theories does not, I believe, do justice to the sort of identity that fashion suggests and promotes. This is true not only, as seen, because not enough has been said about bodily identity, but also because the great majority of identity theories rely on narrative conceptions of identity that poorly fit the performative, experimental, and at times haphazard nature of fashion. I will return on this topic at the end of the book, hoping that the analysis conducted in the previous ones will help elucidate and prep the ground for my conclusions. I will now turn to the first connotation of fashion: the identification between fashion and the new.

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Fashion: What’s New As mentioned in the previous chapter, the association between fashion and the new is a feature of both its theoretical analysis and the very history and nature of fashion. Specifically, I have mentioned Walter Benjamin’s treatment of fashion and, in relation to the second point, the dynamics of the fashion world, from the fast pace of fashion weeks across the globe to the seasonal (and often mid-seasonal) turn of collections. Benjamin’s theory of fashion is centered around fashion’s relation to time and its ability to transform us. He was influenced by both Baudelaire, on whom Benjamin had written, and who had famously defended fashion, aesthetic finesse, and eccentricity as the traits of the flaneur, but perhaps even more profoundly by the enthusiasm for the reconfiguration of the everyday we find in the Surrealist movement. The way in which fashion allows for eternal present, for the eternal return of the new (Benjamin, 1999: 544), is by employing the same techniques familiar to the Surrealists, their belief in alchemy, allegorically understood as the re-elaboration of the familiar and mundane into something new and vibrant, into novel possibilities— theoretical as well as aesthetic. Fashion, in his analysis, goes past death, or, better, it annihilates death by providing constant renewal. This is true of styles that

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incorporate past trends, of materials and fabrics that were not previously considered for sartorial purposes, but it is also true of the bodies that wear fashion items as a shield against death and aging. As he wrote, a woman “titillates death and is already something different” every time she embraces a new look (Benjamin, 1999: 63). As often in Benjamin, the movements of fashion can be interpreted and read in many keys, from the political to the sociological, to the aesthetic. But what’s crucial for our purposes is that in his view, “the new” in fashion is not something that has never before been displayed; it is not something unprecedented: its revolutionary power, and especially its revolutionary power against time, is based instead on its ability to reinterpret the past and the ordinary, to look at what is passing and to refuse to let it end. Such an understanding can, I believe, help us temper the criticism leveled by Svendsen against fashion’s ability to truly provide something new for, according to him, consumerism dictates, and trends are repeated. The new, as the reader will recall, is for him only associated with the acquisition of more and more items, items that rarely embody anything genuinely novel. Svendsen is not entirely incorrect. A quick look at the contemporary fashion industry does invite a denunciation of consumerism and its effects on society, the economy, and the environment,1 but denying a connection between fashion and the new is equally wrong. What’s wrong, and here I follow Benjamin, is that the new in fashion is first and foremost transformation: of time, objects, and the everyday. But, I argue, such transformative component, the new and the difference that fashion can bring, is also to be understood precisely in light of what Svendsen appears to fear: repetition. I will support these claims by looking at the fashion world and by contemplating a number of filmic examples.

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The Dynamic of Repetition and the New: Designing Fashion In Svendsen’s words, fashion is trapped in a logic of supplementation: eternal consumption substitutes the need for novelty. But novelty in fashion, as remarked, is hardly ever sheer, unprecedented creation. If anything, innovation in fashion is based, even dependent, on an understanding of the importance and pervasiveness of repetition. This is the case in high fashion, with its at times irreverent aesthetic innovations, and it is also a central component of fashion’s ritualistic function and its use in the everyday. The everyday is indeed the first place where to observe fashion’s penchant for a creative use of repetition. Think of school uniforms. While remaining largely unchanged throughout the decades, they are often a vehicle for expressing individual identity. Wearers alter them slightly, adding ingenious, curious components: a pin, a loosened collar, a particular way of cuffing a sleeve. These changes are minimal, but visible; “hosted” by uniform garments—which secure collective identity—they also contribute a personal touch. Such intimate addictions often act as signals: from simple aesthetic preference and reverence to fashion trends, to signifiers of socio-political and gender affiliation. A recent example is Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s collars. A pioneering advocate for the equal treatment of women, Ginsburg adorned her black robe, the uniform worn by judges, with beautiful, eclectic collars from all over the world. Ginsburg was the second woman to sit in the US Supreme court: her robe undeniably signaled her position as a judge while her collars acted as a reminder that a woman occupied that role. Vanessa Friedman, a fashion expert and journalist for The New York Times, reports an interview given by Ginsburg to The Washington Post: “‘You know, the standard robe is made for a man because it has a place for the shirt to show, and the tie,’ Justice Ginsburg told the

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paper. So she and Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female Justice on the court, ‘thought it would be appropriate if we included as part of our robe something typical of a woman.’ They weren’t going to obscure their sex or pretend it was beside the point. It was part of the point.” (Friedman, Sept. 20th, 2020)

A collar is a way of voicing the new; its force depends on an understanding of fashion and, in this case, its political significance in relation to gender identity. André Leon Talley’s kaftans, which he started wearing in past years,2 are a further testament to these claims. The former American editor-at-large of Vogue, Talley brought the personal to the world of contemporary fashion; his “armors,” as he calls them, share similar designs (kaftans, after all, have not changed in hundreds of years) with slight variations that accentuate his creativity and better emphasize his status in an environment, the fashion world, he knows all too well. Allowing novelty to emerge from repetition is also a feature of stylistic innovation. In some cases, repetition matters per se. It can be precisely what a garment “aims to achieve” to become popular, and, in some cases, striking: think of iconic designs such as the little black dress, first conceived by Christian Dior, or Marlon Brando and James Dean’s simple white T-shirt. Something remains innovative precisely because it allows for repetition, with each repetition and iteration further contributing to its charm and appeal. There is then a certain art of repetition. Much coveted today, vintage garments and looks are the results of skillful repetition. Skill, here, is not only to know what to repeat but how. A vintage Rolex is chic, a new one not so much, and the same can be said for Vuitton trunks and Chanel bags. While vintage is about re-introducing styles, it would be wrong to classify them as replicating previous styles. Vintage clothing does not just supplement new ones. Vintage garments are often worn together with new ones because by mixing old and new items, the possibilities for a more original look multiply.

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Designers, of course, master such skills when relying, for inspiration, on previous traditions and trends: from Batsheva Hay’s “Victorian” dresses to the experimental creations of designers such as Martin Margiela, who notoriously included second-hand clothing and previously seen items in his collections. The creation of novelty through, in light, and because of repetition should, if we follow these examples (and many more could be added), be regarded as one of the fundamental features of fashion, its definition, and its innovative power. Furthermore, as it can be inferred from above, the duo of novelty and repetition is also a mark of the interactive nature of fashion and, in turn, of what makes it relevant to the establishment of who we are. By knowing what and how to repeat, by realizing when to diverge, wear a collar, or stick to a kaftan, we become who we are. It is this aspect that I now want to explore. To do so, I will shift the focus to the costumes, creations, and designs we encounter in four movies: All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955), Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002), Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015), and In the Mood for Love (Won Kar Wai, 2000). As expressed in the previous chapter, the goal is not only to confirm features that belong to the definition of fashion, but also to point to how an artistic means such as costume design can affect the understanding of a movie: its narrative, message, and mood.

The Power of Repetition: Three Movies Cary’s Grey Lady Suit and the Promise of the Red Dress Here’s is a funny quote: “The studio loved the title All That Heaven Allows. They thought it meant you could have everything you wanted.  I  meant it exactly the other way around. As far as  I  am concerned, heaven is stingy” (Halliday, 1997: 1). It says quite a bit

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about a film that reveals more as the years go by. It gives the whole movie away. All that Heaven Allows is a gorgeous picture with sweeping crane shots, outstanding mise-en-scène, and a performance so sculpted that it is virtually impossible just to watch it. You stare at it. But it is also a sad movie. Fassbinder, after watching the film during a retrospective on Sirk in Berlin in 1971, summarized it as such: Jane Wyman is a rich widow, and Rock Hudson is pruning her trees. In Jane’s garden is a “love tree,” which only blooms where love is present, and so Jane’s and Rock’s chance encounter becomes a great love. But Rock is fifteen years younger than Jane, and Jane is completely integrated into the social life of a small American town. Rock is a primitive type, and Jane has a lot to lose—her girlfriends, the good reputation she owns to her deceased husband, her children. In the beginning, Rock loves nature, and Jane at first doesn’t love anything, because she has everything. That’s a pretty shitty starting point for a great love. Her, him, and the world around them. But basically that’s how it looks. (Fassbinder, 1992: 78). All That Heaven Allows is a love story between Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) and Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), a widow and her gardener. It is set in a wealthy New England enclave and unfolds through two seasons, two seasons in which the love between the couple is seen through class conflict, insecurities, and hopelessness. It is, in a word, the quintessential melodrama, and, as most melodramas, it is dense with philosophical insights. Peter Brooks defines melodrama as the site of the “moral occult,” the hidden moral meaning, and truth, that lies behind conflicts at the domestic and social level; Thomas Elsaesser remarks that melodrama involves an impossible situation, one that the characters, no matter how nuanced, split, and prismatic they may be, are not able to face (Elsaesser, 1991: 68–92). More recently, Robert Sinnerbrink describes it as a display of the complex ways in which moral messages are expressed in film, ways that may make us reconsider established ethical paradigms (Sinnerbrink, 2015).

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The movie has received abundant attention: from Laura Mulvey (Mulvey, 2014), who praised Sirk for making a movie about the social and domestic confinement of women to, more recently, Andrew Klevan, who, against more common and existing interpretations, has emphasized the romantic touches of the movie and the possibility of a positive ending (Klevan, 2018: 147–54). My analysis will introduce a new strand for the goal is to see the movie and its melodramatic tone and significance in relation to the use of fashion and costume choices. Despite all the talk about nature and references to Walden, and despite the occasional deer pasturing close by the house, All That Heaven Allows is far from a hymn to the simple and honest life: it is a profoundly formalist work, a meticulously curated aesthetic piece. Actors in Sirk are seen through mirrors; they are partially hidden or approached from unnatural angles. The overall effect is one of both suffocation and alienation. Cary, the heroine, is often filmed with plenty of headroom, almost crushed by the frame. Dialogues avoid a “shot-reverse-shot” technique and close-ups are sparse. It’s not empathy that Sirk is trying to trigger, but a sort of distance, one that, in the Brechtian theater he had mastered, allows for the kind of detached contemplation that leaves room for philosophical thinking. Such a suffocating effect is evident in Sirk’s use of set design. Objects populate each frame—so many of them. The movie opens with Sara (Agnes Moorhead), Cary’s best friend, bringing Cary her plates back, adding more to a home that is already full of any imaginable kind of vase, plate, and pot. And more objects punctuate the movie. A sign of bourgeois wealth, they are both possessions and a sign of possessiveness, of ownership, and, with it, of stability. The trophy sitting on the fireplace symbolizes the financial prosperity that Cary’s deceased husband had brought to the home: it is about owning their position in the New England enclave in which the film takes place, but it is also about owning her. The Wedgewood piece mended

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and then broken again, somewhat accidentally but not quite, by Cary, is as important as any of Ron’s trees and is situated, conceptually, at the opposite end of Ron’s taste for nature. In a sense, that piece is Cary herself, it is something she recognizes, something she loves, and something that perhaps, as  I  will argue and as her breaking it may imply, she is not too content with sharing. The distance and uneasiness that set design and camera work invite are further enhanced by Sirk’s arguably most discussed trademark: color. Sirk was not the only one using, and, by today’s standards, abusing color in the 1950s. Every movie followed the instructions of the Color Advisory Service, directed by Natalie Kalmus, just as every movie had to abide by the guidelines of the Hays code. But Sirk transformed the obstacle into an advantage. His fascination for color was an expressivist one, indebted to the European expressionism he had become acquainted with in Germany. Colors are primary. They are vivid, overwhelming, and often violent. There is very little taupe or mauve in Sirk’s films. Instead, they split the screen in two: blue, the color of constraint, and red, for love, with also a fondness for an acid green that makes everyone look insecure and somewhat evil. Lastly, and in line with the considerations above, we have Bill Thomas’ costumes.  I  will here only focus on Cary’s dresses for not only do they reinforce the idea of fashion as a performance  I  have outlined in the previous chapter, but they also anticipate the ending of the movie, acting as a window into Cary’s emotional and moral profile. Fashion takes us from the “walled up” life in which we first meet Cary, a widow buried in her large, cluttered home, to the hope and promise of escape brought to her by her love for Ron, to the breaking of such promise, in the final sequences of the film, where we see Cary sitting next to her lover, semi-conscious. Ron has fallen off a cliff, and Cary seems to be acting more like a nurse than a partner: the

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large glass door of the living room where they are sitting becoming as much as a divide as the sturdy walls of the home where she used to live with her husband. Cary is seen wearing a relatively small array of outfits for a movie that unfolds across two seasons. Two are,  I  believe, particularly significant. The first is a grey tailleur, a lady’s suit. While there are slight (almost imperceptible) variations between the ones she wears, little about them truly changes: her outfit repeats itself. It is patently conservative and conceals her beauty, making her appear older or, I’d rather say, making her disappear: the grey suit blending perfectly with the color of her imposing home, becoming one with it. Cary is “wearing” that house, and she continues to wear it even when her life, because of her love story with Ron, appears to be taking a different turn. In the movie, the very same outfit, its repetition, is an indication of what is to happen: Cary’s inability to escape her bourgeois life, for that life will keep coming back to her. Significantly, this is true even when she is taken out of her environment, as when Ron and Cary join Ron’s friends Mick and Alida at a party out of town. The rustic setting in which she finds herself is the radical opposite of the country club she is used to, but, there are reasons to suspect, it is also the opposite of who she is. Instead of making her blend into her house, her grey outfit, this time around, is what singles her out: it indicates how despite all the dancing and drinking, she still does not belong to that world. The repetition of the same outfit, when the outfit is allowed to, literally, “move away from home,” tells us something new about her, which is that her home, in a way, travels with her; it moves with her just as her clothes do. I have commented on how All That Heaven Allows exemplifies the ability of fashion to innovate through repetition: the repetition of Cary’s grey outfit provides us with insights into the end of the movie, thus disclosing the moral ambiguity and complexity of melodrama

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and its characters. But the movie also makes a stellar case for the importance of experimentation in identity construction: something offered by Cary’s most audacious outfit, the red dress. While the grey suit aligns easily with Jane Wyman’s performance, her hesitating smile, her role as a bourgeois widow who is tempted but afraid to choose freely, the red dress tells us that there is something more to her, something she wants, but can’t confess. Cary wears it only once for her night out at the club with Harvey (Conrad Nagel), an older family friend who is seen by their circle of friends as a potential and promising new companion, but the dress is hardly a means to impress him. Cary wears it after having met Ron for the first time, but before their romance has begun to unfold. It signals what Cary is thinking, projecting, and hoping for. Still, from the reaction of everyone around her, we quickly understand that it is also what nobody else is thinking or even imagining. It gets a tremendous amount of (unwanted) attention: Cary’s children, Harvey, the ominous Mona (Jacqueline DeWit), and the genuinely unpleasant Ned (William Reynolds), who will harass her. Her courageous attempt is suffocated with spite by everyone in her vicinity. But while brief in its appearance, the dress is a window into Cary’s complexity. It tells us that Cary is a beautiful, strong woman aware of her body and presence. After all, there is not a single moment in which the dress appears to make her feel uncomfortable, for she is not. Confined to the personal and social identity of a widow in grey, Cary can show a more decisive, assertive, and independent side of herself. The red dress is a way to experiment with the person she ultimately feels to be. It is significant, in this respect, that the dress, while perhaps inspired by her encounter with Ron, is never worn in his presence. Cary’s sense of identity, we are, I believe, allowed to conclude, is not dependent or promoted by him: it’s hers alone. It’s the kind of fashion choice a nuanced character would make.

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A Homage to Doug Sirk: Two Movies by Todd Haynes The depth and layering of emotions we encounter in Douglas Sirk’s melodramas, while sadly missed by his contemporaries, were not lost on a number of other directors. I earlier mentioned Fassbinder’s fascination for Sirk’s movies, but perhaps one of the most direct tributes to Sirk is found in the work of Todd Haynes. This section will focus on two of Haynes’ movies, Far From Heaven (2002) and Carol (2015). While one should not overstate the importance played by Sirk’s influence—after all, these are not remakes, and they are perfectly capable of standing alone—Sirk’s touch remains visible, in a literal sense, for these movies share colors, atmosphere, a tone. Most importantly for our purposes, they are elaborate reflections on fashion and its ability to hide and reveal while also showing us, once again but under a different light, the importance of repetition in relation to fashion and identity. Both All That Heaven Allows and Far From Heaven, not unlike fashion, unfold through the seasons, from Fall to Winter into a Spring blessed with joyful blossoming, a sad irony, as change (and joy) are not in Sirk and Haynes’ heroines’ future. The echoing of All That Heaven Allows can be heard throughout the movie: both open with a languid crane shot and a giant baby blue car; both follow similar narrative twists, from a bucolic adventure where the two protagonists, Cathy Whitaker, played by Julianne Moore, and Raymond Deagan, played by Dennis Haysbert, realize their love for each other, to a hideous party where the constraints and bigotry of the societies they inhabit take center stage; both are about the 1950s, and America, and the particular kind of affluent, conservative enclave we find in pockets of the North East. But they are not the same movie. Far From Heaven is a movie about the 1950s that uses the tools provided by the 1950s—scoring, technicolor, and costumes—with the sensibility of 2000.

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This is true conceptually, for the movie is a complex reflection on both homophobia and racism—the two entwined in poignant ways—and stylistically, for Sirk’s use of colors, mise-en-scène, and his attention to objects and settings are not only echoed but amplified. As Haynes commented, such techniques are the product of emotions that are too big for the characters, emotions that spill into everything that surrounds them. They drown them. […] in Far From Heaven the love and pain depicted is almost too big for any single character to contain. So it spills into the music, the wardrobe and décor, the colors and shadows on the screen. The style allows expression to be spread into non-verbal arenas, displacing the desire and villainy of the characters onto, literally, the walls and clothes—even the narrative forms—they inhabit. (Haynes, 2003: xi-xii)

There are three main colors in Far From Heaven which tint everything in the movie, including, of course, its costumes. Red and green, used in contraposition, but also as clues for narrative switches, and a lilac/ mauve, the color of Cathy’s chiffon scarf, a symbol of her encounter with Raymond and her attraction to him. Sandy Powell, the costume designer, plays masterly with the incongruity of Cathy’s green and red dresses. Virtually all of them feature a tight, bottomed-up peplum jacket, narrow at the waist, and a flowy A-line skirt, matching hats, matching gloves. The clothes, we can tell, are expensive. There’s chiffon, crinoline, silk, taffeta. But in their beauty, they are also a physical prison, a symbol of pent-up desire, a desire that is—and here again the movie reveals its contemporary side—markedly sexual. Red and green are primary colors; they are challenging to wear in their bolder hues and are used parsimoniously. However, Far From Heaven does the opposite, spreading the two colors over the entire outfit, the furniture, the screen, the light that permeates the movie.

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In their exceptional visibility, they are merciless, leaving no space to breathe, suffocating the characters while also, and here’s Haynes’s genius, providing the audience with a critical, privileged look into the story. The potency of the colors becomes a window into the unseen: Cathy’s love for Raymond and the lurid racism of the community they belong to, and Frank’s (Cathy’s husband, played by Dennis Quaid) homosexuality, his desire for another man, and his ultimate decision to abandon his family. Green and red in lighting, objects, set design, and costumes, are headlights cast on the inner life of the movie: impossible to wear, almost unbearable to watch, they are the most explicit and harshest condemnation of the world of which Far From Heaven takes place and of which it is a vocal critic. Far From Heaven is a movie about the surface of things; better, it is about the surface of things people are incapable of seeing past. But that surface, in Haynes’ movie, is astoundingly complex and symbolic. It is a film reference to the world of Sirk’s melodrama, it is about technicolor and the history of film, and it is about our social and cultural history and its biting cruelty. Fashion, the ultimate surface of things, echoes these themes; it amplifies them. Cathy is self-conscious of her clothes, her makeup, and her beauty. Her daughter wants to grow up to look like her. Her dresses call for and deserve compliments, and for this reason, perhaps, she keeps wearing new ones. Far From Heaven is a defile of monochromatic, gorgeous outfits, the kind of outfits benefiting from the spilling of the 1940s Christian Dior’s look into the 1950s. But they are also quite similar, and their similarity, how looks are repeated, is significant. In both All That Heaven Allows and Far From Heaven, outfits are repeated: Cary’s conservative grey dress and Cathy’s collection of red and green outfits. And they also both feature one that stands out, assuming immediate symbolic function: the lilac scarf in Haynes’ film and the red dress in Sirk’s. The grey dress and Cathy’s outfits make the

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heroines blend in their backgrounds. The muted palette of grays and browns of All That Heaven Allows is a reminder of the constraints of Cary’s bourgeois life; the unnatural, incongruous, and somewhat violent greens and reds of Haynes’ film convey more than suffocation and constraint for that society has now, with its racism and bigotry, become impossible to tolerate. It is too much for the characters; there is too much suffering and pain. The repetition of outfits in Far From Heaven is also, as in Sirk’s case, a window into the psychological makeup and complexity of its heroine. Cathy is a strong-willed woman who, aware of the difficulty of her situation, is not ready to give up. While Cary’s all-grey dresses are, for the most part, dull and unattractive, Cathy’s ones, despite their similarity, are stunning. Cathy keeps trying very hard to get what she wants. She wants her husband to find her attractive, she wants to be popular, she wants her world to work; her ammunition is her beauty, her style. And it is not without sadness that we see her fail, again and again. She can’t stop her husband from loving another man, and she also can’t pursue her love for Raymond. And yet trying she does. With Raymond, her perseverance is embodied by her scarf. It is an armor. We see her wearing it proudly around her head as she drives to the train station, at the end of the movie, to see Raymond one more time, just before he is forced to leave the town he grew up in because of the racist bigotry and the threats to his life and the life of his beloved daughter. But, even in this case, her efforts are not successful. Cathy uses repetition, its fashion force, we may say, to obtain something she cannot obtain. In the end, the train leaves, and she drives back in the opposite direction. Ironically, it is spring. The scarf she had relied on, the scarf that signified her connection to Raymond, is now just another one of her beautiful and yet ineffective garments. Cathy depends on her outfits, first the beautiful while similarly colored and tailored dresses, and then, in the end, the

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scarf, to bring her the life she wants. But their repetition, in the end, appears both stubborn and hopeless. Clothes that she hoped would bring change confine her back into the world she belongs to, the one that has imprisoned her. It is the 1950s again. It is the North East, it is another bourgeois residence. Carol, Haynes’ 2015 movie, starring Cate Blanchett as Carol and Rooney Mara as Therese, her lover, introduces a new angle and set of perspectives. Here, just as much, if not more than in Far From Heaven, Sandy Powell’s costumes play a major role: in large part, their role is to make Carol a 2015 movie that takes the courage of looking back, and confront, as opposed to just record, the 1950s. Cary and Cathy’s confinement and their suffocated feelings are now tempered (albeit not erased). It is now possible to express and listen to a woman’s point of view; lesbian love, candid and prideful, is cherished. Rather than disappearing in the background, drowned by their surrounding and hateful milieu, Carol and Therese emerge as uncontested heroines. Much of the strength of the movie, and perspective, comes from Carol herself. Unlike the movies discussed so far, she owns the title, alone, with no reference to heaven, whether achievable or not. She is also able not only to pursue but to enjoy her love. While Carol’s husband’s threats will halt Carol and Therese’s romance, the romance between the two occupies the largest portion of the movie. We see it consumed in one of the most cinematically delightful segments of the film: the journey, metaphorical and not, that Carol and Therese take across the country, a holiday spent in a motel room, sharing a single bed, laughing in the car. Carol is stunning and very much aware of it, of her beliefs, and of her ability to fall in love and seduce. She is in control, even when she’s suffering. Even in challenging moments, when she’s forcefully separated from her daughter, she refuses to reject or deny who she is. This is markedly visible in her clothes, poise, hair, and makeup.

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Therese and Carol meet at Frankenberg, a department store in Manhattan where Carol is shopping for a gift for her daughter. Their first encounter is exemplary of the symbolism of fashion: it is an encounter between two hats, Carol’s stylish one, a perfect match to her coiffed wavy hair, and Therese Christmas’ hat, which the store is making her wear—it’s the holidays. The exchange between the two is amusing, witty, juxtaposing personalities that will nonetheless quickly reveal an affinity. Therese’s clothes are the clothes of a young woman: a “hipstery” look (given the time and place), to use today’s jargon; they fit her personality, her petite physique, her shyness and determination. Carol is outright fabulous; her sense of style and refinement made even more noticeable but her surroundings. She is the kind of person who can look fantastic when doing grocery shopping. But the promise of kinship is not late to arrive. Carol confesses that shopping makes her nervous. Therese responds, “working here makes me nervous.” She admits to be confined to a desk, Carol admits that, in the end, something with the holidays always goes wrong: “you somehow wind up overcooking the turkey anyway.” Carol will end up following Therese’s advice and order a toy train instead of a doll, something Therese has always loved. She takes off her gloves to sign the receipt with her address and leaves them there. On her way out, she turns around briefly, points at her head: “I like the hat,” she whispers. We don’t need anything else for their romance to start, and it’s hard to imagine it will not. Hat and gloves mark the beginning of their love, and fashion will continue to play a role. It does it in at least two instances: through Therese’s photography and, secondly, thanks to a simple checkered plaid robe. Therese’s ambition is to become a photographer and, one may add, not a housewife. Her interests blossom with Carol, not only because she will purchase her a camera, but because Carol will be her model. Therese, commenting on her passion for photography, admits that

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she “should be more interested in humans.” When Carol asks her “how’s that going,” she firmly responds, “Quite well, actually.” After all, she had just started photographing Carol, her human. Something about the pictures reminds us simultaneously of languid love and of a study in fashion photography where attention is given to both Carol’s statuesque beauty and her outfits. But the photographs also escape the unpleasant, male-gaze tendency toward voyeurism. Carol is not an object; when she sees Therese’s pictures, what she sees is herself and Therese’s love for her. Again, she’s her only model, Therese’s human of interest. Pausing, photographing, and immortalizing Carol’s beauty and her clothes are signs of liberation, of difference, of the kind of hope that a movie made in 2015 can instill into a story taking place in the 1950s. It is also a compelling exploration of fashion, a recognition of its ability to allow for self-affirmation. But while Therese’s pictures celebrate and indicate her fascination for Carol’s glamour and refinement, her outfits remain indications of her simplicity, of a certain freshness and ingenuity. These qualities are not lost on Carol, and her appreciation for them is shown by her embrace of one of Therese’s looks: the kilt pattern. It is here, specifically, that we see how powerful the repetition of a fashion item can be. Kilt patterns are popular, they are mainly used on sturdier fabrics, such as wool, and they are often associated, in women, with girlhood, school uniforms, and the like. Therese is often seen wearing a hat with such a pattern, virtually always when traveling with Carol. Its simplicity is intriguing while also comforting. It is surprising, in a way, to see the effect of the pattern on Carol, to see her in it. From Therese’s hat (hats again), the pattern travels to Carol’s robe, which she wears night after night as the two travel across the country. Repeating a pattern is a way of declaring and reinforcing love; it is another affirmation, despite, or perhaps because of the pattern’s contrast with Carol’s fashionable style. It gives us another example of how repetition both solidifies a

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pattern and reinvents it. It adds something new, which, in this case, is a romance that could not have happened in the 1950s, or in Sirk, or in Haynes’s Far From Heaven. Carol takes place in just one season, the Winter: from the holidays to the first signs of spring, and, in this case, hope. The three movies analyzed are connected in multiple, prismatic ways. I have focused on the dynamics of repetition and novelty and their relation to the emotional makeup of the three heroines. More can be said about these costumes and their function, there is no doubt, but before moving on to our last example, it is worth emphasizing one more reason to think of them in relation to the power of repetition in fashion, a reason that emerges when we begin to investigate their metacinematic layering. When analyzing Carol, we saw how Carol’s adoption of the kilt pattern, which distinguishes and characterizes her loved one, cements their relationships. It allows the relationship to unfold and unfold in all the ways in which relationships unfold: there is love, fun, regrets, laughter, and silence. But when we open the discussion to the three movies, then another repetition becomes visible, connecting all three heroines. For fashion and the looks chosen by Sirk and Haynes are also important because, and this is an intrinsic characteristic of fashion, they can be worn again. Julianne Moore in Far From Heaven and Cate Blanchett in Carol wear strikingly similar outfits to the ones worn by Jane Wyman, and it is not simply because all three movies take place in the 1950s. They wear the same clothes because virtually identical tailoring and fabrics can come to signify and symbolize difference. Jane Wyman could not change into her red dress without being ostracized by her community, friends, even her own kids. In Far From Heaven, Cathy’s frequent dress changes only let her sink deeper in her misery. They did not work. The mauve scarf holds sentimental value but won’t bring change. It won’t restore honesty in her marriage

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and it won’t allow for the satisfaction of her desires. But, and here is where repetition turns into difference: there is hope for change. And we are reminded of that hope as Carol parades in her luscious mink coat inside the toy store. She can wear it without being trapped in it, and wearing it only emphasizes her strength. Carol can be a lesbian, she can fall in love, and she can fight her husband. Her costumes, so similar to the ones worn by Cary and Cathy, are nonetheless so different on her: her name also begins with a “C,” but her name resonates throughout the movie. It’s its title. In a broader sense, we can see how those looks are essential to the continuation of a discussion on melodrama, its split characters, and its philosophical value. Melodrama conveys emotions through cinematography, mise-en-scène. Costumes are equally important. They are a testament to a filmic tradition connecting directors across the decades. Repetition is never blind, never meaningless. If we pause on the progression of these three movies, and especially on Carol’s power and on her ability to recognize and embrace who she is, we begin to see how the repetition of outfits does, in the end, open the possibility for something different and new. It creates a style, a mood, a cinematic tradition.

Twenty Qipaos Despite having spent a good portion of his career as a screenwriter, Won Kar Wai does not write scripts for his own movies: In the Mood for Love (2000) is an excellent example of such a directorial stance. Born as a movie about food (titled Three Stories about Food), initially filmed with a markedly erotic touch, drenched in the director’s memories as a Shanghai expat living in Hong Kong, In the Mood for Love retains all these qualities and sublimates them at once. While a

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simple synopsis of the movie may classify it as a love story, one may hesitate to do so: for every time the category of “love story,” requited or not, is brought forward, some other components of the film point to different feelings, vibes, and, of course, moods. The prominent mood of the film is afforded by repetition, a technique not unknown to filmmakers—think of Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961)—but somewhat uniquely accomplished by the use of set design and cinematography (Christopher Doyle and, later, Mark Lee Ping Bin), and, in ways I am about to explore, by the repetition of one dress, the qipao. The qipao, or cheongsam, is a feat of tailoring. It hugs the body: a perfect silhouette topped by a tight high collar. Silk is widely used, and so are colorful patterns, both floral and geometric. Born as a traditional Chinese dress, the qipao became a symbol of the Shanghainese upper-class and its sensibility. The qipaos worn by Shanghainese women were flattering, glamorous, expensive; in them, Chinese tailoring met western sensibility in the use of form-fitting cuts and in the addition of deeper slits. The qipao is tradition and cosmopolitanism at once. Su-li Zhen, Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) wears approximately twenty qipaos throughout the movie. She does not wear any other style of dress. Not only do we have a style that is being repeated, but we also have the repetition of the very same qipao, for sometimes she wears them multiple times. We are led to infer that those dresses sit in her wardrobe; we imagine her choosing one in the morning before leaving for work. As mentioned, In the Mood for Love is filled with references to Shanghainese expats, and expats bring their lives, at least portions of them, with them. It is inevitable not to imagine Mrs. Chan bringing those  qipaos with her from Shanghai: they are a symbol of her previous life, of wealth, of her social status, but they are also all she has

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left—hence, perhaps, the wearing, at times, of a previously seen one. Worn every day, the qipaos become a window into her past, which is never disclosed to us, but that is nonetheless there, worn on her body. In addition to revealing characteristics of what the audience can speculate might have been Mrs. Chan’s past, the repetition of the qipao plays at least other two functions in the movie: one is related to the narrative unfolding and, in tandem, meaning of the story; the second is instead a reflection on the nature of childhood memories. The repetition of the qipao works together with the narrative organization of the movie. It is linear, chronological, and adapted to the mundane rhythm of everyday activity. Mrs. Chan moves, in her dresses, along the same corridors (where her dresses often match the wallpaper), she walks down and up the same stairs, she performs virtually the same actions: we see her at work, later, we follow her at the noodle stand. The repetition of her dress symbolizes her routine and the nature of the love story at hand, where nothing truly changes. The love between her and Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung) is about repetition with no signs of progress; it is characterized by a certain longing, a malaise that Won Kar Wai inherits from Michelangelo Antonioni (the insistence on frames, and the sense of constant “spying on” characters reinforces the analogy). It is about impossibility, but an impossibility that is not due to fate but choice; for, after all, the two protagonists refuse to be like their respective partners. They refuse betrayal by never allowing their love to progress. On a different level, the use of repetition, so clearly evoked by the twenty qipaos we see in the movie, is also an insight into the director’s influences and what makes In the Mood for Love an autobiographically tinted movie. Won Kar Wai was a child when he moved to Hong Kong, and the memories we see reflected in the film are the memories of a child. Childhood memories often come in recurring fragments, following the structure of repetition we find in the movie. Memories of food and songs, replayed and eaten again;

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memories, in our case, of dresses and fabrics that echo Shanghainese identity, but that were also, it should be noted, worn by the heroines of the Hong Kong/Hollywood films Won Kar Wai used to watch with his mother as a child. The qipaos we see in the movie complement the mood carried on by the film’s cinematography; they reflect the pattern of memories, a mood of longing that is felt in fiction through the film’s cinematography and nonfictionally, as a glimpse into the director’s life. One more time in fashion, repetition can lead to uniqueness.

Conclusions: Rethinking Repetition All the movies discussed in this section feature romance, and it is not entirely a coincidence, for romance repeats itself through life, and yet hardly ever in the same way. The duo of repetition and novelty is also something we find in fashion and something central to the movies analyzed and their costumes. Svendsen’s criticism of fashion and its purported inability to truly deliver anything new is, I believe, at least partly refuted by such examples. Repetition is played in different ways, and so is its connection to novelty. From a narrative device to a clue to interpreting the nature of the characters and the meaning of a film, repetition in fashion and costumes deserves to be treated as a prominent component in the cinematic and critical analysis of film. In the next chapter,  I  turn to another feature of fashion: its connection to the body—to bodies on screen.

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Exploring the Body A fascinating feature of one’s body is that it simultaneously defines and eludes us. While we are often aware of the presence of our body—feeling fatigued, a sore muscle, a pounding headache—we are also partly blocked from a complete understanding of it. We cannot see ourselves from the outside or see ourselves moving; we cannot capture the very expressions we make. Appearance, often regarded as superficial, is more mysterious than we may think, the way we look being something we may not own or fully grasp. Fashion can be seen as a stratagem to bridge this gap or, at the very least, of acknowledging its potential. Fashion items put us in a dialogue with the way we look, providing us with solutions to render the body. Fashion gives us an angle and perspective from which the body can be observed—it is not seeing, but, to quote John Berger, a way of seeing (Berger, 1972). But observing the body is a complex activity, no matter whether such an observation is a form of self-reflection or whether the observations we are contemplating are coming from others. Historically, Western philosophy has looked down at the body— Plato, Descartes, Kant. It is not, arguably, until Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology that the body—and its importance—will again not just make an appearance, but become a focus of philosophical discussion (Merleau-Ponty, 2012). Merleau-Ponty’s work exercised an influence on feminist philosophers, from Judith Butler to Iris Marion Young, and attention

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to the body is today a central concern of scholars working in ethics and aesthetics (Butler, 1990; Young, 1980). Such attention is also the primary tenet of several, relatively new branches of aesthetics: somaesthetics, started by Richard Shusterman in the 1990s (Shusterman, 1999, 2012), and body aesthetics, with contributors such  as Sherri Irvin (who, in 2016, edited the groundbreaking collection Body Aesthetics), Paul Taylor, Anne W. Eaton, and several others. The research aims of these fields are eclectic, but they share common features. First, the consideration of the sociocultural milieu that bodies inhabit. This implies consideration of how bodies are perceived in the current culture: think, for example, of advertising, dieting, social media, and the overall importance given to how bodies are seen, received, appreciated, and sadly often denigrated. Second, these accounts often see the body as an opportunity for self-reflection, as the incipit for an investigation on one’s identity and values. In this sense, the body is the most immediate starting point for a discussion on race, gender, and ableism. This chapter explores the ways in which these debates intersect with fashion’s relationship to the body, a relationship that, as briefly mentioned in the opening chapter, is not without contradictions. I will explore these topics by looking at three movies: Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018), Mad Max Fury Road (George Miller, 2015), and Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016).

Fashion and the Body: Staring and Strategies for Aesthetic Exploration Identity is constructed through physicality: fashion is often one of the vehicles of such construction. Fashion makes us aware of our presence, the space we occupy, and the boundaries that a body’s shape

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establishes. It is informative, in this sense, of a conception of identity that is not limited to life events and thought processes; the identity we explore through, and thanks to the body, is inherently performative and situated. It is inevitable, we look at bodies; often, we stare. The ways in which we look at bodies are, of course, multiple. There is, first and foremost, a sense of self-interrogation for bodies change over time and with them the assessment of our identity. As  I  am writing this chapter, my body is changing. I am pregnant with my first child. For this reason,  I  am even more keenly aware that bodily changes are daily, visible, and felt; they require care, attention, and at times the reconsideration of my identity as a woman. There is growth; there are the ways we alter our bodies through exercise, dieting, bodily modification such as piercings, tattoos, and plastic surgery. These changes often lead to an exploration of ourselves that, in turn, puts us at a dialogue with the environment, institutions, accepted mores, and standards that surround the reception and assessment of bodies. There are cases of fitting in, but also sharp confrontations with the systems in which we are embedded, systems that, at times, and sadly, rest on institutionalized forms of oppression. Needless to say, such systems are concerned primarily with appearance: perceived attractiveness, gender-based and racialized conceptions of beauty, and accounts of ableism—to mention some of the most prominent. These systems exercise considerable power in fashion, beginning with the fashion industry. The ways bodies are displayed, advertised, and adorned in fashion magazines, media (and especially social media) weigh on the appreciation of our bodies, the bodies of others, and how bodily appearance affects values and identity. We are attracted to some bodies and repulsed by others: we are naturally curious. We stare and assess bodies more frequently than we may be willing to admit. In part, as evolutionary psychologists insist, this is simply a matter of who we are and our evolutionary instincts.

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A fit body is more likely to be a healthy body, and a healthy body, the story goes, has higher reproductive chances. This is true, but up to a point. To begin with, as David Davies has shown in his assessment of such theses, fitness in a body hardly compares to the beauty standards of the latest Instagram feed. He notes how symmetrical and unusual features can be equally attractive, for they trigger our curiosity. It is also essential to observe that from an evolutionary standpoint, older female specimens (in both human and nonhuman animals) are typically preferred to younger ones because of their “record” of successful breeding; after all, for our ancestors (and the preferences of our ancestors are, according to the tenets of evolutionary psychology, still affecting our dispositions), a woman who has already given birth has fewer chances of dying in childbirth (Davies, 2012: 105). Lastly, evoking evolutionary psychology as the “natural” basis for specific beauty standards may be altogether misleading, or at least stubbornly one-sided, for beauty has what Davies refers to as a “social side.” When choosing a partner, we look for loyalty, chemistry, humor, and kindness: we look for someone to spend a life with, perhaps have children with, and for someone who can be a partner in matters that go beyond sexuality and immediate attraction. Character and beauty are both relevant and cannot be disjointed: beauty standards cannot, therefore, be analyzed or picked in isolation (Davies, 2012: 111–15). But, as mentioned, even after admitting that attractiveness is not exclusively based on natural standards of fitness, a pressing concern with perceived attractiveness or unattractiveness remains: its connection to other evaluative judgments and specifically to judgments that can lead to systemic injustice. Sherri Irvin, in her 2017 paper “Resisting Body Oppression: An Aesthetic Approach,” tackles precisely this issue; as she claims, “we have a picture whereby, from the moment of birth, attractive people (with a few exceptions)

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accrue positive social capital in families, schools, and workplaces, while unattractive people pay a very substantial penalty that may involve less positive parental attention, less support from teachers, less recognition for their qualifications, less help when they need it, more punishment, and so forth” (Irvin, 2017: 6). Irvin’s response is to develop aesthetic exploration strategies that aim to encourage individuals to turn to a positive aesthetic outlook of bodies. Such strategies include seeking out a body’s particular aesthetic affordances and exploring bodies  with the goal of developing both interest and openness. The notion of aesthetic exploration and the possibility of positive aesthetics are notions I am sympathetic to. First, to echo Irvin, because these are strategies that can effectively fight systemic oppression, but also because it is possible, as  I  will argue through filmic examples in the next section, to use fashion—and its performative expression through movies—to enact them not only on an individual but also on a collective scale. This latter point, the expansion of aesthetic exploration from the individual to the collective level, and therefore the possibility of making it a structured endeavor, is crucial. Irvin suggests to begin with our own bodies; she encourages the reader to focus on her own hands or any other part of her body, or linger on the examination of the body of a loved one. But it is also desirable, if we are to shift our standards in the evaluation of bodies, and, with them, our judgments (aesthetic and not), to broaden the scope of our exploration to society and to the inclusion, and appreciation, of bodies that are diverse, non-conforming, and yet, as mentioned, interesting, beautiful, and positively surprising. The contribution of fashion and movies to this endeavor is then something we should consider and promote. The emphasis on social justice (and on fighting systems of oppression) we encounter in the work of scholars such as Irvin is also an indicator that a discussion on the body—and in our case,

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of how fashion in film is revelatory of issues of bodily identity—is also intertwined with discussions on race and ableism. Judgments of attractiveness and unattractiveness are frequently connected to racialized standards of beauty privileging Caucasian features. In the opening of this book,  I  have mentioned the work of Paul Taylor in Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (2017), where he dedicates a chapter to “hair affairs” and the imposition and perception of hair straightening among Black women. Advertising mostly straight, easy-to-comb hair—relatively common in Caucasian females—hair straightening products warn against “regression” to kinky hair, as if natural hair, in Black women, were to be regarded as “unkept,” thus signaling an aesthetic defect that could potentially spill into other value areas (Taylor, 2016: 104–31).  I  have also, in conjunction, begun to hint at promising avenues promoting inclusive standards of beauty, both in media culture, as in the case of Urban Bush Babes, a fashion blog started by the Quann sisters, who, throughout the years, have reached the status of fashion gurus while also proudly sporting natural hair, and among scholars in academia. Promising research can come, in this latter case, from scholarship on intersectionality. Originating in Black feminist thought with the work of Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1989), it has been embraced by contemporary feminism as a potential response to the problems of exclusions (Carastathis, 2014: 304), thus offering the possibility for a more nuanced understanding of cases where existing theoretical paradigms have proven unsatisfactory. In Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric, Madison Moore accomplishes precisely such a goal while also shifting the attention back to fashion, costumes, and their performative nature (Moore, 2018). Moore’s goal is to explore the importance of being “fabulous” in the queer community. To be fabulous is a way for marginalized people, predominantly Black and brown queer people, to be recognized in their

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creative difference. To be fabulous is provocative, with provocation blending playfulness and activism, imaginatively driving the two in the same direction. He calls for “creative strangeness” past gender and race and uses fashion and fabulous outfits as the propelling force. All forms of beautiful eccentricity put the body on the cutting edge of identity, and this is why it is a meaningful aesthetic. […] beautiful eccentrics look forward to every new chance they get to use fashion and performance to say that they are not their marginalization. Fabulousness, as the fashion theorist Carol Tulloch might say, offers an agency that shows how selves are created through a range of craft-making practices that are applied directly to the body. (Moore, 2018: 16)

There is much to learn from this approach, for we can learn from fashion, use it to empower us, and to better connect the intimate and the public. Another issue this chapter will pay attention to is ableism and responses to differently abled bodies and their ways of being fashioned. Perhaps in this context more than in others, we need to be reminded of the role played by “staring” as beautifully articulated in Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s essay “Ways of Staring” (GarlandThomson, 2006). Garland-Thomson analyzes staring as a form of social choreography; it is an interpersonal practice where we learn about others and ourselves, both a confrontation and an encounter— the “most intense form of looking.” More narrowly, she points to arrested staring and separated staring, the first implying arrested comportment and frozen astonishment, the second a form of visual fleeing. In the first, we stare, paralyzed, arrested in the recognition of something different, foreign, likely uncomfortable. In the second, becoming aware of our own stare leads to embarrassment. We do not want to be caught staring: caught staring and potentially judging what we see.

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And yet, it is possible, she urges us, to turn arrested and separated staring into a form of identification rather than differentiation, an opening for mutual transformation. That’s learning to see. Garland-Thomson’s analysis is a helpful starting point for the analysis of the reception of disabled bodies. It provides a structure for “seeing,” one that is close and compatible with Irvin’s notion of aesthetic exploration. It is fruitful, in addition, to look at her research in tandem with the work of Tobin Siebers (Siebers, 2008). Grounded in disability studies and philosophical aesthetics, Siebers’ work is also the most fitting link to explore the relationship between disabled bodies, fashion, and film as it is primarily concerned with the representation of the differently able bodies (Siebers, 2006). Siebers criticizes a representation of the disabled body as one that is deficient, “other” and draws a connection between disability studies and aesthetics by remarking that “aesthetics tracks the emotions that some bodies feel in the presence of other bodies,” making it the perfect standpoint from which to analyze the representation and perception of disabled bodies in the arts and, in our case, in movies. When discussing the role of disability in art history, Siebers notes how we would not have a conception of the beautiful in art if we had not taken into consideration the disabled body. Linking disability and beauty he observes how “… the acceptance of disability enriches and complicates materialist notions of the aesthetic, while the rejection of disability limits definitions of artistic ideas and objects,” he writes, “… good art incorporates disability” (Sibers, 2006: 64–5). His argument is supported by several examples. He notes how the Venus of Milo, and the lack of her arms, has for centuries been the paradigm of aesthetic beauty, the quintessential female body. Her missing arms are the result of not being properly preserved, and yet, they entered our

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imagination and become a staple of art history. Picturing her with arms would go against our experience of art, it would go against popular imagination—and the statue is indeed a part of it—but it would also go against, Siebers notes, the appreciation of her aesthetic quality. With arms, he continues, her beauty may not be recognizable, her grace would escape us—her uniqueness lost. Siebers finds confirmation for such a statement in the work of artists, such as Renè Magritte, who painted the Venus armstumps in his Les Menottes de Cuivre in blood-red or, later, in the work of Alison Lapper whose pregnant, disabled body stood as a remarkable sign of her femininity. Beauty is a function of its manifestation; the synergy between the representation of disability and art and the contribution brought by disability to the history of art have transformative power and can reshape standards of bodily attractiveness. Fashion and film can further contribute to this mission. While the fashion and movie industries are only rarely an aid to our understanding of disability, and while we are still far from the kind of inclusion and acceptance of people whose bodies are seen as disabled, changes are visible. We have finally stepped away from the hideous classification of disability as a medical abnormality, and stereotyping and discrimination are less present than they used to be. Disability, we have come to recognize, characterizes everyone, for everyone faces it during the course of her life, and the course of life is in itself a path toward the losing of certain physical abilities; it is also a path,  I  believe, toward the gaining of others, physical and not. Film is beginning to show a more pronounced social and political stance, one that can be, when considering the vast audience that film can reach, critically stimulating. As the movie industry is beginning to acknowledge the work of female directors, actors of color, and

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members of the LGBTQ+ community, it is also opening the door to differently abled bodies and to conversations on equality and dignity. Such a contribution, when used productively, can lead to the questioning of obtuse understandings of bodies, attractiveness, and normalcy. In the remaining portion of this chapter, we will look at fashion and costumes and how they can aid, to again follow Irvin’s suggestions, aesthetic exploration. I will also, in line with the purpose of this book, underline the significance of such explorations of the body in relation to the very definition and understanding of fashion.

Furiosa’s Strength In 2016, Lesley Vanderwalt (hair and make-up) and Jenny Beavan won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design for their work on Mad Max: Fury Road. It was not Beavan’s usual film as she had previously trafficked in costume dramas of the like of Howards End (James Ivory, 1993), The Remains of the Day (James Ivory, 1993), Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee, 1995), and others (what Rachel Lee Harris labels “bonnet and corset” pictures; Lee, 2016), but her ingenuity and creativity are not only undeniable, they are essential to the flow and character of the film. Shot against the stunning apocalyptic backdrop of the Namibia desert, the movie is the fourth Mad Max film. Still, it is also, most definitely, a distinct work, one that combines the thrill of adventure with issues of water and food scarcity, mechanized society, and environmental catastrophe (Lane, 2015; Lee Harris, 2016). The narrative is not particularly intricate: in the end, it is a car chase into the desert. Led by tyrannical Immortan Joe, played by Hugh Keays-Byrne, the world of Mad Max is one in which water is scarce, gasoline is essential, and pretty much nothing else matters. The

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women we encounter are either wives (a selected group of top-model looking women chosen to carry the children of Immortan Joe) or breeders, their engorged breasts hooked to machines to produce milk—the most horrifying version of a breast pump. Then we have the two main characters, Imperator Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron, highly trusted by Immortan Joe, who is put in charge of the mission to find and bring back gasoline, and Max, played by Tom Hardy, who has been captured, but has managed to escape. Furiosa, we soon learn, has no interest in obeying Immortan Joe’s orders: she wants to boycott the mission to bring back gasoline and reach instead the “Green Place,” a promised land she remembers from childhood: green, with plenty of water, and fertile. She also has an important cargo with her: the mastodontic truck she is driving is hiding Immortan Joe’s five wives, a clear way of disobeying his orders and undermining his power. Max, more or less unwillingly, will end up joining her plan. And so the impressive car chase begins. What’s impressive is not just the chase—unfathomable speed, spectacular accidents, and heavy metal music—but the way it is adorned, its costumes and machines (and the combination of both). The first feature of costumes in Mad Max is that, in a way, they are not for humans only, but a seamless blend of humans and vehicles.1 Costumes display the hybrid nature of the bodies they cover and reveal; when costumes emphasize machine-like and mechanized aspects, as in Immortan Joe and in the War Boys, what emerges is the decay of human features. Immortan Joe, as Vanderwalt remarks, “[had] become quite putrid really, from all the toxic waste and years of battles,”—a life spent living and depending on machines has, literally, taken any semblance of life and living away from him (Lee Harris, 2016). On the other hand, the lack of machine-like components leads to the opposite effects. The wives, dressed only in muslin cloth, may at first appear even too ethereal (when we first

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encounter them, showering by the truck in the middle of the desert, they may be part of a mirage or an erotic dream—either, really), but in the end, what they are is nothing but human, and, one may add, almost impossibly human given the conditions of the world they live in. While everything in Immortan Joe is about decay, his body rotting in front of us, everything in them is about fullness, regeneration, and, of course, birth: his favorite wife is heavily pregnant, and her pregnant body is used, throughout the movie, as a shield—one that, we’ll discover, is just as sturdy as Immortan Joe’s carapace. Revealing the female body corresponds, in Mad Max, to showing its strength, thus making it an example of positive aesthetics, as discussed in the previous section, of recognition and acceptance, and of the kind of aesthetic exploration that movies,  I  believe, can encourage. The body of Imperator Furiosa, and the costumes that reveal it to us, invite such a positive stare, initiating a process of recognition of who Furiosa is, her identity, and our relationship to her. The first thing we learn about Furiosa is that she’s a warrior and respected. She drives the truck nobody else is allowed to drive; she’s in charge of the mission. Soon afterward, we become aware of her independence, for the mission she puts herself in charge of is, as seen, not the one assigned to her by Immortan Joe: another nod to her strength. Costumes inform this side of her. Like an amazon, her breasts are wrapped; as if wearing a war mask, her eyes and forehead are covered in black, oily grease from the truck. It is, we assume, another reminder of what before we have seen as being the dual nature of the characters, their connection to both machine and natural components. But Furiosa is nonetheless somewhat different, as we discover later in the movie, when the truck stalls in the desert. The wives are enjoying a brief moment of rest. They are washing and finally getting rid of the immobilizing metal chains Immortan Joe had forced upon their bodies. We see Furiosa from the back, a shot that resembles the first time we saw her, back at the Citadel, about

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to jump in her vehicle, but this time around, what captures us, what catches our stare, is that Furiosa is an amputee; she is missing an arm. Her stump is not covered, and she’s not wearing the prosthetic arm she uses to drive the truck. The lack of the prosthetic arm—an essential component of her costume—augments her strength. Furiosa is no less beautiful than the wives, no less courageous than any of the warriors, no less relevant to the plot structure than any of the characters. Her missing arm does not make her a victim; its absence is acknowledged and respected, making our gaze transition, as Garland Thomson wishes us to do, from an arrested or separated staring—one frozen, the other distant—to an engaged one. We identify with her, her body, and her role and status in the movie. From that moment on, it’s her that we follow. Max is hardly in a different position. He won’t take over as the hero, and he’ll stand by her side. And so will we, for we have learned to see her imperfection as a feature of who she is, apart from standards of attractiveness or unattractiveness. The wearing and removal of the prosthetic arm and the way her costume emphasizes her body are signs of her nuanced complexity, of her identity.

Black Panther: Carter’s Superhero Costumes, Worn Everyday Black Panther’s success is due to both its cinematic and cultural merits, making it an example of how aesthetics can interact, dialogue, and positively shape the sociocultural milieu from which it emerges. From a cinematic standpoint, the film innovates the MCU tradition by featuring, for the first time, a black character in the leading role. It has a black director, Ryan Coogler, and a mostly black crew. It is a superhero movie, but one that looks at the current society and its diversity. Wakanda, the world they created, is a production marvel, one layer of which, costumes, will be explored

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in this section. Beyond its beauty and the immediate appeal of its cinematography, the film is also an example, as Paul Taylor has argued, of the possibility of Black aesthetics and of the importance of establishing, in tandem with Black aesthetics, an aesthetic of reconstruction (Taylor, 2020). The call for an aesthetic of reconstruction was first voiced by John Dewey (Dewey, 2019). The father of an aesthetic grounded on experience and on continuous, phenomenological sensibility and appreciation for the world that surrounds us, Dewey felt the need to shake up existing philosophical and theoretical frameworks from their  formalist rigidity. Taylor, who is similarly interested in an aesthetic of reconstruction, commends Dewey’s agenda and yet highlights its flaws: Dewey’s analysis lacked genuine consideration of society’s reality and specifically of the racial politics of the time. A system of white supremacy was in place (it still is), but Dewey, and others, failed to acknowledge its presence and criticize its disproportionate influence. A movie like Black Panther positions itself, if not as a solution, at least as an indicator of what is instead an aesthetic of reconstruction, one capable, in Taylor’s words, of becoming a conversation about theories, one that combines theoretical and conceptual considerations while “interrogating the institutional conditions under which dominant ways of thinking attain their influence” (Taylor, 2020: 33). The film’s box office success is a reminder of such a need: it responded to a “long-simmering demand for cinematic experiences that foreground black characters and life-worlds” (Taylor, 2020: 41). It is not, significantly, just a matter of including black characters; it is a matter of showing an interest in black life, in its reality, traditions, and in the theoretical conversations that are the everyday of Black studies and its dialogue with other cultural and philosophical traditions. These conversations revolve around issues of invisibility, authenticity, and appropriation—all of which are present in the film

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(Taylor, 2020: 33). Wakanda is hidden from the world, the nature of its identity is at stake—the plot is based on the decision of what course of action should be pursued to protect it and maintain its integrity—and the production of the movie is a constant reminder of African traditions thus making one ponder over the question of appropriation. Importantly for our purposes, the questions raised by the three themes, invisibility, authenticity, and appropriation, are also nested in the film’s production design, by Hannah Beacher, and in Ruth E. Carter’s costumes. Carter’s research for the film is not unlike the one a costume designer would conduct for a period film: there is research in terms of distinct traditions (the Tuareg inspire the merchant tribe, the mining tribe resembles the Himba of Namibia, known for their red ocher body paint and leather headpieces, etc.), techniques (think of beading and pattern design), fabrics, hand-dying, and also contemporary trends in African fashion as well as cultural movements such as Afro-futurism.2 Her research, the eclectic way in which she combines tradition and recent influences, matches the spirit of the film: Wakanda is a place where futuristic technology and traditions work hand in hand, where they protect and support each other. The movie itself is about their relationship. When we look at costumes, the most striking example of the blend and mutual collaboration of technology and tradition may be the Black Panther suit worn by T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), created by Marvel character designer Ryan Meinerding and re-conceived by Carter. Made in eurojersey (a tech-fabric used for high-performance sports clothing), the suit is distinctive for two main reasons: the first is the presence of the triangular pattern typical of kente cloth, a nod to tradition echoed by several other costumes in the movie, the second is that the suit disappears. Its power can be made invisible, it can be hidden thanks to the technological advances of Shuri’s lab

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(Letitia Wright), T’Challa’s younger sister, who has ideated it. The suit can conceal in a modest, traditional necklace (it is important to emphasize, in this respect, that when asked to choose between two “suit-generating” necklaces, T’Challa chooses the most humble one, thus further directing our attention to issues of invisibility): what’s hidden (only to be spectacularly revealed) are a blend of traditions, the powerful technology of Wakanda, and the forward-looking mindset of T’Challa who is determined to integrate the world of Wakanda without recurring to violence (contrary to the black nationalism of his adversary, and cousin, Erik Killmonger—played by Michael B. Jordan) and without sacrificing its multicultural history and tradition. More examples can be mentioned. There is Queen Ramonda’s (Angela Bassett) collar and headpiece. 3D printed in Belgium by UCLA architecture professor Julia Koerner; it is a way of bringing contemporary fashion technology in touch with both Marvel history (the headpiece is modeled on the one we see in the comics), and the hats that are traditionally worn by Zulu women. The gorgeous blanket in which W’Kabi, played by Daniel Kaluuya, is wrapped echoes a Lesotho blanket, on one side. The other is screen printed with Wakanda’s powerful fictional metal, Vibranium, in Adinkra symbols that allow the blankets to transform themselves into tech-inspired battle shields. Nakia, a Wakandan spy (Lupita Nyong’o), wears a sleek “Bond” dress with a 3D printed kente pattern of the Akan people of Ghana that is just as much about royalty and adherence to tradition as it is the most appropriate outfit to wear if one is scheduled to get into a pretty impressive fight (it is, after all, a superhero movie). Such intermingling of technology and tradition, innovation, and meticulous historical and cultural research is the starting point for what in Black Panther is a visual commentary on bodies—on black bodies. Perhaps the most direct way of seeing such a connection is the use of a bright, intense, and mesmerizing color palette. A movie

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that puts black bodies at center stage is also a movie about color, diversity, and the boldness and cheer with which pigments are brought forward. bell hooks, closes an autobiographical piece by reminding her reader to learn how to see blackness differently, as something “strange and oppositional” (bell hooks, 1995: 72). Her piece invites a different way of seeing darkness, dark rooms, the history of those rooms, and the memories of a black girl who is to become a poet and a critic; it is a way of taking darkness out of the hands of the invisible. Similarly, Black Panther revisits blackness and how it is perceived. Wakanda may be hidden, but it is luscious and bright. It is complex, a reign of multiple cultures, of different epochs, of values and traditions that we keep seeing on the bodies of its inhabitants, on the clothes that adorn them. The visibility of black bodies in the film, and the ways fashion enables and underscores it, are matched by a reflection on authenticity and on how to approach and discuss issues of appropriation. The authenticity of the costumes worn by Wakandans is based on the striking blend of the traditions, trends, and cultures that led to their creation. It is an authenticity “in progress,” for nothing authentic stays the same, immune to change. And so is black identity. Tommy Shelby and Paul Taylor both look at black identity as something that is based not on a naturalized conception of race, but instead as something that allows for conversation. The basis for black identity is a history of common oppression which, unlike firm beliefs in a nationalist agenda, allows for ideas to flow, develop, and contaminate each other (Tommy Shelby, 2002). We see this on Wakanda’s people, on their clothes. Carter herself, describing her work and philosophy in an interview with Tanisha Ford, rejects any assimilation of her work to pre-existing trends, whether rooted in African tradition or evocative of Afropunk and Afro-futurism. She confesses that Wakanda’s fashion is “absolutely saying we’re not falling

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into any kind of mold of the way things should be. We’re going to create our own. The time is now” (Tanisha Ford, 2018). What’s authentic, and here the line between a superhero movie and reality fades, is the eclectic and multifaceted nature of black identity and its traditions. It is the starting point for a real interest in black lives. In this sense, the movie, I believe, goes past issues of appropriation. The costumes of Black Panther are not about “borrowing” as they are about perspective and the creation of perspective. As argued in the previous chapter, repeating a pattern such as the kente triangular pattern is not merely copying a tradition: it is the presentation, in fabric, beads, and 3D prints of something unequivocally new and progressive.

Moonlight: The Gold Grill Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016) is a coming-of-age movie, or so one would classify it were we to slot into a specific genre. And yet, as it often happens, and as  I  believe it does happen in Jenkins’ film, genre classification seems to banalize its content and the audience’s expectations; “coming of age” seems a bit stuffy, antiquated even. I prefer to think of Moonlight as a movie about a name. Names introduce us. A name is the first bit, together with our body, we offer to others: it is something we need to learn to say. We can say that Moonlight is a movie about Black (Trevante Rhodes), who used to be Little (Alex Hibbert) because, back then, as a child, he could not utter (because of a combination of shyness, fear, and embarrassment) his real name, Chiron. Living with a single mother, Paula (Naomi Harris), who suffers from drug addiction, Little happens to meet Juan (Mahershala Ali), who, despite being a drug dealer, is also a paternal figure, a source of safety. In one of the most poignant scenes of the movie, he will take him swimming, holding his body in the crystalline ocean water, a baptism and rebirth.

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Little is a Black man, he is gay, and the way in which the movie reveals his sexual identity is delicate, suffused, and authentic. Moonlight, following the discussion started with Black Panther, is an opportunity to discuss race in context, in the current sociocultural system, in light of present and past institutions, and of other social identity categories. Moonlight, in this sense, opens a discussion on intersectionality, how blackness affects queerness and vice versa, their encounter and dynamics. I have mentioned, at the beginning of this chapter, the work of Madison Moore on fabulousness and on what it is like to be fabulous for the marginalized community of Black and brown queer people (Moore, 2018). Moore uses fabulousness as a way of going past gender boundaries, as a vindication and affirmation that is not without obstacles; fabulous people steal a look, but they also risk their lives. They do every time they hail a cab, walk down the grocery store aisle, and meet a friend at a café. They ought to be fabulous and courageous. While fabulous outfits are not what we see in Moonlight, an aesthetic of fabulousness is still visible in the minimal gestures that characterize the movie, in their enchanting simplicity. This chapter has focused mostly on complex, ornate costumes. But fashion does not act exclusively through such sartorial feats. It is about details, small objects. In Moonlight, one of these objects is a gold dental grill—and the way it is removed. Doniella David, Moonlight’s make-up artist, bought the grill at Dr. Kelly Gold Grillz in Miami for $700 (you can find them for a lower price, they told her, but they look yellow). Like everything else in the film, oil, skin, sweat, Paula’s dark circles, the grill shines its special light—moonlight in Miami. Trevante Rhodes, Black, wears it in the third and last portion of the movie. He is a man now, imposing and muscular. He deals drugs in Atlanta, but a call from his high-school friend, and first lover, Kevin (André Holland), brings him back to Miami. Kevin is a cook now.

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Black parks the car, fixes his hair, adjusts his shirt. He checks his breath for a moment and walks into the diner; Aretha Franklin’s One Step Ahead is playing. Sitting at the counter, his eyes encounter Kevin’s, who tells him that he hasn’t changed one bit: “You still can’t say more than three words at a time.” Black, in fact, has changed a lot since their high school days, at least his body certainly has, but his most distinctive feature—the inability to speak up, to say his name— is still there. To know that his name is something he can’t entirely utter is to care about him, as Juan did in the first portion of the movie, and as Kevin does in the last. Juan had brought him to his home to eat, Kevin will serve him dinner: the chef ’s special. It is not that often, in a movie, that we see a man cooking for another man, and I can’t recall a case in which the cooking involves so much care and longing. It’s arroz con pollo; the rice is molded in a small takeout container before being placed on the dish next to a scoop of beans, there’s cilantro sprinkled on top. Time slows down; it is savored. Black has to remove his grill to eat the meal, which he does as Kevin fetches a bottle of wine from the back, already open, and then another. They’ll drink wine from plastic cups, even though, Black confesses shyly, he does not drink wine. The grill Black is wearing is gold, so is his chain, and he wears diamond studs. He bought them with drug money, bought them, we assume, to show his status. But a grill is also a cover, and that cover will remain there—on his teeth, smile, and words—until his meeting with Kevin. Until Kevin will feed him, pour him a drink. The grill loses its function as a shield—it is no longer a barrier, an imposition. A gold grill stands for masculinity, force, and, in Black’s case, for what he can’t confess. His lack of words—and words need teeth to be uttered—parallels his inability to embrace his sexuality; until, dinner in front of him, the grill comes off. The wearing and removal of the grill problematize Black’s experience and, in turn, what it is like to be black and queer. Complexity and ambivalence are shared by the other male characters,

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Juan and Kevin. But despite their ambiguity, despite the difficulty we (and they) encounter when tracing their moral outlook and identity, all three recognize each other, they name each other. Robert Randolph notes how Moonlight makes “the intersectional lives of black queer men more legible, not to white audiences, but to black communities” (Randolph, Robert, 2017: 385). Black bodies, their lives, and stories become more intelligible when seen in the broader context of society and social identity. A gold grill is all these things: a personal object with a social meaning: in Moonlight, such a meaning has a twofold function. One has to do with wearing it: covering oneself, becoming a drug dealer, the inability to talk; the other with removing it: savoring the chef ’s special, wine, recognizing in Kevin a side of himself, the one with a name.

Conclusions: Aesthetic Explorations This chapter can be seen as an attempt at what Irvin defines as aesthetic exploration. We have, through Mad Max: Fury Road, Black Panther, and Moonlight, explored the embodied identities of characters that, fictional or not, see their bodies assessed by others and by broader social institutions and standards. Such exploration has brought us to considerations of ableism, race, and gender and to how they are situated in the context of these movies, but also, imaginatively, in our everyday. Costumes have been the leading guide. And it could not have been otherwise. Costumes, in film, are our first access to the bodies of characters; they cover them while signaling who they are (or may be), they raise questions about their identities and foreground our expectations. In all these movies, costumes are also worn and taken off, thus displaying the power that a garment can have on the body in both situations. Furiosa’s prosthetic arm, the Black Panther suit, and Black’s gold dental grill appear and disappear: their removal affects

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the narrative. It contributes to the pace and unfolding of these movies while directing our assessment of who the characters are and what their fate will be. As remarked in the opening of this chapter, we often stare at bodies. We also stare at movies. The costumes we encounter in the three movies analyzed in this chapter contribute to such staring and, I want to argue, its positive valence. As an aesthetic form, a film can alter our moral compass; it can problematize our conception of values. It can through the stories it tells, through its images, and, as  I  continue to insist, through its costumes. Furthermore, the possibility of such shifts is not just a matter of individual sensibility. For, Noël Carroll has argued (Carroll, 1985), film is and will remain a mass art. It can encourage a larger, joint shift in how we, as a society, respond to the values and identity that are communicated thanks and through bodies. The movies analyzed in this chapter are mainstream. They are beautiful movies and stunning artworks, but they are not for the selected few. They have won prestigious prizes and filled movie theaters. Half of the kids parading the streets of New York for Halloween wore replicas of the costumes we see in Mad Max and Black Panther. Moonlight won eight Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. One can be a skeptic and argue that what captured the imagination of so many people were the fantastic worlds they depicted, the special effects, the bold colors, and sounds. But  I  am inclined to think that part of the attractiveness of such movies is how they map our encounters with the body and with a multiplicity of body identities. Such identities do not belong exclusively to the screen, to fantasy or sci-fi; they are around us, better, they are us. Fashion can teach us how to explore our bodies, recognize the body of others, and embrace diversity as a feature of who we are.

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Acknowledging Costume Design The previous two chapters have, through the use of filmic examples, outlined two essential components of a philosophical understanding and definition of fashion: its ability to play with the dynamic of repetition and novelty, and, in the third chapter, fashion’s connection to the body; fashion can be a vehicle for the expression of bodily identity, and it can also initiate a process of aesthetic exploration where bodies are investigated in and because of their diversity—be it gender, race, abilities, etc.—and aside from pre-established standards of attractiveness. Fashion, in both cases, has been presented under a positive light. I won’t deny that fashion can be used for consumeristic purposes, and  I  am aware that it would be foolish to see fashion only as the trigger for a positive aesthetic and exploration of the body: it only takes a few minutes of looking at high-fashion advertising or social media to realize how suffocating of a constraint it can be. But while these issues are widely discussed, in academia and not, an exclusive focus on the denunciation of fashion runs the risk of limiting our ability to see its potential and complexity and, most importantly, it hinders fashion present and future ability to exercise change, to critically engage in discussion with accepted standards, with overly conservative institutional responses, and, broadly, with the systems of oppression it is too often accused of supporting.

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Film has allowed us to achieve such a goal, and it is in part responsible for the positive outlook taken by the analysis. But the use of film is also motivated by the kind of art it ultimately is. While we can’t deny that film is changing—think of the changes to the movie industry caused by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic—it remains an art for the masses, perhaps increasingly so. As mentioned at the end of the previous chapter, this is part of its power. There are avant-garde films, independent cinema, experimental films, etc. Still, the overwhelming majority of what we watch is Hollywood international films, films that, whether produced by the US Hollywood system or elsewhere in the world but according to the same or similar systems of mass production, are exoteric, captivating, and tightly linked to their entertainment function (Carroll, 1988). Because of film’s power and because of its wide reach, I was curious to explore what it can communicate about fashion, thus contributing to the analysis of what fashion is and how it is perceived by the mass audience. In fact, I am not simply curious to investigate what film can say about fashion;  I  am interested in what movies say through fashion: how meaning is conveyed thanks to the use of fashion as an aesthetic means. The last two chapters have,  I  believe, offered an example of how this can be done. But the attentive reader would have noticed, by this point, that one question has been dodged: when the focus is on both fashion and film are we referring to fashion or costumes? And, what is the relationship between the two? This question has been tackled before; scholars in both fashion studies and film have commented on the relationship between fashion and costumes, their differences, and how one affects the other—the two often blending or sharing fragments of their evolutionary history. But such a mingling still deserves further investigation, especially as one of the concerns of this book is the performative nature of fashion, and to see fashion (and/or costumes) in a movie is to see them perform.

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I will begin with an overview of the relationship between costumes and film and then move to a series of filmic examples. I am interested, in these cases, in topics ranging from sartorial history to the switching of roles between directors and fashion designers to the synergy between walking the runway and movement in film.

Costumes? The relationship between film, fashion, costumes, and couture is complex. The fashion and the film industry are not extraneous, but they are also distinct. Booth Moore recognizes such friction. Whereas costume design is a creative art beholden to stories, the stories the screenwriter and director have created, fashion design is an industry whose creativity is based on the construction of desire. The fashion designer builds a fantasy through the runway and collections, but she’s also dependent on sales. On the opposite end, the costume designer may very well engage in the fantasy of film, but, oxymoronically, that fantasy works only when felt as real, when unquestioned, when, for the duration of the film, the audience can suspend its disbelief. The costume designer “strives for reality to sell a fantasy” (Moore, 2012: 154). There is then the question of identity, to which this book is not unfamiliar. The costumes we see in film help complete and, importantly, reveal the character’s identity. Costumes’ ability to inspire and guide an actor toward the impersonation of a character is well-documented, with actors such as Robert De Niro, Harrison Ford, and Meryl Streep attesting to the importance of a costume in making a character “come alive” (Landis, 2012). In the previous chapters, I further expanded on the importance of costumes in revealing the character’s identity while also focusing on the ramifications that such revealing entails. A character’s identity is not a matter of personality alone, for identity is inherently social and

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contextual. In this sense, as we have seen, a costume can significantly mark, question, investigate, and highlight issues of social identity and bodily identity. Costumes are props for what in philosophy we refer to as social epistemology. We should not disregard the ability of movies to propel such an analysis, as we have seen in the previous chapter with costumes such as the ones worn by Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road, the Black Panther suit, and Black’s grill in Moonlight. They initiate a conversation on issues of gender identity, race, and disability. Fashion choices outside of the film world can be equally powerful. I have defended fashion’s ability to contribute to the notion of identity by allowing the wearer to develop a personal style, a style that not only reflects who we are, but that allows for self-discovery (Di Summa, 2021a). In the next chapter, I’ll further emphasize how fashion may very well be a means to rethink philosophical accounts of personal identity, which tend to focus on narrative conceptions of the self, by emphasizing instead the importance of a performative side of identity, of episodic occurrences, tentativeness, and even errors. As we will see, identity is an ongoing exercise: fashion items, choices, and trends can allow us to experiment with it. One may worry about the distinction between everyday fashion choices, which largely constitute what  I  have above referred to as personal style, and the choices made by fashion designers, especially when it comes to the rarefied world of haute couture. It is a valid concern. What fashion designers and fashionistas recognize, advertise, and display is not necessarily related to a sense of personal identity, at least when we think of it in a somewhat narrow way, as something unique and as something that distinguishes us. It would be odd to see the wearing of trendy designer clothing as a relevant mark of personal identity and style. Relying exclusively on a logo or even sporting the latest fashion fads may strike as an anonymous decision, one dictated more by socio-economic power than by a desire to use fashion to express oneself. If that is indeed what one decides to wear,

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then fashion is probably not what that person chooses as a way of affirming herself—not strongly. After all, fashion is most definitely not the only way or the privileged way to express who we are. But, on a broader scale, and as the history of fashion design shows, iconic outfits such as Dior’s little black dress—from the 1940s on—contemporary designers such as Virgil Abloh and Off-White or Opening Ceremony, and fashion trends such as the heroin chic, minimalism, street-style, and more do contribute to a sense of identity. It may not be the identity of a single, individual person, but it is the identity of a generation, a collective, a social group—whether already existing or in the making. For fashion can also create new forms of collective identity. This is particularly true today, where such identity often emerges through and thanks to social media and their relation to contemporary fashion brands. We can be critical of it, and it is hard sometimes not to spot in it dangerous superficiality, but it can also be quite powerful and advance worthy causes.1 More should and will be said on the connection between fashion and identity—and couture and identity—in the next chapter. So far, their involvement with identity and its establishment has allowed me to refer to fashion choices within film and costumes somewhat interchangeably. But, again, we should be mindful of not confusing the two as each deserves separate analysis and considerations, considerations that will occupy me in this chapter. Lamentably, for the most part, care not to confuse an analysis of fashion with an analysis of costumes in film has not been thoroughly exercised. Beginning, arguably, with the work of Stella Bruzzi in the popular Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (1997) and continuing with scholars in both fashion studies and film studies, the accounts we encounter tend to focus on well-known fashion designers and their influence. Armani and American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980), Givenchy and Sabrina (Billy Wilder, 1954), Yves

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Saint Laurent and Belle de Jour (Luis Bunuel, 1967), and Chanel and Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1960) are some of the most quoted examples. More recent examples continue on this trend. The recent Shoe Reels: The History and Philosophy of Footwear in Film (Ezra and Whitley, eds. 2020) is admirable in finally turning the focus to shoes—always more than an accessory—but the tendency to overlap fashion and costumes remains there. The scope is broader: there is considerable attention to world cinema, a reflection on the role that shoes play in the narrative, and sociocultural issues do take center stage. Yet, it is hardly a philosophy of footwear—to this extent the title is, I believe, a bit misleading—and mostly an historical analysis of the role that footwear has played in film. It is about recognizing its role and function. The examples we encounter in these publications are catchy and often glamorous; the stories connecting designer, director, actors and actresses, and the film’s overall production are fascinating to follow, but they are also partial: what about the costume designer? What about all the other costumes, the ones not worn by the leading character? What about the difference between designer clothing and clothing designed to become costumes? The historian and costume designer Deborah Nadoolman Landis, the Director of the David C. Copley Center for Costume Design at UCLA, has attempted to fill this gap throughout her career and through Hollywood Costumes, an exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The exhibition, which ran from October 2012 to January 2013, put together over 100 iconic movie costumes, the product of research that unfolded as a treasure hunt taking her and her staff to private collections, foreign buyers, vintage stores, warehouses, and more (Landis, 2012: 178–87). For the most part, Landis appears to resent the patina of glamour that covers most accounts of fashion and film, especially as they

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typically omit references to the work of costume designers and lack a proper understanding of the nature and history of costume design. Her goal is to provide such a history and clarify and acknowledge the role of costume design in making a film. In the early years of film, actors were supposed to wear something appropriate to the part and regularly supplied their own clothes to the production. In the 1910s, influential figures such as the producer Adolph Zuckor and Director D. W. Griffith introduced the practice of making costumes for films produced in the United States (first in New York and then, partly because of the advantages of sunny California, in Los Angeles). But only the leading actress’ costumes required the employment of a costume designer, and even when the practice of designing costumes was extended to other members of the cast, as in Griffith’s Intolerance: Love’s Struggle through the Ages (1916)—the first film  where costumes were created for extras and lead roles alike—costume designers remained uncredited (Landis, 2012: 14). While there won’t be an award for costume design until 1948, several costume designers began to establish themselves thanks to their work in silent films where ornate costumes supplemented character information. Adrian Adolph Greenburg at Metro-GoldwynMayer and Howard Greer and Travis Banton at Paramount are some of the most notable names, names that will carry the development and ingenuity of costume design from the silent era to the Golden Age, navigating everything from budget cuts to the constraints imposed by the Hays code, Hollywood particularly limiting censorship system. Edith Head, one of the most renowned costume designers in the history of Hollywood, was hired by Paramount in 1923 and moved up the ladder until she became head designer. Thanks to figures like her, the role and function of costume designers in the overall movie production are finally acknowledged. At the risk of sounding schematic, three appear as the guiding threads of costume design. The first is adherence to the script and the

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instructions of the director. A costume designer does not act out of sheer creativity even though creativity is needed to design costumes meant to complement the instructions received. Helen Colvig and Rita Higgs, who worked with Alfred Hitchcock on some of his most well-known movies, for example, recall the director asking them to shop at a ready-to-wear store to build the wardrobe of Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960). They were instructed to pay only what a secretary could pay: they bought a bra and a half-slip, the first in white, the second in black to reflect Hitchcock’s desire to display our inner duality of good and evil. A second feature of costume design is to reflect what Robert Sinnerbrink has labeled the “mood” of a film. Outfits are not to be seen in isolation but in relation to both cinematography and narrative. They aid the disclosure of a “cinematic world,” they dictate the tempo of a film. While, as we have seen, in the beginning costume designers only clothed the lead characters, contemporary costume designers are responsible for leads and extras and for how costumes “interact” and blend together. Movies such as Mad Max: Fury Road and Black Panther, which we encountered in the previous chapter, are stellar examples of this feature of costume design. Lastly, costumes are intimately tied to characters. Costumes can help the actors understand and give life to their characters, making them memorable. In some instances, what matters is our inability, as members of the audience, to distinguish a character from her clothes: costumes are, to this extent, invisible. Costume designers talk about the importance of “not noticing” costumes. But, if  I  am correct, invisibility does not mean not noticing a costume—who, after all, can be completely blind to, say, a superhero costume—but not questioning it. The character is somewhat born in it. Briefly, what makes a costume fit a character is that it does not feel like a costume to begin with. What I mean is that what actors wear in a movie does not feel like a mask, a cover, an occasional masquerade. They wear

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everyday clothes; they wear clothes they have worn before, clothes passed on to them by a friend or a sibling, clothes that sat in a closet and were pulled out in the morning. It is important to keep these three features in mind when talking about costumes, fashion, and the movies. It is true, as Valerie Steele reminds us, that choices in costume design have influenced fashion, as Bonnie’s beret in Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) and men’s clothing for women in Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977), and that fashion has influenced film, as for example with Vivienne Westwood’s brassieres worn over clothing, which were seen on Madonna in Susan Seidelman’s 1985 Desperately Seeking Susan (Steele, 2012: 143). But even when cross-pollination is indeed present, on multiple levels, as we will soon see, the distinction between costume and fashion design must be respected. We owe it to both industries.

Fashion and Costumes: Avenues of Conversation Once some of the essential features of costume design have been recognized, it is possible to look at the many ways fashion and costumes have crossed. A relatively common way of emphasizing a connection has focused on what we may refer to as “hybrid” examples where couturiers joined the movie industry by offering their designs and collections.2 The very Paul Poiret, who followed Charles Frederick Worth in opening the first fashion houses in Paris, designed the costumes of Sarah Bernhardt in The Loves of Queen Elizabeth (Louis Mercanton and Henri Desfontaine, 1912), whose rights were acquired by Zuckor. Later examples include Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Givenchy, Armani, Balmain, Karl Lagerfeld, etc. A second strategy, equally common, is to focus on individual garments and on how their being featured in a movie can lead to new fashion trends. I have mentioned Bonnie’s beret in Bonnie and

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Clyde and the menswear boom for women after Annie Hall. Other examples are Marlon Brando’s white undershirt, the multiple gowns later copied and used as prom dresses, and the endless number of Halloween costumes inspired by superhero movies. Designers have also often relied upon the creativity of costume designers, with film costumes undoubtedly influencing them. Amber Butchart, for example, highlights how the costumes of Belle de Jour, which saw a collaboration between costume designer Helene Nourry and Yves Saint Laurent, who dressed Catherine Deneuve, had a lasting impact on Prada’s understated style and clothes evocative of the movie also appeared in Vera Wang Spring/Summer collection in 2016. The gorgeous qipaos of In the Mood for Love, which we considered in the second chapter, led to Won Kar Wai being appointed as artistic director of one of the Metropolitan Museum’s most popular fashion exhibits, “China: Through the Looking Glass,” and the dystopian setting of Mad Max: Fury Road was well represented on the 2015 runways of Rodarte, McQueen, and Rick Owens—to only focus on some of the films featured in this volume (Butchart, 2016). A third way of analyzing the intertwined relationship between fashion and costumes is to look at films about fashion—Funny Face (Stanley Donen, 1957), Pret-a-Porter (Robert Altman, 1994), Coco Before Chanel (Anne Fontaine, 2009), Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (William Klein, 1966), etc., as well as at the genre of fashion documentary—Made in Milan (Martin Scorsese, 1990), The September Issue (R. J. Cutler, 2009), McQueen (Peter Ettedgui, 2018), The Gospel According to André (Kate Novack, 2018), and others. These latter examples may not tell us much about costume design, but they make us aware of a crucial component of fashion: it looks good when it moves and is pretty stunning when filmed. All these approaches are legitimate, can lead to fruitful insights on the nature of film, fashion, and costumes, and they jointly inform my

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analysis of Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017), Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006), Geoffrey Beene: 30 (Tom Kalin, 1993), and Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016). The goal, however, is not simply to follow the threads already opened by fellow scholars but to look for a connection between fashion and costumes that can reveal something about the films and their interpretations while also contributing to our ongoing investigation of the nature of fashion: of what it is to wear clothes, dress up, dress for the everyday, and dress who we are.

Phantom Thread: Filming the Couturier Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) makes dresses; that’s why, as he explains to Alma (Vicky Krieps), the waitress turned muse, model, and lover, he cannot commit to anything else, especially marriage. But intimate relationships are all but dismissed in the film. Phantom Thread displays gorgeous gowns and gala dresses, but it is hardly just a movie about those clothes or about London fashion in the 1950s. It is about what Woodcock declares unable to commit to: his personal life and his love for Alma. The kind of fashion we see in the film, the costumes chosen and designed by Mark Bridges, deserve the praise they received because they don’t interrupt the flow of the film, but instead allow it to progress, to sink deeper and deeper into an examination of Woodcock and Alma’s relationship, from their first encounter to their marriage. In this sense, the clothes we see on screen embody an essential characterization of costume design: they aid the performance, making it more nuanced, more effective. The costumes we see in Phantom Thread complement the acting: style does emerge, but it is not just “style” as meant when referring to a fashion trend. It is the style chosen by two persons, a lifestyle, in the broadest sense conceivable.

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Interestingly, the ability of clothes to “disappear” to leave space for the performance is achieved not by concealing them but by letting them dictate the pace. And the pace, in this case, is the creation and tailoring of clothes: fabrics turning into sleeves, models marching in and out of rooms, as typical in fashion houses before runaway shows became the norm. Paul Thomas Anderson has worked with Mark Bridges on all his films. The movie stirred a flurry of debates and speculations on the figure that inspired the character of Woodcock and on how realistically the film reflects a fashion house in the 1950s (Cochrane, 2018). Fashion experts weighed in. Woodcock seems to be modeled on a mix of mid-century couturiers such as Norman Hartness, Hardy Amies, Charles James, and Cristóbal Balenciaga; his residence in Mayfair replicates the look of ateliers of the time. Each morning, immaculate white interiors welcome a small army of seamstresses in pristine lab coats; everything points to the level of precision, detail, routine, and schedule that comes with the profession. The importance of seamstresses and tailoring is made evident by the very title of the film. The phantom thread syndrome is a condition that affected seamstresses in Victorian London returning home after a long day of work. They would find their hands still sewing, involuntarily, a phantom thread (Bell, 2018). And seamstresses, real ones, appear in the movie too. Biddy and Nana (played by Sue Clark and Joan Brown), who help Woodcock’s sister run the atelier, are one a fashion teacher and the other a former employee of Amies and Worth. They are now both volunteers at the Victoria and Albert’s Clothworkers Center Archive—one of the institutions visited by Anderson and Bridges. The gowns and dresses were made new by Bridges according to the style of the period. More about the period is evoked thanks to the use of old Pathé footage. In an interview with Sight and Sound, Anderson reports finding material shot at the Chelsea Art Club Ball, fashion

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shows, and even footage of the American heiress Barbara Hutton’s marriage to the Puerto Rican diplomat Porfirio Rubirosa—which is replicated in the film (Bell, 2018). Other influences from the period have been drawn from the short stories and novel (Great Granny Webster in particular) of Lady Caroline Blackwood, the Guinness heiress and London socialite, and movies such as The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948), whose lead character obsession for his creative enterprise parallels Woodcock’s, and The Passionate Friends (David Lean, 1949) which shares the Chelsea Art Club Ball and Switzerland as locations. The meticulousness of Anderson and Bridges is matched by Woodcock’s obsession with everyday rituals and his detail-oriented and almost manic involvement with his work. His work, fashion, shapes the person he is. As a result, what can be said of fashion can, often, be said of Woodcock. There’s repetition, as we have seen. This is visible in the routine followed by Woodcock and his employees, by his eating habits—breakfast must always be quiet, asparagus never with butter, etc.—and by what, at least until Alma, has been his attitude toward women: muse and models until it is time for them to leave. There’s speed: the rotation of collections, the deadline to deliver a dress, the backstage of a fashion show. Speed is also, not without irony, incorporated in a few of the movie’s car scenes. Woodcock drives, and he drives too fast. Fast is also the banter between Alma and Woodcock, an exercise in mutual control. Control of the body, one of the leading characterizations of fashion, is a prominent theme. Initially, we see it in how Woodcock drapes, measures, and gauges Alma’s appearance. Fashion allows for touch and the crude assessment of her body: her breasts are small, he observes, but “I’ll give you some if I choose to.” His sister, Cyril (Lesley Manville), sits on a chair recording Alma’s measures on a notebook; it is the only description of Alma the two seem interested

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in, a description that is, however, and importantly, foreign to Alma. With candor, she confesses that she has never liked her body. She does not seem to have thought much about it either. While Alma lacks control over her body, she is full of spirit (perhaps it is not a case that her name means, in Spanish, “soul”); she is perfectly aware of her needs, desires, and her ability to control Woodcock, if she decides to (notice that, throughout the film, both insist on being able to choose for the other). While Woodcock exercises his control through fashion, his profession, hers is associated with food. “For the hungry boy,” scribbled on a piece of paper, is her first step toward Woodcock, when the two first meet, at a tavern in the England countryside where she is employed as a waitress. Later, both living in Mayfair, she will unnerve him, noisily buttering her toast at breakfast. Lastly, we will follow her attempt at making him dinner, hoping for a romantic night, away from his job and rituals, and the failure of that dinner (an “ambush,” he calls it) will lead to the last and most efficient of her culinary moves: poisonous mushrooms. Poisoning him, making him unable to work for a few days is what, in the end, brings the two together. They will marry. Woodcock, after feverish nights, hallucinations, and plenty of vomiting, proposes to Alma, who has spent the night on the atelier’s couch, right next to the wedding dress Woodcock was supposed to work on, one of his most important commissions. “Will you marry me?” she responds after he proposes—another question. She’s still in command, the wedding dress, finally finished, stares from a corner. One last point cements the connection between fashion, costume design, and the very romance between the two: hiding. Woodcock and Alma are two characters in a gothic romance; their relationship is not out in the open. It has a tone, a mood, and a pace that remind the audience of confinement. Their confrontations are tense, aggressive, but they nonetheless remain deeply intimate—the

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rest of the world disappears. More than arguing about what surrounds them, they, unconsciously, argue about how the two of them—two persons almost predestined to be together—can face the rest of the world. After all, they are outsiders; they are hidden figures. They both observe and mostly despise the British mores and dictates of London high society. Living secluded from virtually everyone else, they hardly recognize their alliance but maneuver in its favor. In many ways, they are the quintessential couple. The nature of costume design shares components of such invisibility. It moves the story, but it does not need to capture the eye; it can’t be a source of distraction. Costumes carry messages. The gowns designed by Woodcock do the same: he has the habit, Alma learns while working on the wedding dress, of sewing hidden messages in the inseams. They are not to be noticed, but they are there to stay. This sense of invisibility, marked by the presence of a message, is also part of fashion. Fashion flirts with the spectacle, but there is not spectacle without hours of invisible work, hidden stitches, without the precision of details that, while imperceptible to the eye, holds a silhouette together. Professionals in hiding—their feelings, their public persona, often their love—Woodcock and Alma build their union almost as a metaphor for what fashion is and what costume design must be to complement a film successfully. Even poison, hidden in the mushrooms Alma serves to Woodcock, echoes this parallel: it leads to a spectacular love story, albeit certainly not the most traditional—but this is true of fashion too.

Fashion and Costume Designers: Tom Ford and Arianne Phillips Everyone wears incredibly fashionable clothes in Nocturnal Animals, but they are not Tom Ford’s.

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Many fashion designers have offered their skills (and creations) to the movie industry, but not many have worked as directors. Tom Ford is an exception, thus making an analysis of his work particularly interesting; it is worth engaging with it especially when we see it in light of his partnership with Arianne Phillips, whom he chose as his costume designer in both of his movies, A Single Man (2009) and Nocturnal Animals (2016)—the latter will be the focus of this section. The partnership between the two is a testament to the importance of costume design and one more reminder of the dynamics connecting the work of the costume designer with the director’s vision—a point often and convincingly stated by Phillips in the numerous interviews she has released. When looking at Nocturnal Animals, there are two, or at least two, significant directions of analysis. On the one hand, there is the analysis of costumes and their overall contribution to the movie: Phillips and Ford’s ability to use their skills as costume and fashion designers to create a look, a look that ultimately becomes an indication of the meaning of the film. On the other hand, considering fashion in the movie is essential to understand its structure as a reflection on the arts and on the blending of different arts. Nocturnal Animals is based on Austin Wright’s 1993 novel Tony and Susan, and it brings together the world of visual arts, fiction, and because of the masterful selection of costumes and their contribution to the narrative, the fashion world. The movie, a Hitchcockian thriller set between Texas and L.A. (with a few scenes in New York), follows three distinct timelines. We have Susan Morrow’s (Amy Adams) life as a gallerist in L.A. and her unhappy marriage; the fictional world her ex-husband, Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal) has built in his book, and, lastly, the past life of the two, until their separation. Recurring themes of the movie are the lack of reality, lack of commitment, lack of interest, and the overall inability to act—creative

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stalling, in particular. Susan is a successful gallerist, but she refuses to acknowledge her success or even her investment in the arts. When asked about the opening of her show – and opening of the movie—she dismisses the topic. What her friend labels as “his favorite subject” (her show) is not something that interests her: “not mine,” she replies. Several times she emphasizes how she does not care about art, reminding everyone who tries to persuade her of the opposite of her lack of creativity and her cynicism. She sees her world as absurd and artificial, for good reasons. We learn of her past desire of being an artist, of her craving for a certain purity and ingenuity, in life and relationships, and of how she abandoned her goals to instead pursue a career as a gallerist and a rather posh lifestyle. Her clothes reflect her duality. Susan, the successful gallerist, is not shy with make-up, her eyes heavily contoured with eyeliner and mascara: so much that she seems to be wearing some kind of a mask, but also so dark as to remind us of her nature. Susan was nicknamed “nocturnal animal” by her ex-husband, and she is still not sleeping at night. Her outfits are sleek, minimal, she is, in a way, the epitome of the Tom Ford woman, even though what she wears is Gucci, Maison Margiela, and Marc Jacobs (all fitted on her). They communicate power, they are an armor, and they confer her a mysterious attitude, one that secludes her in a mostly solitary world. The necklace she wears at the start of the film, adorned with a thick black stone pendant, evokes such characterizations; it could as well be a talisman, an amulet. But this is not Susan’s only wardrobe (Zemler, 2016). Perhaps equally significant are the warm, oversized cashmere sweaters she wears at night, in bed, while reading the proofs of Edward’s book—entitled Nocturnal Animals and dedicated to her. No make-up, her legs bare. Reading it leads to moments of unsettlement where her loneliness becomes palpable. Upon each reading, the film cuts back to another one of the interlocking stories blending fiction, reality, and past memories.

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What remains true of all three realities is emotional vividness: emotions – pain, fear, horror, angst—affect the characters (and often the audience) with force—their impact not unlike the provoking shows organized by Susan. Art, its emotional influence, is a component of the film’s cinematography: every frame and scene evokes the tonality, light, and composition of artworks, from Jeff Burton and Ed Ruscha’s photography to Rothko’s meditative colors (Cusumano, 2016). Equally bold and matching the film’s cinematography and Abel Korzeniowski’s dramatic score are the details of several other costumes. Susan’s mother (Laura Linney), the stereotype of a conservative, affluent Texan lady, meets her daughter at a New York restaurant to persuade her not to marry Edward, whom she had known since high school. Edward is kind, idealistic, and wants to be a writer: she concludes he won’t be able to provide for her. She is wearing two rounds of large pearls, a Chanel jacket, a golden Judith Leiber clutch on the table. It’s too much, and so is her comment, “we all eventually turn into our mothers,” but, in line with the rest of the movie, too much does not mean it is not true. Jena Malone, who plays a curator, wears an outlandish vintage Comme Des Garçons corset, her clothes as oversaturated with a craving for glamour as the artworld surrounding them. The same abrupt, impossible-to-ignore details are seen on Ray Marcus (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), the cringe-watching criminal responsible, in Edward’s book, for the killing and rape of the wife and daughter (Isla Fisher and Ellie Bamber) of Tony Hastings, the protagonist, also played by Gyllenhaal. Ray’s Texan boots are of a shiny hue of kelly green. You can see them at night, they can’t be missed, and they signal his cruelty, associating him immediately with the psychopath he is. The last one that deserves to be mentioned is the last one we encounter: the hunter gown Susan wears to the restaurant where she’s supposed to meet Edward after twenty years, and after having read

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his book. Designed by Phillips in a style reminiscent of Tom Ford, it is both striking and a reminder of the movie’s duality: while the silhouette and cut are in line with Amy’s personality, the self-declared cynical curator, they are also bound to show her fragility. Upon looking at herself in the mirror before leaving her L.A. villa, Susan removes her lipstick, perhaps reminding Edward of her previous self. But Edward will never show up at the restaurant, locking his existence securely into the fictional world he was able to create. The choice of costumes matches the film’s tone; it contributes to the layering of stories and timelines and offers a window into the characters’ personalities and their peculiar positioning in a world that is permanently in-between reality and fictional construction. But what is also interesting about the masterful use of costumes in the film, as mentioned, is how it juxtaposes fashion and other arts: literature, the visual arts, and of course, film. In part, such a blend is inevitable. Ford is a fashion designer and a director; Phillips has worked in film (well-known is, for example, her collaboration with Tarantino), but she also dressed Madonna, and she is therefore responsible for what are undoubtedly some of the most iconic looks in the history of the music industry. I have noted above the painterly precisions of each frame and the references to existing artworks, which contribute to the film’s mood while also showcasing the characters. But in addition to serving narrative purposes, the juxtaposition of different arts can be seen as a commentary on the nature of fashion. Fashion is, in many ways, a hybrid art, one that not only takes inspiration from other arts—and prominently film and the visual arts—but that thrives in the ability to reproduce those images on fabric, in three dimensions, on the body, through design. Nocturnal Animals acknowledges fashion’s hybrid nature and voracity by juxtaposing fashion and other arts, primarily the visual arts and literature. Fashion’s interest in other arts is not limited to copying, evoking, or resembling a work. It is

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instead a matter of establishing novel, at times unseen collaborations. Something about fashion is better expressed when it is seen next to or in the context of other arts. We’ll return to this concept in the last section of this chapter.

Historical Accuracy and Imaginative Freedom: Dressing Marie Antoinette Sofia Coppola was allowed to film Marie Antoinette at Versailles, a rather incredible filming location; she studied Marie Antoinette’s biography, relying predominantly on Antonia Fraser’s 2001 book Marie Antoinette: A Journey, and she visited the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute where Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge, guided her through some of the styles and fashions of the period (Bailey, 2020). Yet, Coppola’s film is not a costume drama, nor is it an accurate historical biopic. Instead, it is a melodrama based on the life, experiences, and emotional life of a teenager that, by marriage, became queen of France. This is not to say that historical clues were entirely ignored; costumes, designed by the nine times nominee and four times winner of the Academy Awards, Milena Canonero, did require quite a bit of archival and historical research. Canonero looked into corsets, extravagant wigs and made sure to echo the shift in fashion preferences occurring in the late 1770s and early 1780s from bold, adorned, and voluminous gowns to delicate muslin dresses—a shift likely caused by the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s bucolic state of nature. But it is impossible not to notice that the prevalent intention is to dress Marie Antoinette not only for the different stages of her life—although those matter too—but for the twenty-first century. When thinking of the lead character, played by Kirsten Dunst, what

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inspired the director were less the historical, debatable, and almost mythical accounts of Marie Antoinette’s life (the iconic “let them eat cake” appears more like an inside joke than as a reference), but her personal life and the kind of things she would do (or wish to do) as a teenager. Marie Antoinette loves to go to parties (and does not like to leave until dawn), she is chatty and gossipy with her friends, mostly clueless about politics, she has crushes, loves dessert, and she absolutely loves to shop. Coppola’s interest in exploring Marie Antoinette’s emotional life, the contours of her inner self, and her growing up in Versailles are complemented by her episodic filmic style, a recurring trait in her career (think, for example, of The Virgin Suicides, 1999), and by her use of mise-en-scène as the framing of choice which showcases Versailles’ splendor, while simultaneously communicating how overwhelmed Marie is by the court, and by that very splendor. She’s drowning, though, until she isn’t, and clothes, shoes, jewelry, and wigs display this ambiguity: the sense of suffocation gives room to her ability to command the situation, to control it. The alternation of both case scenarios is the film’s narrative thread and what brings the audience close to the lead character, who, as quintessential melodrama characters, can only be understood in light of her ambiguities. Costumes allow for the emotional pre-focusing that is necessary to the development of story and character, thus fulfilling two of the functions of costume design we have seen at the beginning of this chapter: to follow the director’s decisions and to allow a character to come alive, to become real for the audience, despite (or, perhaps, because of) the fantasy of film. The last characteristic of costume design we considered, the ability to convey a mood, is also displayed by the costumes chosen for the film. There’s, first of all, the depiction of Marie Antoinette’s psychological states; pastel is the color of choice for her early teenage years,3 brighter and bolder colors follow her during her party years,

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beige and taupe muslin dresses which, as mentioned, became popular during the years of the French Enlightenment welcome her as a mother, now more interested in her children and nature than in parties and entertainment. Gorgeous black, dark purple, and indigo gowns, stripped of the frilly adornments of her earlier years, mark her mourning for her mother’s death and leave her to her fate. But mood is also tied to the film’s cinematography. Costumes, in Marie Antoinette, are frequently associated with pastries – decadent and colorful – and with music. One of the most significant scenes of the movie, where Marie and her friends are selecting clothes from a couturier (some kind of “at-home” shopping), is a fast-paced montage of shoes, clothes, make-up, champagne, pastries, and playing cards. “I Want Candy,” by the Bow Wow Wow, accompanies the scene which also includes another reminder that what we are looking at is a twentyfirst-century version of teenage Marie Antoinette: a pair of celeste Converse All-Stars high-tops sits on the floor, further highlighting the blend of rococo fashion and punk rock vibes. Lastly, mood is in the film’s locations. Here too, costumes are seen as playing an important role. Marie Antoinette’s gowns often match the ones worn by her friends. Some of them also blend with her surroundings: upon receiving a letter from her mother, warning her that her future depends on her getting pregnant, Marie leans against the wall, and suddenly we realize that her dress’s pattern is almost identical to the tapestry. Versailles is winning, crushing her with its own “style.” On other occasions, however, her style, the pastel of her gowns, displays her command. But not only are the costumes in Marie Antoinette significant and fitting examples of the role and function of costume design in film, but they can also be seen as an indication of some of what in this volume I emphasized as being fundamental characterizations of what fashion is and of what it is to think of fashion as a performance closely tied to the display of identity.

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Two features of fashion, which we encountered in the previous chapters, are evident: its contradictory nature and its power to innovate through repetition. We have, in part, already hinted at the former. Marie is a split character, and the costumes she wears underscore her personality by both revealing it and hindering it. They allow her to distinguish herself, but they are also a sore reminder of the constraints of life at Versailles. Corsets and impossibly elaborate wigs may be beautiful, but they are also excessive: good taste and bad taste are constantly side by side, for luxury is gorgeous until it becomes downright ugly. The pastries and copious amounts of champagne that we see juxtaposed to her gowns can be similarly analyzed, delicious until revolting and nauseating. The French fashion style Marie is forced to embrace is both ripe with pleasures and a source of pain and humiliation. Early in the movie, when she first reaches the border with France, she’s stripped naked of her Austrian, modest clothing and asked to wear an ornate French gown. Her hair hid by a wig. She has left her past behind. The dressing, and undressing, will continue. Every morning a storm of women, servants, and relatives enters her room to dress her; for what appears like a few interminable minutes, she stands there naked, shivering. It is an insufferable ritual, followed by an equally obnoxious breakfast. Such patterns are repeated throughout the movie, and yet, change is visible. Because repeating the same ritual, over and over, ultimately gives her power and control. Dressing and undressing are tools allowing her to slowly conquer the very French fashion that had first appeared as an imposition. As seen in the first chapter, the repetition of an outfit or, in this case, a dressing ritual, leads to the establishment of difference: her taste and identity. Marie begins to shop for her own clothes, privileging first over-the-top designs and then the ethereal dresses she will wear in the years at the Petit Trianon.

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Shopping for new clothes signals Marie’s desire for exploration. Clothes allow her to discover who she is, and different outfits inform different sides of herself. The episodic format of the movie matches her approach to fashion and, as we will see in the next chapter, her ability to construct her identity not thanks to narrative continuity but in light of episodic discoveries, mistakes, and wardrobe changes.

Thirty Years of Geoffrey Beene Clothes and accessories must perform. We have seen how this is true for fashion designers, who oversee the performance of their creations on the catwalk, and for costume designers, whose work would be meaningless if not placed within the context of a film and its production. It is then interesting, to conclude this chapter, to look at one more example of the performative nature of fashion, one that, unlike the movies analyzed and the runway shows mentioned above, features an eclectic and complex mix of costumes and fashion; of what is true of costume design, and of what is true of fashion design. Geoffrey Beene: 30 (1993) is a 30-minute film by Tom Kalin about Geoffrey Beene’s first thirty years as a fashion designer. The film is divided into three 10-minute sections, all referencing a different filmmaker. The first echoes Flesh and the Devil, a romantic melodrama starring Greta Garbo (Clarence Brown, 1926); the second is a nod to Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet (1930) and its inherent surrealism; the last is instead a Felliniesque circus fantasy also reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), an expressionist clown movie. It is a black-and-white film. Tom Kalin adopted the same technique he used in his 1992 movie Swoon (which particularly impressed Beene, who, upon seeing it, reached out to the director), namely to

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shoot in 16 mm and to later blow the film up in 35 mm (the size required to release a movie theatrically). The effect is fantastic for fashion: it amplifies contrast, allowing white to stand on white and adding edge and shadow to even the most miniscule detail. Images appear sculpted, cut for the screen. And sculpted and sharply cut are descriptions that well apply to Beene’s creations. An advocate of American fashion and the first American fashion designer to show in Milan, Beene’s work is recognizable for its minimalist cuts, the use of everyday fabrics, and his attention to the body. Trained in anatomy—he was a medical school student before turning to fashion—Beene is interested in complementing the body and defining it: interpreting what a body is in relation to clothing. Such an interpretation took the form of a film. Beene’s minimalism has always been matched by a desire to experiment. Even before the making of the film, he showed interest in alternative fashion displays by adopting video on the runway, with cameras focusing on both the models’ movement and the details of their outfits. He also expressed a preference for using performers, especially dancers, in lieu of models (or supermodels, as Beene’s work coincides with their appearance in fashion shows). His focus remained firmly on movement and on the value of entertainment in fashion. When discussing the importance of entertainment as an essential component of the fashion show, Beene remarks: I’ve been to fashion shows, and sometimes even when I look at my own clothes, they are not enough: then  I  have to move forward and make them more interesting from other angles. […] I try to embrace the body. I don’t use many side seams because that bisects the body. I make a lot of seams that go from the front to the back or they wind around the clothes. But to bring movement and extra dimensions to clothes, I think that maybe actresses and performers are better than some models (my emphasis). (Beene, Kalin, Mirabella, and Yokobosky, 1999: 15)

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Hence a movie. The use of black and white, emphasized above, contributes to the clothes’ performative quality, and so does the use of various groups of people, age fourteen up, allowing the clothes to belong, inhabit, to participate in the staging of different scenes. In Geoffrey Beene: 30, there is no distinction between costumes and fashion, at least not in their appearance. And yet, what is crucial is that fashion finds an additional layer of meaning because it is used as costume, following the tenets of costume design we have analyzed at the beginning of this chapter. It is true, the outfits are striking in themselves, but they also serve a function in the overall film narrative (for Kalin was indeed interested in communicating a narrative feeling); they provide a voice to silent characters in the same ways in which costumes added complexity, nuance, and detail to the productions of the Hollywood silent era. At the same time, the movie revolutionizes the idea of the runway, including its most eccentric examples for, in this instance, clothes are seen in the context of a story, they are lived in—albeit fictionally. Their appearance is an episode in the overall course of the movie. In the next chapter, we’ll return to this latter point. To the episodes fashion affords, and to its connection to the building of life experiences.

Conclusions: Two Industries This chapter has explored the distinction between fashion and costume design; while the two share many boundaries—most explicitly their connection to identity and their ability to reveal it—the focus has been on their differences. I have stressed the importance of seeing costume design as intimately tied to a feature’s overall production, especially to the director’s vision. In addition, costumes, even when fabulous—as

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several of the ones analyzed in this volume—“disappear:” they should not stand out, and they should instead be felt like a character’s second skin, as what we would expect that character to wear, from morning to night as well as at special occasions. In the films analyzed, we have looked at how costumes can contribute to a character’s personality, from the actor’s identification with the character to the use of costume in marking the multiple stages of a character’s development. The examples have also opened a comparison between fashion and costume design, most notably in Phantom Thread and Geoffrey Beene: 30. The former, a fictional movie following the work of Woodcock, a couturier in the London of the 1950s, the second a 30-minute avant-garde film made by Tom Kalin to display Geoffrey Beene’s creations. Looking at costumes in the opening chapters of this volume, but perhaps specifically in this latter one, has raised one more issue that is now time to explore: the relation between fashion and an episodic, as opposed to narrative, conception of identity. Such a conception works in tandem with the performative, bodily, and social understanding of identity that has so far emerged. Episodes in fashion can be both experimental and formative, making us realize the role of fashion in our aesthetic lives and in the establishment of our values.

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The Episodic Self: Fashion and Identity Often, in the course of this book, I mentioned a connection between fashion and identity. The two aspects of identity  I  have focused on so far have been, primarily, the importance of fashion and costumes in revealing the identity of a character and the relation between fashion and the construction, display, and assessment of bodily identity. In the first case, as seen in the previous chapter, costume and fashion choices serve the purpose of disclosing the personality of a character and behavioral nuances that, together with other aspects of cinematography, drive the narrative. In the second case, we have explored fashion’s ability to act in relation to an embodied subject who is necessarily immersed in the sociopolitical context. Fashion reveals and constraints the body; it can build tight barriers. Still, it can also be the starting point for a process of aesthetic exploration where the body is discovered, or, better, rediscovered and appreciated in its complexity. Informed by such an analysis, this chapter further narrows the focus to prominent views in identity theory and their discussion in philosophical aesthetics. While identity is an eclectic and multifaceted concept, hardly reducible to necessary and sufficient conditions, it is not uncommon to encounter, in philosophy of literature, accounts of identity where identity is analyzed in tandem and in light of accounts of narrative: identity can be seen and investigated, to put it simply, when looking at the narratives through which it is weaved.

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The goal of this chapter is to introduce such views while suggesting an alternative. For, as the reader will see, while not entirely extraneous to the notion of identity that emerges through fashion, I do not find these accounts to be entirely satisfactory. Fashion does not preclude the possibility of a narrative self. However, narrative construction is not the sole or most influential way in which fashion can contribute to identity and its portrayal. The modalities and strategies through which fashion displays and contributes to identity are instead better viewed in light of a less popular notion of the self, one seeing it as essentially episodic. I will attempt a fine-tuning of the notion of the episodic self in relation to fashion, movies, and costumes. What’s pressing, and what  I  can anticipate in this introduction, is that interest should be given perhaps not to identity per se, a concept that is in itself awfully broad and hard to pinpoint, but to the modalities of identity expression afforded by fashion. How is fashion to speak of identity? Through what means is fashion capable of displaying who we are? And, more provocatively, how is fashion not just to accompany or complement who we are, but to actively and transformatively allow for the discovery of the self? How is fashion to elicit a process of self-investigation?

Narrative Identity and Its Shortcomings I will not digress on a detailed summary of prominent accounts of narrative identity. I will limit myself to sketching what are arguably some of its most prominent characterizations. The question of identity is a compelling one. The history of philosophy has a special relationship with the pronoun “I,” since Augustine or perhaps even earlier, but questions related to identity are also the texture of everyday life. There’s thinking about the body

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we occupy and the body of others, its appearance and status, as seen, and thoughts and debates surround the notion of social identity where “I” is by far not the only pronoun we should consider. Identity, our own and the one of others, is a matter of discovery and unfolding: the journey of a lifetime. It is not mistaken to look at identity as the ultimate autobiographical question. Autobiographical accounts are complex, for reasons that are often apparent. First and foremost, autobiography depends on memory, and memory recollections are not factual or historical recountings. To remember is to recollect as much as it is to reconstruct. This does not entail that lives (and the stories we tell about them) are comparable to fictional works—as there are undeniable differences between being a person and being a character—but it is nonetheless impossible to think of such accounts as devoid of any distortions, imaginative replays, etc. It should be noted that not all such distortions are deliberate. It is at times hard to retain correct details; personal recollections mix with anecdotes and with the testimony of others. Autobiographies are also forms of therapy, stories we tell ourselves to reach closure, remember selectively, and sometimes forget. They are curated works, whether monotonous and mundane or peculiarly and elusive. In addition to “what” we remember, there is “how” we remember it. It is here that we encounter narrative accounts of identity. As human beings, we have a special relationship with stories. Anthropologically, stories are the vehicle of cultural beliefs and values, in many cases the backbone of our traditions. We tell stories to relate to others, share a common ground, and inform one another. Then, of course, we share stories about ourselves. As some of the most substantial accounts of narrative identity maintain, we build narratives to better understand, grasp, and express who we are.

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One such account was developed and refined over the years by Marya Schechtman. Schechtman’s “Narrative Self Constitution View” argues that the expression of identity requires narrative and diachronic connections to fulfill the four essential features for personal existence: survival, moral responsibility, self-interested concern, and compensation (Schechtman, 1996, 2014).1 Narrative accounts differ from each other, with stronger positions such as Schechtman’s and more moderate accounts, such as Peter Goldie’s “narrative thinking.” (Goldie, 2012). But despite their differences, they all tend to highlight the importance of connecting the events of a life into a whole, the importance of giving them a structure, whether based on causal or on emotional connections or a blend of both. Those connections lead to a sense of closure, an ending, and that ending is likely to be charged with moral significance. These approaches look, differently put, for cohesiveness and continuity where meaning is given by the careful connections that can be established among the events in one’s life. It isn’t easy to imagine fashion fitting such accounts. For some, fashion’s ephemeral nature, its connection to consumerism, the constant changes in trends and style, etc., are clear reasons for fashion’s inability to fully connect to identity. This position, taken by Lars Svendsen, whom we have encountered in the second chapter, sees fashion only, at best, as a frivolous addition to who we are. In fact, Svendsen’s account may go as far as seeing fashion as an obstacle to a better grasp of identity and the stories that compose it: a threat to authenticity. There are, I believe, two responses to such a threat. The first is to look at the downside of narrative accounts; the second is to shift the attention to accounts of identity that move away from the narrative view. Beginning with the former, the bulk of objections and worry against narrative accounts is that, quite simply, life is not a narrative. While some of us are more predisposed toward building stories

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about ourselves and the events of our lives, others are much more inclined to live in the moment, refusing the temptation of building connections for, as one is often forced to admit, things sometimes just happen, whether we have paved the ground for them or not. Life can be a somewhat random affair, and the connections we build when creating personal narratives may only forcefully make sense of our experiences. In the hope of abiding by the rather trite admonishment, “everything happens for a reason,” we may believe to have found a reason when there is none. It’s also unclear whether a narrative conception of identity is preferable for the moral assessment of our lives. Schechtman’s account verges in that direction, but it is unclear why diachronic and causally connected stories fare better in inspiring ethical reflection than single episodic instances. Galen Strawson (2005 and 2015) is arguably the sharpest critic of the narrative view and has suggested an alternative position: the episodic self. There’s no need for narrative accounts: episodes are significant in themselves. In Strawson’s terms, there is no sense of diachronicity in the establishment of the self, nor is it needed to grasp the moral significance of life events. While Strawson’s argument has encountered criticism,  I  believe it offers an interesting angle to rethink identity and its connection to fashion. Fashion thrives in its episodic appearances. This is not to deny that there may be connections between one outfit and another (think, for example, of the “story” of an item of clothing that is passed on to one’s children or grandchildren), or narratives in fashion history, but one must admit that fashion is powerful, and fun, sometimes precisely because of its episodic character. We wear certain items and accessories, patterns and cuts because they fit a rather specific, typically temporally discreet situation. The uniform I had to wear in school, a wedding dress, white linen dresses at the beach, and many others. Some of us go even farther by associating one outfit to a

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specific episode, a moment of one’s life. I remember exactly what I was wearing when I first met my partner; I remember what I was wearing when  I  took my son to his first art gallery. In a similar vein,  I  buy clothes when I sense the importance of remembering a moment, be it a vacation or a particular day. Different outfits also mark differences in what we may mean by episodes. A uniform attaches to an extended segment of life—school years; what I was wearing on a date is just one night, but nonetheless worth remembering. There is no need to weave these outfits into a story. While what  I  was wearing on my first date with my partner is significant also because we eventually ended up sharing a life together, one should not ignore the impact of that single night: its phenomenological appeal. There are also other reasons to link fashion to an episodic understanding of identity. The most relevant one, in my opinion, is the experimental nature of fashion. We try things on to check if a given size fits us well, but at times what matters is that we simply try. For some of us, different outfits, trends, etc., are the vehicle through which we test our identity. I had blue hair and a few more piercings than now. I wore a lot of black for a while, and recently I am in love with a specific kind of midi dress. Trying on clothes can become a way of testing oneself: checking boundaries; it can be a way to imaginatively try on, with the clothes, a different identity. Clothes can help discover a side of who we are. I have argued elsewhere for a connection between the establishment of a personal style and one’s identity. I see such a style as different from a fashionable style and as distinct from the kind of style one may choose to blend in with a group. It’s a research where the wearer and the dress inform each other. Wear a given outfit just one time, it may lead to a better understanding of who you are, or it may not change absolutely anything: in both cases, there’s some kind of episodic exploration. Clothes, outfits, dresses, etc., carry meaning and are powerful ways of

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making us contemplate alternative sides and aspects of identity. Think, for example, of the feeling of looking at yourself nicely dressed up after lounging around in PJs for a day. It is transformative. As I am typing this paragraph, we are about to exit (hopefully) a pandemic that lasted almost two years and that has affected virtually every aspect of our lives—clothes included. It is pretty common, these days, to chat with colleagues, friends, and random strangers about what it feels like to put on a tie or a somewhat elegant work dress after over a year of working in sweatpants in front of a laptop. These are significant episodes, significant outfits, and significant ways of exploring who we are. In what follows, I will investigate the connection between fashion and identity, with a focus on episodic identity, in three films: Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas, 2016), L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), and McQueen (Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, 2018). With the first, Personal Shopper, we will further consider the experimental nature of the kind of identity afforded by fashion, especially when one outfit ends up corresponding to one temporally discreet episode. Last Year at Marienbad, a classic in the study of fashion and film, is an opportunity to reflect on alternative narrative constructions and on the notion of repetition—which we have in part already covered—and its relation to identity. McQueen is interesting for our purposes because it is a documentary, therefore intentionally designed to display the identity of someone: in this case, the celebrated fashion designer Alexander McQueen.

All Chanel: Personal Shopper Maureen, played by Kristen Stewart, is not an entirely new face to the loyal moviegoer and Assayas’ fan. Assayas’ repeated use of the same actors often seems to be a way of making them play, and replay, the same role. It’s a metacinematic game we encounter in Clouds of

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Sils Maria (2014) and Non-Fiction (2018), and of course, also in the movie that concerns us here: Personal Shopper (Di Summa, 2021b). Maureen, in Personal Shopper, is the assistant of a celebrity, Kyra. Years earlier, in Clouds of Sils Maria, where she played Valentine, she was the assistant of Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche), a famous actress. The similarities do not stop here. Both characters are prone and feel the effects of the mystical: the Maloya snake, a sinuous cloud formation that envelopes and engulfs the Swiss Alps in ways that can only recall romantic definitions of the sublime, in Clouds of Sils Maria, and the otherworldly presence of a lost twin brother with whom Maureen, who is a medium, is trying to make contact, in Personal Shopper. Then there is a look: the look of Stewart in both films. Stewart is beautiful when tired and dumbfounded. She thrives when frustrated, for that is when she can show her resilience and resourcefulness. She is also a sexy character for all these reasons: hard to grasp, independent, and forever mysterious. Perhaps her roles do not inspire much empathy, but they are intriguing, and intrigue also brings her character alive. Jürgen Doering, the costume designer who also, not surprisingly, worked on Clouds of Sils Maria, dresses Stewart in ways that are, for the most part, practical and causal, but that also tilt toward an understanding of how casual can be unique, even refined: the Lacoste T-shirt (popular in the 1980s but associated with some kind of preppy vintage now), the chunky Fair Isle sweater she wears sitting in the dark in an abandoned mansion, waiting for a sign of her brother, the shearling moto jacket. It’s the look of someone who knows fashion well, so well that she can ignore its dictates in the morning when absent-mindedly picking whatever street-cool item comes in handy. Véronique Hyland notes how the tone set by her clothes is significant because it aligns her with “the schlepping, uncomplaining clogs who keep the glamorous shod and clothes and stoke the engines of luxury” (Hyland, 2017). Still, I believe there is more to say about

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such a costume choice. The first is that these are clothes we can imagine the actual, nonfictional Kristen Stewart wearing, which once again brings us back to Assayas’ ongoing fiction/nonfiction game. Secondly, because the moment the chain of effortlessly cool and understated clothes is interrupted acts as a cinematic alert: something is about to happen. In both cases, we are confronting issues of identity: the character’s identity and, we may add, Stewart’s identity as well. Stewart is a popular and internationally recognized actresses. She’s in blockbuster films, auteur films; she is on the cover of fashion and gossip magazines. Her appearance at Cannes Film Festival, where Assayas won Best Director, was a celebration of both her talent as an actress and her status as a fashion icon. A fashion icon with a special relationship with Chanel. Chanel sponsored several Assayas films and selected Stewart as its face (they had a two-year contract). Juliette Binoche is dressed mainly in Chanel in Clouds of Sils Maria, and Stewart wore a slashed Chanel T-shirt when the movie premiered at Cannes, two years earlier than Person Shopper. A fascination for Chanel, but also perhaps a sense of being trapped in those clothes, as if under a spell, appears to be a characteristic of Stewart’s life as well as her characters (Farra, 2017). In what is arguably one of the most significant scenes of the film, Maureen tries on a sequin Chanel dress she has bought for Kyra, her celebrity employer. They wear the same size, but she’s not allowed to try the clothes. The dress is highly feminine; it’s flashy, it’s also the dress her boss will wear at a gala event. But there is more: a darker side. For her boss will soon be found dead in her apartment, while Maureen is haunted by a mysterious person who communicates only via text messages but who knows her and her movements way too well. It’s hard to resist the temptation of seeing Maureen wearing the dress as a transformation. Because of the mysterious, at times surreal nature of what is happening around her—text messages from an unknown person and her attempts to make contact with her deceased

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brother—it’s only plausible to see the dress as the entryway into l’au de la, the beyond (Romney, 2017). A dress, something material, something that in the movie is seen explicitly as an item to be bought (she’s a shopper after all) is also an occasion to contemplate what’s immaterial, what may or may not exist (we never find out who and whether there is anyone behind the text messages). If we return to the different conceptions of identity I considered in the previous section, the scene is an example, and a defense, of how powerful an episode—and of course one in which fashion is prominent—can be in the presentation of identity. As seen, episodic identity, especially when looking at its most radical understanding in the work of Galen Strawson, rejects the necessity of seeing life as a series of related events, composed into a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end (or, better, a sense of closure). Strawson’s defense of episodic identity finds such a construction artificial and not at all necessary for identity and for the  embrace of values that typically follows the assessment of life events. While  I  do not want to defend one conception against the other, I believe fashion, especially when seen in connection to film, can deliver, if not an endorsement of the episodic view, at least insights  into the importance of individual episodes in defining who we are. When looking at the portion of the film mentioned above, when Maureen tries on the Chanel dress she had purchased for her boss, several interpretations become available, all, in some way, linked to a better understanding of who Maureen is, but also of who she can or might be, thus allowing fashion to provoke a more nuanced reflection on how prismatic identity can be. It is not just a matter of affirming oneself; it is a matter of trying, risking, putting oneself in positions in which we may not want to be, re-emerging perhaps changed or unscathed, but informed by the experience nonetheless.

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We can see the changing into the Chanel dress as a way of embracing a world she works for but ultimately despises. By wearing the dress, she becomes her boss, the celebrity. And this is not entirely implausible. As mentioned, we have been reminded that the two wear the same size, and given that we never see Kyra, we have no actual marker to distinguish the two (to this extent, Kyra is yet another ghostly presence in the film). Additionally, Kyra is found dead soon after the scene, suggesting a transfer between the two. On a meta-level, by wearing the Chanel dress, Maureen, the character, is indistinguishable from Stewart, the actress and Chanel ambassador: another celebrity. Another reading may see a confirmation of Maureen’s fragility in the scene while also offering a new angle of analysis through the contemplation of her sexuality. Jonathan Romney, for example, describing Maureen, says, Soft-spoken, with a voice that often sounds tired, Maureen seems herself to suggest an etiolated ghost of a young woman, someone struggling to materialize in the world fully. With her sexuality almost in suspension—the film plays implicitly on the constant speculation around the star’s own sexual identity—Maureen sometimes displays defiant independence, but at other times seems so delicate that it’s as if she’s on the verge of dissolving. (Romney, 2017)

Is the Chanel dress, overtly feminine and sexy, a way of “trying on” a more sexualized version of herself? Maureen communicates to her boyfriend via Skype and is in an ongoing text message exchange with a man who is nonetheless able to see her and (possibly) tempt her into actions she may not otherwise contemplate. Then her deceased twin brother and her attempts at getting in touch with him. All three men simultaneously exist and don’t exist in her life. Her relationship with them does not follow a story, has no material, bodily dimension, does not unfold or develop. Is wearing the dress a way of at least making

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her presence visible? And we wonder, can they see her (especially, of course, the mysterious person texting her and her deceased brother)? While the scene is related to the rest of the movie and acts as a turning point, it is significant in itself and can stand alone. Maureen, as a character, does not truly grow in the movie, and most definitely not in a narrative fashion. She does not come to realize anything in virtue of past events, and she does not appear to be making decisions based on previous interactions. She’s stuck in limbo, appearing and disappearing. But her changing into the Chanel dress is, as a single sequence, perhaps the best window into what she is or could be. It is just one episode, and yet it discloses so much about her: her tentativeness, fragility, ability to pick and try on. After all, she’s a personal shopper.

McQueen: The Runway This book has considered a variety of movies, from blockbusters to independent films, from contemporary to classical. But it has not mentioned documentaries. There is one immediate reason for sidestepping nonfiction: it does not make use of costumes. Nonfiction gives us a segment of reality, and in real life we wear clothes that are not meant to have any direct connection to the movie industry: they are not supposed to aid the narrative or contribute to character development (as seen in the previous chapters, two of the fundamental features of costumes). However, such a seemingly straightforward, if not redundant observation, is not without exceptions. The first is that, in some cases, what is worn in a documentary is significant. We may not call such clothing “costumes,” as there is no costume designer behind them, working together with the production crew, but what is worn may nonetheless be essential to the characters (in the case of documentary,

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real people) we encounter. Albert and David Maysles’ much celebrated—and controversial—documentary, Grey Gardens (1975), follows two upper-class former New York socialites and relatives of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edith Bouvier Beale (“Big” and “Little” Edie, respectively) living in isolation at the Grey Gardens estate, in East Hampton. Little Edie parades an impressive array of clothing; she creatively drapes them on her body and is not shy in her love for her whimsical wardrobe; her choice for clothes has the pace of runway changes. More than clothes, her outfits are a testament to who she is: in love with dressing, not afraid of posing, Little Edie has the energy of a diva and the coquette manners of a socialite. She is an eccentric and eclectic character. Her clothes, so meticulously chosen, secure such an assessment. The second reason for considering clothing, accessories, and the like in the contest of nonfiction films, is that documentaries are hardly a mere recounting of facts. I won’t here enter the debate on nonfiction films and what it means for something to qualify as nonfiction—a debate that often sees the analytic tradition at odds with scholars in film studies (Di Summa, 2019)—suffice it to say (and on this everyone seems to agree) that documentaries, whether committed to objective truths or willing to present a subjective perspective on the facts, are often adopting techniques that allow the director to edit content significantly. One of such techniques, notably, is re-enactment. Mastered by directors such as Errol Morris in The Thin Blue Line (1988) and Joshua Oppenheimer in The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), re-enactment allows for a high degree of control which the director exercises, but can also extend to the characters who are given the power to re-live their past actions and, with them, their looks. Anwar Congo and Herman Koto, whom we encounter in The Act of Killing, are former leaders of the Pancasila Youth, a paramilitary organization that in the mid-1960s helped the military kill over a million “communists” in Indonesia.

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Actively complicit in genocide, the two re-enact the killings in the documentary, sparing no brutality but also, shockingly, no cinematic detail. The two see themselves as movie gangsters; they act as such and, importantly for our purposes, dress us such, evoking an aesthetic quite familiar to the American audience, which, poignantly, is instead likely to have for the first time become aware of the horrific events the documentary chronicles. Lastly, documentaries do reflect on fashion when, simply put, fashion is the focus. Documentaries on fashion abound: The September Issue (R. J. Cutler, 2009), Bill Cunningham New York (Richard Press, 2010), The Gospel According to André (Kate Novack, 2017), which we mentioned in relation to the importance of repetition in fashion, and several documentaries on individual designers from Chanel to Dior to Valentino, to the one I aim to discuss in this section: McQueen. Directed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui and released in 2018, the film is interesting not only, quite obviously, because McQueen is an exciting designer (and character), but because it is structured around his iconic collections with each collection opening a new chapter of the film. The movie’s division in chapters—and, to this extent, its embracing of an episodic style—is structurally not entirely uncommon but particularly significant in the case of a movie on fashion, for a number of reasons. To begin with, while it is possible to identify fashion narratives, as the re-appearance of styles over the decades (think, for example, of the influence of 1980s fashion on contemporary “athleisure” clothing, or the narrative associated with the evolution of the “little black dress”), fashion is also notorious, and arguably especially notorious, for its ability to glorify the moment, to immortalize an aesthetic, to turn a flashlight on a style, a way of being, a movement. Some may say that fashion’s ability to capture such moments is the purpose behind creating a show where clothes are introduced to the public. In

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many ways, such seems to be the purpose of McQueen’s memorable shows. The documentary follows the designer’s iconic collections: Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims, Highland Rape, the Voss collection, and Plato’s Atlantis. They can be seen together as the steps in the career of an accomplished designer, but they are individually intriguing. McQueen’s styles are provoking, rebellious, and often autobiographical. The shows he organized reflected his interests and fascination, but  they were also a window into his personal life and experiences. When watching the documentary, it is tempting to wonder whether the shows, those brief, intense, and unforgettable moments could be taken as the key to revealing his identity. Differently put, are the shows, those episodes, representative of who he was not only as a designer but also as a person? Are they perhaps more representative than any narrative, story, or weaving of events that can be used to describe him? Is there a story we can trace to better understand the life and work of McQueen, or shall we look at those clothes, especially at the few minutes in which those clothes were introduced to the public—on the runway? Generalizing,  I  believe it is possible to argue for the feasibility, especially in cases where fashion plays a prominent role in establishing one’s life and everyday, of an episodic, rather than narrative, understanding of identity. This does not mean, as mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, that one excludes the other. I think that a narrative and an episodic understanding of identity can and should be seen as compatible. However, focusing exclusively on narrative is likely mistaken. Attention to episodic instead of narrative features of our lives can illuminate crucial aspects of identity development and the difficulty and uniqueness of such a development. When looking at McQueen’s collections, what we see is an explosion of identity. There’s irreverence, a feature of his work, but also tentativeness. The shows were attempts to develop a vision, they

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were groundbreaking, provocative, but they were also, as mentioned, forms of autobiographical expression—an attempt at offering a vision (and not just a story) of McQueen’s own mind—a mind that, like fashion,  expressed itself visually, through motion, on bodies, and with fabrics. While narrative is a central component of our lives, while we may want to claim it has ties with who we are as human beings—as a kind of evolutionary device allowing us to live together as a society—not everything is a story. So much is left out when focusing exclusively on the (mostly) propositional means used to convey who we are in personal narratives. More cogently, it is not just about what is left out; it is about leaving something unseen. Fashion can embody an episodic understanding of identity by combining visual and tactile details. Those details are further amplified in runway shows such as the ones orchestrated by McQueen, where the visual appearance and tactile feeling of clothes are put in motion, staged, given a score and a pace. And it does not matter that shows run for only a few minutes; they may be as intriguing and revelatory as a long and detailed recounting of facts—arguably, in some cases, more. In selecting the means leading to the portrayal of identity, it is thus essential to contemplate the power that solutions alternative to narrative can play and how such solutions can make us better understand the effectiveness and impact of an episodic construal of identity.  I  believe fashion to be such a means.  I  argued that it is in McQueen, for the designer, McQueen.

L’Année dernière à Marienbad: Fashion or Identity? Last Year at Marienbad premiered in 1961 as a collaboration between Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet, the novelist who, with this film, began his career as a filmmaker. The movie won the Golden Lion

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at the Venice Film Festival and was later nominated, in 1963, by the Academy Awards, for Best Original Screenplay (the award went to Pietro Germi’s Divorce, Italian Style). It is not an easy movie. A dreamlike enigma, the film is hardly based on a causally structured narrative—if on a narrative at all. What we have is instead a movie based on repetition: of questions, images, games, and, of course, fashion. It features two main characters, Giorgio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyrig. Unnamed, the two are guests in an opulent resort, Marienbad; they keep meeting, and virtually each meeting questions whether they had met already, the previous year. The play of questions, the stories they begin to tell each other but hardly finish, the walks they take in the gardens and up and down the endless corridors lead to nothing. What develops is puzzlement, uncertainty, and an almost intolerable longing for closure. The movie does not progress; rather, it spirals onto itself: layer upon layer, teasing the audience into creating a story that fails to materialize. Resnais wished the film to be examined like a statue in three dimensions; he wanted viewers to explore its surface and complexity from every angle. There is the architecture: the tapestry, the halls, the furniture, the heavy mirrors framed in bronze. The gardens, the play of shadows and the cone-shaped cypresses, the statues, the monumental building in the background. Then costumes. Like all the other components, costumes remind us that this is a movie we explore rather than watch. Seyrig, a fashion icon, wears a series of dresses and gowns, alternating black and white. Donated by Chanel, they contribute to the repetitive theme on which the movie is built, but they also, as I will try to show, offer another opportunity to contemplate fashion in relation to narrative and identity. To begin with, as mentioned, the movie refuses to abide by standard narrative conventions. It builds expectation but never rewards it.

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Whether the two have or have not met at Marienbad before, what they did, what their relationship may have been like are disputable facts. There are no certainties in terms of space or time—two nonexisting coordinates. There are also no certainties when it comes to the identity of the protagonists. Seyrig and Albertazzi are not just unnamed; they are statuesque, frozen in fantasy, unreachable. We do not know whether they have met and fallen in love. Details of Seyrig’s life seem, at one point, to emerge. The movie suggests she may be married, sojourning at Marienbad with her husband (Sasha Pitöeff, cast as a secondary character, card player, and Seyrig’s potential husband). Still, they are just as questionable as everything else. Narrative is lacking in both the movie and the characters’ lives making their identity utterly ineffable: it cannot be described through words, through a narrative, through their love story. But it is precisely this point, the lack of a traceable narrative, the repetition of the same question as a symbol for the lack of speech that makes the film’s appearance, look, and mood so intriguing. Costumes in the movie are presented to us as sculptures, as artistic creations. The feathered peignoir, perhaps one of the most easily remembered outfits in the film, can transform Seyrig into a mythological figure. Already hardly reachable—her distant beauty, her poses, her brief appearances, her inability to remember—Seyrig is transformed, by the costumes, into something that may not even be human: a hallucination, a fable. To this extent, we may argue that costumes, in Last Year at Marienbad, do something radically different from giving life and identity to a character: they surpass it, they become actors, the object of our attention and gaze. Seyrig models the clothes, walks in them, stops, and poses— framed in a picture or a mirror—but she hardly seems to own them or have chosen them. They have chosen her. In the end, her gowns are all we know about her: a surface we can contemplate, a surface that is stunning, ornate, luxurious, often to an excess. We are left to wonder

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if this is enough as identity, and arguably it isn’t. But is the search for identity, of an authentic way of portraying the self even a possibility? The movie suggests a negative answer. In it, identity is suffocated by what surrounds it. Seyrig is a model, a statue: her sphynx-like appearance further emphasized by her dresses. However, while the dresses may tromp details of the character’s personality, while they in part dehumanize her, they also allow us to reflect on the position and status of Seyrig as a woman and as a woman who is there to be looked at. Seyrig is the object of Albertazzi’s desire and, as the movie implies, an erotic victim. The fear she (may?) experience upon each encounter is mentioned but hardly explored or contextualized. It is fear of assault, a fear that anticipates a violent attack and possibly rape. The combination of the lack of individual, personal characteristics and her being the object of desire highlights her fragility as a woman, if not, more comprehensively, the fragility of being a woman. And such fragility is exacerbated, one more time, by repetition. Costumes, the dresses worn by Seyrig, become, if we follow this line of analysis, another way of signaling the overall impossibility, for women, to avoid objectification and being viewed as an erotic prize. They also mask her fear; presented to us almost as a mannequin, adorned with nothing but beauty, Seyrig is deprived of feelings and especially of her ability to confront the dynamics of erotic desire that are set up by the multiple (inconclusive) narratives of the film. Her clothes, as seen, silence her. And clothes, we are invited to think, often silence women. It is interesting to speculate on whether a more traditional approach to narrative and, further, a more conventional use of narrative as the means to convey identity could have achieved the same result.  On the one hand, erasing individuality for the sake of the aesthetic, on  the other, sidelining individual identity in favor of a reflection on collective identity and gender. Resnais’ film does both. In it, the

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episodic narrative and fashion choices nullify the hope for authentic identity, but they also simultaneously denounce the objectification and sexualization of women. On the one hand, we have an opportunity to dwell in the metaphysical conundrums of identity. On the other, we recognize the need for sociocultural awareness and criticism of the status quo: a philosophical feat.

Conclusions: Episodes and Fashion We can summarize the insights of this chapter with a question: what can the combination of episodic storytelling and fashion teach us about identity? While  I  have not provided a single conclusive answer to such question,  I  believe, quite simply, in the importance of raising it. Reflecting on the relationship between episodic storytelling in film and fashion makes us ponder how identity can be portrayed. And it is crucial to notice how such ways can disclose features of identity that may go unnoticed when a narrative approach is preferred. We began with Personal Shopper, where we observed how the wearing of an outfit, even only one time, can, as an episode in one’s life, illuminate the role played in the development of who we are by allowing us to “try on” alternative personalities. Far from a controlled set of events that follow each other in a more or less causal fashion, life is full of tentative moments, mistakes, experiments, and explorations of identity. Fashion, and in the case of this movie, a Chanel sequin dress, offer the possibility of trying on alternative egos, exploring portions of ourselves, our desires, inclinations, and values that may otherwise not emerge. It does not even matter whether authenticity is or is not the goal. For there is no identity without room for the mundane, the futile, for impossible visions of who we may be; there is no identity without room for mistakes and masks and, I shall say,

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dresses that suit us poorly. The episodic nature of fashion allows for these moments to emerge, and, in many ways, it can ease us from the pressure of performing our “best” self—the one whose life is an organized narrative, with a moral of the story built into it. With the second movie analyzed, McQueen, the goal was to acknowledge the episodic nature of fashion and suggest that forms of expression such as fashion, arguably also in virtue of their episodic nature, may be preferable, for some, to more traditional narrative means. I suggested that this might have been the case for Alexander McQueen, the designer. Such an inference is based on the importance that his fashion shows—the focus of the documentary, but also the expression of both his inner life and genius—had in expressing the designer’s personality: his aims, troubles, obsessions, and vulnerability. I argue that it is likely wrong, or at best partial, to see narrative as “the” way to trace and express identity. Its reliance on language, plotting, on the overall need for an arch bringing life from beginning to end is both too much and too little. Too much, as critics of the narrative view have shown, because it seamlessly conflates nonfictional life with the lives of characters in fiction; too little because painfully unaware that expression does not only happen through words. Can fashion and the very creation of fashion allow for an alternative way of portraying identity? My suggestion, one more time, is that they can. In McQueen, I believe they do. Last Year at Marienbad is built around a question that keeps being asked but cannot be answered. The film is set in a place where the appearance of things—rooms, gardens, corridors—is an ornate and dazzling labyrinth, a visual enigma. The movie does not follow a narrative arch and presents a series of episodes instead. In those episodes, clothes—the Chanel gowns worn by Delphine Seyrig— add to the mystery of her identity, perhaps even suggesting the impossibility of finding identity, of reaching a sense of authenticity. However, we have also observed how they may serve a different

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function: they may witness women’s silence in the face of a potential threat and symbolize the objectification of women in erotic relationships. These are just a few examples of how fashion can contribute to a model and understanding of identity that does not necessarily benefit from a narrative account of the self. I hope this counts as the beginning of a new reflection on how to frame the conversation on identity and better understand the tools that can be used to display it.

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Closing Thoughts: A Philosophy of Fashion—through Film

This book aims at defining fashion while also investigating the ability  of film to contribute to philosophical discussion. The first goal, defining fashion, is the primary goal. Yet, the second one, namely a reflection on the possibility (and ability) of film to contribute to philosophical discussion, is not entirely ancillary. There are several ways in which film can convey philosophical insights. As the reader will remember from the beginning of this book, films have been used as thought experiments. But films can also challenge accepted paradigms and mores, and they can—and this is the thesis I advocated in the course of this book—do philosophy per se, thus actively contributing to the philosophical dialogue. The view I chose to defend, familiar to scholars in the philosophy of motion pictures and supported by Aaron Smuts, is that for film to indeed “do” philosophy, they must meet two criteria. The first is to provide an epistemically novel contribution. Not necessarily something unheard of (as we remarked, that’s hardly the case in philosophy), but something that is nonetheless intriguing: a new compelling angle on an existing debate would do. The second criterion is instead concerned with how such content is delivered. The means in question, as we are engaging with the filmic medium, must be cinematic and thus different from the ones philosophers traditionally use: articles, books, lectures. The primary way in which the films analyzed “do” philosophy sees them as contributing, collectively, to a philosophical definition

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of fashion, one in which fashion is seen as an object that performs, and  as  an object that affects the development and discovery of our identity. Film has allowed for such a definition to emerge, in part, needless to say, because it is in itself performative and because fashion is used as an aesthetic means central to cinematography and the overall film production. The ways in which costume designers think about costumes together with their understanding of fashion—for several of the films considered are also reflections on the fashion world—have allowed us to explore fashion’s definition and philosophical value while also contributing to the overall philosophical content of the films, a content that of course varies with individual films. The use of film to ground arguments on the nature of fashion also suggests an opening, in the philosophy of motion pictures, to a discussion on costumes—they are a central aesthetic resource and are only rarely sufficiently acknowledged. But there are two more ways in which we have established a connection between fashion, film, and philosophy. First, in relation to the understanding of bodily identity when seen through the discussions raised by the field of body aesthetics. Secondly, as we have seen in the last chapter, costumes in film can provide us with reasons for considering, in addition to more widely accepted notions of narrative identity, the significance of an episodic sense of the self. To summarize, fashion and costumes have provided us with reasons to pursue avenues of philosophical research while also suggesting ways in which such research can grow. They have done it by introducing the possibility and the guidelines for a philosophy of fashion, by advancing research on body identity, and by making us consider the relation between narrative and episodic accounts of identities: their advantages and shortcomings. Let me consider them in order.

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What Is Fashion? I ended every chapter of this book with a set of brief conclusions summarizing the main tenets, arguments, and contributions to the definition of fashion and to an understanding of how seeing it in the context of film can trigger a reflection on identity. The definition of fashion I proposed is based, first and foremost, on fashion’s performative nature. Such a nature is the starting point for its characterization. Fashion is “to fashion”: it is something we do. Fashion items are meant to be worn; they age with us, they are to be manipulated. When someone sees fashion as one of the ways in which one’s identity can be affirmed, then the performance of fashion—the way it is made perform—becomes increasingly significant. It is a matter of what one does with certain garments and accessories—how they are selected, arranged, and combined—but it is also a matter of letting those items guide self-discovery. As a lover of fashion, I have been, I believe, changed by what I am wearing. I felt better in some clothes worse in others.  I  wore fashion, but it also carried me somewhere I often found novel, unexpected. A second component to the definition of fashion, which  I  have inherited from existing accounts and specifically from the work of Walter Benjamin, is that fashion is about creating the new, a new that is achieved, however, only in virtue—and this is the point I defended— of the creative use of repetition. While it is inevitable to link repetition to the continuous production of new items that we too frequently encounter in our consumerist society, we should be wary of criticizing its role in defining fashion. For fashion is about learning how to repeat a trend, where the repetition of fashion and individual outfits or styles should be seen as essential to their power. Repetition, in fashion, is far from mindless, and it is the starting point for the endless modifications that lead to

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new and iconic items. Learning how to repeat is a vital component of the history of fashion, but it is also essential when looking at the clothes and accessories we wear every day. It is true, we are often, too often, victims of the allure of trends and styles that are hardly innovative. And many times we repeat to conform to the norms of a social group, status—we repeat to fit in. To this extent, we either repeat mindlessly or because of reasons that lie outside of fashion. But we should not forget that there are instances in which repetition is a carefully studied move, one that has to do with styles we find close to ourselves, we decide to revive, or we repeat for precise and personal reasons, as when an item is associated with a defining moment in our life or the life of someone close to us. Repetition, when understood in such a way, has quite a bit to do with who we are, with our identity, and with how identity is filtered by the garments we wear. Furthermore, and moving to the second feature of fashion we emphasized in this volume, fashion is intimately tied to our bodily identity. Such a connection is part of its definition: to talk about fashion is to talk about the body: our body and the body of others. In fact, as we have seen, the connection between fashion and bodily identity can be the starting point for a process of aesthetic exploration where the body is observed, conversed with, and discovered. Treating the body as a territory worthy of aesthetic exploration, a concept introduced by Sherri Irvin, has brought us to the analysis of bodies in their broader sociocultural context, with a focus on gender, race, and ableism. Perhaps the importance of film and the use of filmic examples are even more visible here than in relation to the previous feature of fashion analyzed, the combination of newness and repetition. For film offers us bodies that move and allows us to observe them in ways that are not available to the naked eye. In film we see bodies through close-ups, we notice details, and often such details are further linked to fashion and costumes and to how they complement the body. As I will further remark in the next

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section, the use of film to explore the body has potential, and can and should be seen as providing us with an additional avenue of research to further grow the field of body aesthetics. The last chapter has narrowed the focus on the portrayal of identity—on the means necessary to its emergence. Here we moved away from narrative accounts of identity and suggested an understanding of fashion in relation to an episodic conception of identity instead. This is not to say that a narrative understanding of fashion is impossible or mistaken. Far from it. The point is that an episodic understanding better suits a description of what fashion can do in displaying and discovering, testing, and examining who we are. These two strands of analysis, the attention to the body and the reconsideration of an episodic understanding of life are not only important when discussing fashion, but they are also a constitutive part of its definition. Fashion is a practice that relates to an identity that is embodied and in progress; an identity that is delineated through fashion’s continuous as well as episodic usage. Crucially, such a notion of identity, and the process leading to its establishment, allow for experimentation, creativity, and the contemplation of alternative paths and possibilities: all aspects contributing to fashion’s dynamism and forward character. Allow me to say a few more words about each.

Moving Pictures and Moving Bodies Curricula in western philosophy have not traditionally prioritized the body and its role in defining who we are. Phenomenologists, prominently Maurice Merleau-Ponty, emphasized the importance of perception and being situated in the world only in the past century. But after that, interest in the body has grown, especially among feminist scholars, ethicists, and most recently among scholars in aesthetics.

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Aesthetic attention to the body is instead a longtime feature, a guiding thread in film and fashion history. In film, we see bodies that move. They act; they are meant to be stared at. There’s abundant literature on the figure and significance of the film actor in academia as well as popular culture. There are divas, stars, and an entire complex industry devoted to them—they are cult figures, always perceived as slightly removed from the rest of us. In fashion, bodies are, in many ways, the starting point. Clothes, accessories, make-up, etc., are meant to emphasize, hide, complement, aid the body. And more. They live symbiotically with it, attached. Bodies and garments reference each other, one leading to the discovery of the other—and vice-versa. There are, as known, downsides to such a connection, which can be highly problematic. It’s the acceptance of unattainable—or outright dangerous—beauty standards, the privileging of a Caucasian conception of beauty, and the commercialization of outfits and aesthetic practices that constrain and limit the wearer’s freedom and dignity. Such difficulties are visible also in film, and sometimes they are at the core of the very star system mentioned above. But both industries are beginning to acknowledge such concerns, they are becoming more vocal, and they have begun to actively pursue alternative approaches, as it is visible,  I  believe, in at least some of the movies analyzed in this volume. The philosophical contribution brought about by such films—and again, it is a contribution made possible by costume design choices— is to initiate a process of aesthetic exploration. Beginning with the observation of the characters’ bodies, movies can have transformative power. They can teach us how to direct our gaze better and how to, in turn, question accepted standards of physical fitness, beauty, and ability. The bodies we encounter and stare at in Mad Max: Fury Road, Black Panther, and Moonlight are the bodies of characters we come to

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love. But the attachment we build is different from the attachment we may have for mainstream movie stars. It is an attachment guided by the realization of the presence, relevance, and strength of their bodily identity, an identity that considers disability, race, and sexuality. As we have seen in the third chapter of this volume, Sherri Irvin suggests that we begin the aesthetic exploration of the body with our own and maybe move on to the body of a loved one. I can start with my hands, say, and move to my partner’s hair and how different it is from mine. The movies analyzed and this volume’s focus on fashion ad costumes suggest one more trajectory and, to this extent, can promote new avenues for the aesthetic exploration of the body. We can start, and this is to be taken as a veritable philosophical contribution, with what bodies wear, with the ways in which the body is adorned and complemented: be it a prosthetic arm or a gold grill. For what adorns a body is an invitation to look at the body more carefully, and such a novel look, such a novel way of “staring” can lead to interest in what is other. What’s foreign and other finally becoming compelling. Perhaps such use of film, and costumes, is not enough to do philosophy per se.  I  do not claim that using costumes to promote the aesthetic exploration of the body necessarily adds a novel contribution to the philosophical landscape. It is not a matter of launching a new field, of claiming something that has never been claimed before. However, the arguments and analysis proposed contribute significantly to a field of aesthetics, body aesthetics, that is only recently affirming itself. This volume, and specifically the chapter dedicated to the body, is thus to be seen as a way of confirming and promoting the need to further reflect on the body, bodily identity, and the convergence of ethical and aesthetic questions and concerns that spur from such a focus. Continuing a philosophical endeavor can count, and, I believe, does count, as philosophical progress.

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Reassessing Identity I ended the previous section by noting how the observation and study of costumes in film can enrich and contribute to a blossoming area of philosophical aesthetics: body aesthetics. There is, however, one more philosophical conversation in which costumes take part: the one on narrative identity. As mentioned in the last chapter, costumes’ contribution here is to make us reflect on the importance of episodes within a lifetime, and especially—and here is the philosophical core—on the value of considering an episodic understanding of identity alongside narrative understandings of identity, which, admittedly, are more prevalent among philosophy scholars. The position outlined does not aim at poking holes in narrativebased accounts.  I  am not questioning their excessive similarity to literary narratives, as Peter Lamarque has done (Lamarque, 2007), nor am I particularly critical of the psychological burden they appear to impose on those who are not seeing their lives as a narrative, as Galen Strawson has argued (2005). Rather than objecting to narrative accounts, my goal is to emphasize the benefits of a more careful consideration of what an episodic understanding of identity may imply.  I  used fashion and costume choices as the starting point for such an analysis. A disclaimer is needed.  I  am not claiming that the movies considered are, therefore, non-narrative movies. Most of them are based on a relatively straightforward understanding of narrative: something with a beginning, a middle, and end, meaningful connections, and a sense of closure. Additionally, the costumes analyzed are also often helpful in the progression of such narratives, thus accomplishing what we have seen as being one of the principal goals of costume design.

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And yet, together with aiding narrative development and fostering character development, costumes also make us aware of the crucial importance of individual scenes—call them episodes. A critical characteristic of episodes—in life and fashion—is that they do not necessarily align with what appears to be the prevailing or guiding narrative. Episodes in life can be a bit random, so to speak. Sometimes things just happen and their duration is limited, confined. We can of course try to fit such occurrences in a more complex narrative, but sometimes there is no need or desire to do so. Maybe doing so would be wrong, even forceful. Why can’t episodes, in life, stand alone? Similar reasoning can apply to fashion. While it is undeniably true that there are fashion narratives (think, for example, of jeans, from their creation to the multiple ways in which they are cut to the ways in which they have “colonized” the fashion world), fashion is also a matter of individual instances. Of outfits that stand alone. Fashion gives us the opportunity of choosing an outfit or, more generally, a way of fashioning ourselves that can drastically diverge from what we would “normally” wear. As mentioned, more than trying on, sometimes we may just “try.” In this, we should see quite a bit more than putting on a mask, than playing a part. While sometimes fashion and fashioning oneself can be ways of hiding something about us, we should be wary of rushing to such a judgment. For even if different from what we would typically choose, even if not aligning with our specific preferences, what we may wear even just once can affect who we are. Rather than covering or concealing aspects of who we are, a fashion item or a style can make us reflect on our boundaries, on a previous decision, on the importance of aesthetic concerns, and of how, in turn, they relate to ethical concerns and our place in society. An outfit can be the episode that sparks a conversation: with others but also with ourselves.

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Fashion allows for experimentation; there are cases in which such an experimentation is not too costly. There are also cases in which it is, as when experimenting is a way of affirming gender and race identity. But in both cases the importance of “testing oneself through clothes” remains crucial, for it has a lot to do with our ability to think imaginatively. It should be noted that not all “fashion episodes” are necessarily to be seen as transformative; in fact, very few are. In most cases, what we are doing is to experiment for the sake of experimenting, more or less. But such experimentations, and the ability to move on and even forget about them, are an essential component of who we are. For some of us, and I can certainly speak for myself here, hesitant, awkward, goofy, and daring experimentations with fashion can be seen as a way of growing and developing into the persons we are, and into the persons we will be. Narrative conceptions of the self focus on what is meaningful, on key facets of our lives, on the ability to connect events, to draw conclusions from them. But this is hardly what life and identity are made of: at best, it is a highly distilled version. An episodic understanding of identity is instead capable of displaying its fullness: experimentations, mistakes, and all—messier, perhaps, but crucially tied to who we are as performative beings: embedded in the present and the everyday. Differently put, we can say, with some approximation, that while narrative accounts of the self focus on the “final product” of a narrative we establish because of the meaningfulness and connectedness of the events embedded in it, an episodic view is more concerned with the ongoing dimension of identity, with its building, step by step. Narrative accounts are also heavily based on memory, specifically on the verbal recollection of memories. They are about stories we tell. But the reliance on language and storytelling abilities (be them more or less conscious) is limiting. Episodic accounts, precisely

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because of their “in the moment” quality, can rely on a broader phenomenological set of inputs. There is more room for displaying identity through showing  rather than exclusively (or almost exclusively) through telling. We have seen this in fashion, in film, and especially in the combination of both. The emphasis on fashion, the emphasis on one specific costume or, as we have seen in Last Year at Marienbad, on the almost strenuous repetition of costumes, allows for individual scenes to stand alone, to carry a significance that goes beyond simply contributing to the narrative flow of the film. We are reminded of how important just one scene, one sequence, can be, and how it can affect the characters and our vision of them. As I was choosing the movies that I believed could better convey my faith in the importance of episodic identity,  I  began to realize that perhaps all the films analyzed in this volume could have served such a purpose. For the movies  I  am discussing here seriously and committedly engage with the power of fashion to talk and display identity, even if it is just a matter of a few minutes, of one sequence. In the films analyzed, identity is problematized through fashion—it is philosophically interesting. But the choice of Personal Shopper, McQueen, and Last Year at Marienbad has the advantage of showing how episodes can tell us something about the tentativeness of identity building. They show the importance of experimentation, struggle, creative bursts, and even failure. We see such components in isolated episodes that, while related to the rest of the movie, are significant in themselves. The identity of the characters we encounter in the films just mentioned does not easily fit a narrative model, for they inevitably rebel against it—thanks to fashion, of course. And such a rebellion, filtered through costumes, is the epistemic contribution we gain—one more way to think about identity, and perhaps a way to reconcile narrative and episodic accounts.

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Fashion, Off-Screen In this book,  I  defined fashion using costumes. Looking at their characteristics and their contribution to the film narrative and character development has allowed me to outline what fashion is, a definition that, as we have seen, sees fashion as inherently performative and constitutive of our identity. But a question can legitimately emerge: how are costumes, an element of film style and one of the many components leading to the creation of a film, an indication of what fashion is in everyday life, away from the mechanics and control exercised by the film industry? How do we move from costumes on screen to what we wear off-screen? Clothes in real life are quite different from the costumes actors wear. To begin with, as we have seen, they do not serve the same functions. Costumes contribute to the narrative and the mood of a film. They are there to allow the characters to come alive. The way costumes are designed and worn is the product of the costume designer and the director’s intentions. Costumes are there for us, the audience. This is undoubtedly true. But if we pause for a minute, we’ll begin to notice how what  I  described above as differences or at least discrepancies between costumes and “off-screen” fashion may instead be similarities. Similarities if, again, we understand fashion as inherently performative and connected to who we are. Let’s be clear:  I  am not claiming that one needs to be heavily invested in fashion for someone’s identity to emerge. While it is hard to completely ignore fashion (even wearing the same things every day is a fashion choice; even not caring about fashion is a fashion choice), it is perfectly normal and legitimate to see it as a minute, tangential aspect of who we are. After all, as we have remarked in the previous section, the research, display, and building of identity can take many forms.

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But fashion can be one. The way we see costumes in the movies analyzed teaches us of specific ways in which everyday fashion can contribute to our identity. It can foster self-discovery—an element of character development; it is attached to the events of our lives and their unfolding, intimately connected to our stories. And, ultimately, it is something we design and curate to express ourselves while also leaving room for discovery: the moment in which an item of clothing, for example, begins to reveal something that we had not previously realized. There are many days in which  I  throw on whatever is convenient.  I  have a dog to walk, a young child to take to school, plenty of emails to get back to, and way too many research projects at various stages of development. But there are many instances in which fashion has acted as a guide to my own self. Instances in which  I  intentionally picked clothes and designed a look, instances that allowed me to experiment. Clothes have surprised me too. Something in a style I would not think of wearing can become a new staple of how I dress—and of who I am. They are not costumes, of course. They are not worn behind a camera or on stage. But they have made me reflect on my life as a performative journey. I have emphasized possible similarities between costumes and fashion as an instrument to define who we are. Again, such similarities may not work for everyone, but they certainly do for many of us in many moments of our lives. Using film to define fashion is also a strategic choice. Movies make us reflect on our lives and identity. They are, as seen, a powerful tool to make us think about pretty much anything—think deeper, I mean, philosophically too. While we may watch movies to escape everyday reality, we also need them to understand it better. This volume is written under the assumption that looking at costumes in film can make us better realize the importance of fashion. It can cast a light

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on what fashion is and can be while also contributing to a better understanding of how we build and assess the person we are— imaginatively, and in the everyday. There are several obvious advantages to the use of film. The focus deriving from directorial intentions allows us to zoom in on significant details. The relationship between costumes and the characters wearing  them naturally predisposes us to think of them in relation to identity and character development. Then, of course, the distance component: it is not us wearing those costumes; it is a character. As we have seen in the chapter dedicated to the body, it is only natural to stare at characters, to explore them—there is no risk of feeling overly shy or embarrassed. Lastly, in movies, we see fashion move. It is not a matter of clothes hanging in a closet, and it is not our image reflected, static, in the mirror as we check ourselves before going to work. Costumes belong to a world of images that move; fashion moves with us, and seeing it move is a first step toward thinking about it.

Epilogue

While the above considerations should suffice as a conclusion for this book,  I  can’t but see the need for an epilogue, etymologically, and literally “one more word.” Epilogues are hardly a part of nonfiction writing; they are most frequently found in theater. They are often directed at the audience, a shift that renders them more personal, almost confessional. But an emphasis on the personal is a feature of fashion. It talks to the self and to the collection of selves we happen to live by, pass on the sidewalk, share cities and airspace with. This is perhaps particularly true now, as  I  type these last lines. I type and I pause, not without hesitation, because it is never immediate to know what to say at the end, even less when what is left is the need to open the debate beyond the academic page and onto the world in which I lived as these pages where written and collected into a book. It is the beginning of 2022. It is a year after 2021, and it has been two years since 2020 which is the year we’ll all remember (or perhaps try to forget) as the start of a global pandemic. Talk of COVID-19 was heard at Milan Fashion week, when not much was yet known about the virus and its strength, and even less, sadly, about how much that very region of Italy will be affected in the following months. New York, another fashion mecca and my hometown, will be hit in an equally brutal way just a few weeks later. Months of isolation followed, and “stay at home” orders closed movie theaters and halted productions. Entertainment was

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consumed and enjoyed inside each household thanks to streaming platforms (the  consequences of the pandemic on how we consume entertainment are certainly a topic we’ll find ourselves debating—if we are not discussing it already). At home, conversations on fashion shifted. As designers tried to figure out how to host a virtual fashion show that would acknowledge the gravity of the situation without skimping on glamour, many of us settled into wearing sweats and working from home. Ironically, pandemic or not, “loungewear” was likely to become my choice of clothing: in 2020,  I  became pregnant with my son, born in February 2021. But the conversations did not stop at loungewear, and some were sombering. The death of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd at the hands of police officers, one more sign of police brutality against minorities and especially the Black community, led to months of protests, peaceful and not. The fashion world responded and emphasized a need for diversity (Testa, 2022). New York Fashion week pledged to pass an inclusion rider as part of its hiring policy. More than 200 black professionals sent a letter to the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) under the name “The Kelly Initiative.” They accused the organization of allowing “exploitative cultures of prejudice, tokenism and employment discrimination to thrive” and offered suggestions for improvement (Tillet and Friedman, 2020). Black-owned companies and black designers are becoming more prominent: Wales Bonner, Farai London, and the exquisite Folklore, which opened in New York City and features emerging high-end brands from Africa and the diaspora are only a few notable examples. Changes in fashion, whether dictated by the fashion industry, as in the introduction of new collections, or personal, as when we privilege one style over another, or somewhat abruptly brought to us, as in the changes to our lifestyles brought by the pandemic invariably lead

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to a reflection on who we are, and where we are going. These are conversations we start, thanks and because of fashion. And they are conversations taking place in the everyday. In September, the Metropolitan Museum in New York hosted its first Met Gala since 2019. The theme was “American Independence.” The hosts were younger than ever, and arguably as popular as ever: Naomi Osaka, Timothée Chalamet, Amanda Gorman, and Billie Eilish. They are not only successful artists, they are social media phenomena. Together with American Independence, they represent America’s future and, with it, the future of American fashion. Historically, athletic and casual clothing have played an important part in defining American fashion, and so did anything not too markedly European. But American fashion is mainly guided—as the Met Gala’s theme suggests, by independence and its ability to move forward (Friedman, 2021). To this extent, the connection and fascination for the movie industry are not a surprise. Perhaps it is because of such independence that we are all wondering what will happen next, what values fashion will embody, how it will reflect on recent and pressing ethical questions and their role in society. We are all wondering what can be said through fashion and what fashion will say about us.

Notes Chapter 1 1

From a private conversation with Dr. Landis, whom I thank.

2

The notable example here is Paul Poirot’s haute couture.

3

It should be noted how, at least initially, the designer did this to protest the very obsession with new clothes (think of Martin Margiela’s work in the 1990s).

4

In this sense, it is different from something that is simply in fashion, for one may be interested in following fashion trends for various reasons— class status, business, professional interests, etc.

Chapter 2 1

Sirk had mastered Brechtian theater as a Weimer stage director, before

2

One of the most interesting is the one designed by Dapper Dan

moving to Hollywood. which Talley has worn to all the press conferences and screenings for his bio-pic The Gospel According to Andre (Novack, 2018).

Chapter 3 1

Pesses, confirming this intuition, sees the movie as a representation of “automobility.” Relying on John Urry’s definition of the term, Pesses sees “auto” as evoking both an autobiographical strand and as objectively referring to machines (Pesses, 2019: 44).

2

Tanisha Ford, in her interview with Ruth Carter, notices how Carter “was drawn to the impeccable Ghanaian-inspired tailoring of Ozwald Boateng, as well as Ikiré Jones’s florid textiles, which reimagine

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Nigerian culture through high Renaissance art. South Africa’s MaXhosa by Laduma, with its futuristic knitwear based on graphic Xhosa prints, and the peculiar silhouettes and color clashing of Duro Olowu—the Nigerian designer who dressed Michelle Obama—add an avant-garde edge. Together, the styles channel the dandified elegance of Congolese sapeurs and the transgressive spirit of the Afropunk festival to express the characters’ wide range of personalities” (Ford, 2018).

Chapter 4 1

Think of the thousands of people who purchase “atheleisure” and who abide, by purchasing items from brands such as Lululemon, Outdoor Voices, Alo Yoga, and more by the rules of health and fitness. I’ll leave to the reader to gauge whether the standard advertised is indeed realistic or reachable, but it is undeniable: these clothes are everywhere, their popularity on the street and social media is undeniable and growing.

2

The opposite case, namely costume designers joining the fashion industry, is rare and less discussed. However, we know of renowned costume designers such as Adrian, who, realizing the popularity of his creations, did ultimately open a boutique in Los Angeles after retiring from MGM in 1942.

3

When discussing the costumes with Canonero, Coppola reportedly asked her to go for fresh, bright pastel colors, the colors of Ladurée macarons (Steele, 2012).

Chapter 5 1

Schechtman has published several versions of her argument. In her most recent book, Staying Alive, she sees the need of building our lives as a narrative as mainly being implicit, but she maintains the importance of seeing our lives as diachronic wholes.

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Index #metoo 17 1940s 45, 81 1950s 40, 43, 45, 47, 49, 50, 57, 88, 103 2000 43 35 mm 101 3D, 70, 72

Assayas, Olivier 111, 113 Atelier 88, 90 Attractiveness 57, 58, 60, 63–4, 67, 76–7 Autobiographical 71, 107, 119–20 Autobiography 107 Avant-garde 30, 103

Ableism 8, 18, 56–7, 60–1, 75, 130 Academy Award 64, 96, 121 The Act of Killing (2012) 117 Adams, Amy 92 Adornment 31, 98 Advertising 24, 56, 60, 77 Aesthetic exploration 9, 56, 59, 62, 64, 66, 75, 77, 105, 130, 132–3 Aesthetics 1, 6, 9, 24–5, 56, 59–60, 62, 66–8, 105, 128–31, 133–4 Afro-futurism 69 Afropunk 71 Akan 70 Albertazzi, Giorgio 121–3 Ali, Mahershala 72 All That Heaven Allows (1955) Allen, Woody 85 Alma 87, 89–91 Altman, Robert 86 America 43 American 36, 38, 89, 101, 118, 143 American Apparel 21 American fashion 101, 143 American Gigolo (1980) 81 “American Independence” 143 Amies, Hardy 88 Anderson, Paul Thomas 87–9 Annie Hall (1967) 85–6 Antonioni, Micahelangelo 53 Arendt, Hannah 20 Armani 10, 21, 81, 85 Armani/Armani X 10, 21, 81, 85

Bailey 96 Balmain 86 Bamber, Ellie 94 Banton, Travis 83 Beacher, Hannah 69 Beauty standards 23–4, 58, 132 Beene, Geoffrey 100–1 Belle de Jour (1967) 82, 86 Benjamin, Walter 19–20, 33–4, 129 Bergdorf Goodman 15 Berger, John 55 Bergman, Ingmar 100 Berlin 38 Bernhardt, Sarah 85 Biddy 88 Bigotry 43, 46 Bill Cunningham New York (2010) 118 Bill, Thomas 40 Binoche, Juliette 112 Black community 142 Black Panther (2018) 56, 67–8, 70–3, 75–6, 85, 132 Black Panther 69, 75, 80 Black-and-white 100 Blackwood, Caroline 89 Blaenciaga, Cristóbal 88 Blanchett, Cate 47, 50 Blockbuster 5, 30, 113, 116 Blood of a Poet (1930) 100 Bodily explorations 9 Bodily identity 6, 8–9, 19, 23, 31–2, 77, 80, 105, 128, 130, 133

158

Index

Body aesthetics 6, 9, 56, 128, 131, 133–4 Body oppression 58 Bolton, Andrew 96 Bonhôte, Ian 111, 118 Bonnie and Clyde (1967) 85 Bordwell, David 2, 28 Boseman, Chadwick 69 Bourgeois 39, 41–2, 46–4 Bouvier Beale, Edith 117 Bow Wow Wow 98 Brando, Marlon 36, 86 Brennan, Samantha 25 Bridges, Mark 87–9 Brooklyn Museum 15 Brooks, Peter 38 Brown, Joan 88 Bruzzi, Stella 14 Bunuel, Luis 82 Burton, Jeff 94 Butchart, Amber 86 Butler, Judith 23, 55–6 California 83 Camera 8, 40, 48, 139 Cannes Film Festival 113 Canonero, Milena 96 Carapace 66 Carastathis, Anna 60 Carol (2015) 37, 43, 50 Carol 47–50, 51 Carroll, Noël 2, 28, 76, 78 Carter, Ruth E. 69 Cartier Foundation 20 Celebrity 112, 113, 115 Censorship 83 Chalamet, Timothée 143 Mrs. Chan 52–3 Chanel 10, 36, 82, 85, 86, 94, 111, 113–21, 124–5 Chelsea Art Club Ball 88–9 Cheung, Maggie 52 “China: Through the Looking Glass” 86 Chinese 52

Chiron 72 Choi, Jinhee 28 Chow Mo-Wan 53 Christmas 48 Cinematography 3–4, 30, 51–2, 54, 68, 84, 94, 98, 104, 128 Cinempathy 30 Citadel 66 Clark, Sue 88 Closure 10, 107–8, 114, 121, 134 Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) 112 Coco before Chanel (2009) 86 Cocteau, Jean 100 Cognitive 2, 28 Collective identity 14, 35, 81, 123 Color Advisory Service 40 Colvig, Helen 84 Comme des Garçons 21 Congo, Anwar 117 Consumerism 2, 9, 22, 34, 108 Converse All-Stars 98 Coogler, Ryan 56, 67 Coppola, Sofia 87, 96–7 Corset 14, 64, 94, 96, 99 Costume design 10, 18, 37, 64, 77, 79, 82–7, 90–2, 97–8, 100, 102–3, 132, 134 Costume designer 18, 44, 69, 79, 82–4, 86, 92, 112, 116 Council of Fashion Designers of America 142 COVID, 78, 141 Creative strangeness 61 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 60 Critic 45, 71, 109 Criticism 16, 22, 29, 34, 54,109, 124 Currie, Gregory 28 Cusumano 94 Cutler, R.J. 86 Cyril 89 David C. Copley Center 18 David, Doniella 73 Davies, David 58

Index Day-Lewis, Daniel 87 De Niro, Robert 79 Deagan, Raymond 43 Dean, James 36 Definition of fashion 2, 6, 8–11, 19, 26–7, 31, 37, 77, 129 Deneuve, Catherine 86 Descartes 3, 55 Desfontaine, Henri 85 Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) 85 Dewey, John 68 DeWit, Jacqueline 42 Di Summa, Laura 80, 112, 117 Dichotomy 2, 23, 31 Dior, Christian 15, 36, 118 Director 16, 18–19, 21, 67, 76, 79, 82, 83, 86, 95, 97, 100, 113, 117 Directorial 51, 140 Disability 9, 18, 25, 62–3, 80, 133 Diversity 63, 67, 71, 76–7, 142 “do” philosophy 3–4, 29, 127 Documentary 86, 111, 116–19, 125 Doering, Jürgen 112 Donen, Stanley 86 Dunst, Kristen 96 East Hampton 117 Eaton, Anne 56 Eccentric 60, 102, 117 Eccentricity 33, 61 Eilish, Billie 143 Elsaesser, Thomas 38 Enders, Maria 112 England 90 Episodic 6–10, 80, 97–103, 105–36 Episodic self 105, 106, 109 Epistemic 3, 5, 29–30, 137 Erik Killmonger 70 Ethics/ethical 2–4, 28, 30, 38, 109, 131, 133, 135, 143 Ettedgui, Peter 86, 111, 118 Everyday 1, 3, 9, 11, 26, 33–5, 53, 67–8, 75, 80, 85, 87, 89, 101, 107, 119, 136, 138–40, 143

159

Evolutionary psychology 58 Ewig Bouvier Beale, Edith 117 Experiment 31, 42, 80, 101, 136, 139 Experimentation 31, 42, 131, 136–7 Expressionism 40 Fabulous 25, 48, 60–1, 73, 102 Fair Isle sweater 112 Far From Heaven (2002) 37–9, 41, 43–46 Farai London 142 Fashion bloggers 24 Fashion designer 10, 20, 21, 79–81, 92, 95, 100–1, 142 Fashion show 20, 89, 101, 125, 143 Fashion week 141–2 Fashionable 26, 49, 91, 110 Fashionista 80 Fassbinder 38 Fast fashion 16, 21 Felliniesque 100 Femininity 15, 63 Feminist 23–5, 55, 60 Fiction 28, 54, 92–3, 112–13, 125 Fisher, Isla 94 Flaneur 33 Flesh and the Devil (1926) 100 Floyd, George 142 Folklore 142 Fondazione Prada 20 Fontaine, Anne 86 Footwear 82 Ford, Harrison 79 Ford, Tanisha 71–2 Ford, Tom 87, 91–3, 95 Frankenberg 48 Franklin, Aretha 74 Fraser, Antonia 96 Frederick Worth, Charles 20, 85 French Enlightenment 98 Friedman, Vanessa 17, 35–6, 142–3 Funny Face (1957) 86 Futuristic 69

160 Gala 87, 113, 143 Garbo, Greta 100 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie 61–2, 67 Gaut, Berys 28 Gender 8, 14, 23–5, 30, 35–6, 56–7, 61, 73, 75, 77, 80, 123, 130, 136 Geoffrey Beene: 30 (1993) 87, 100, 102–3 Germany 40 Ginsburg, Ruth 35 Givenchy 81, 85 Gloves 44, 48 Golden Age 83 Golden Lion 120 Goldie, Peter 108 Gorman, Amanda 143 The Gospel According to André (2018) 86, 118 Gown 86–8, 91, 96, 98, 121–2, 125 Great Granny Webster 89 Green Place 65 Greenburg, Adrian Adolph 83 Greer, Howard 83 Grey Gardens (1975) 117 Griffith, D.W. 83 Grill 72–5, 80, 133 Guinness 89 Gvasalia, Demna 16 Gyllenhaal, Jake 92 H&M, 21 Hair 24, 47–8, 60, 74, 99, 110, 133 Halliday, Jon 37 Hardy, Tom 65 Harlow, Shalom 16 Harris, Lee 64 Harris, Naomi 72 Hartness, Norman 88 Harvey 42 Hat 48–9 Haute couture 21, 80 Haynes, Todd 37, 43–7, 50 Hays code 40

Index Haysbert, Dennis 43 Head, Edith 83 Hero 67 Heroine 39, 43, 46, 47, 50, 54 Hibbert, Alex 72 Higgs, Rita 84 Highland Rape 119 Himba 69 Hitchcock, Alfred 84 Holland, André 73 Hollywood 5, 54, 78, 82–3, 102 Homosexuality 45 Hong Kong 51, 53–4 hooks, bell (71) Howards End (1993) 64 Hudson, Rock 38 Hutton, Barbara 89 Hyland, Veronique 112 Identity theory 32, 105 Immortan Joe 64–6 Imperator Furiosa 65–7, 80 Individual style 31 Innovation 35, 36, 70 Instagram 17, 58 International 30, 78 Interpretation 2, 31, 39, 87, 101, 114 Irvin, Sherri 56, 58–9, 75, 130, 133 Ivory, James 64 Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims 119 Jackson, Frank 3 James, Charles 88 Jenkins, Barry 56, 72 Jolles, Marjorie 23 Jordan, Michal B. 70 Juan 72, 74–5 Kaftan 36 Kalin, Tom 87, 100–3 Kalmus, Natalie 40 Kant, Immanuel 55 Kantian 20

Index Katayama, Mari 18 Kawakubu, Rei 16, 21 Keays-Byrne, Hugh 64 Dr. Kelly Gold Grillz 73 Kelly Initiative 142 Kennedy Onassis, Jackie 117 Kente 69 Kevin 73–5 Khan, Nathalie 16 Kirby, Ron 38 Klein, William 86 Klevan, Andrew 39 Koerner, Julia 70 Koto, Herman 117 Krieps, Vicky 87 Kyra 112 L.A. 92, 95 Lacoste 112 Lagerfeld, Karl 21, 86 Lamarque, Peter 134 Lane, Anthony 64 Lapper, Alison 63 Last Year at Marienbad (1961) 52, 82, 111, 120 Lean, David 89 Lee, Ang 64 Leiber, Judith 94 Les Menottes de Cuivre 63 Lesbian 47, 51 Lesotho 70 Leung, Tony 53 LGBTQ+ 25, 64 Linney, Laura 94 Little Edie 117 Livingston, Paisley 28–9 Locke, John 23 Logo 18, 21, 80 London 82, 87–9, 91, 103 The Look of Silence (2014) 117 Los Angeles 83 Louis Vuitton 20–1, 36 Loungewear 142 Love 1, 50–3, 87, 91, 110, 117, 122, 133

161

Love story 38, 42, 52–3, 91, 122 Love’s through the Ages (1916) 83 The Loves of Queen Elizabeth (1912) 85 Luxury 15, 99, 112 Machine 65–6 Mad Max Fury Road (2015) 56, 64–5, 75–6, 80, 84, 86, 132 Made in Milan (1990) 86 Madonna 85 Magritte, Renè 63 Make-up 64, 73, 93, 98, 132 Malone, Jena 94 Maloya snake 112 Mannequin 123 Manville, Lesley 89 Mara, Rooney 47 Marc by Marc Jacobs 21 Marcus, Ray 94 Margiela, Martin 16, 21, 37, 93 Marie Antoinette (2006) 87, 96, 98 Marie Antoinette 96–9 Marie Antoinette: A Journey 96 Marriage 50, 87, 89, 92 Marvel 69–70 Masculinity 74 Maureen 111–16 Max 65, 67 Mayfair 88, 90 Maysles, Albert and David 117 McCarthy, Stella 21 McQueen (2018) 86, 111, 116, 118, 120, 125, 137 McQueen, Alexander 16, 20, 86, 111, 118–20, 125 Melodrama 38, 41, 45, 51, 96–6, 100 Memory 107, 136 Mercanton, Loius 85 Merleau-Ponty, Marcel 55, 131 Met Gala 143 Metacinamatic 50, 111 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 83 Metropolitan Museum 14, 20, 86, 96, 143

162

Index

Miami 73 Milan 20, 101, 141 Miller, George 56 Mirrors 39, 121–2, 140 Mise-en-scene 38, 44, 51, 9 Model 17, 24, 48–9, 65, 87–9, 101, 123 Modernity 19, 22, 25 Mood 4, 30, 37, 51–2, 54, 84, 95, 97–8, 122, 138 In the Mood for Love (2000) 37, 51–3, 86 Moonlight (2016) 56, 72–3, 75–6, 80, 132 Moore, Julianne 43, 50 Moore, Madison 25, 60, 73 Moorhead, Agnes 39 Moral 4, 6, 23, 38, 40, 41, 76, 108–9, 125 Morris, Errol 117 Morrow, Susan 92–5 Moschino 21 Movie industry 18, 63, 78, 85, 92, 116, 143 Mulvey, Laura 39 Murakami, Takashi 20 Nadoolman Landis, Deborah 18–19, 82 Nakia 70 Namibia 64, 69 Nana 88 Narrative accounts 6, 107–9, 131, 136 Narrative identity 10, 106–7, 128, 134 Narrative self 106, 108 The “new” 8–9, 15, 19–22, 28, 31–53, 129 New England 38–9 New Look 15 New York City 14–15, 35, 76, 83, 92, 94, 117–18, 141–3 Nocturnal Animals (2016) 87, 91–3, 95 Non-fiction (2018) 112 Nonfiction 28, 54, 113, 116–17, 141

Nourry, Helene 86 Novack, Kate 86, 118 Nutcracker 16 Nyongo, Lupita 70 O’Connor, Sandra Day 36 Off-screen 11, 138 Off-White 21, 81 One Step Ahead 74 Opening Ceremony 81 Oppenheimer, Joshua 117 ORLAN 17 Osaka, Naomi 143 Oscars 76 Owens, Rick 86 Pandemic 78, 111, 141–2 Paramount 81–3 Paris 17, 20, 85 The Passionate Friends (1949) 89 Pastel 97–8 Pathé 88 Paula 72 Penn, Arthur 85 Performance 6, 8, 13–19, 26–7, 31, 38, 40, 42, 61, 69, 87–8, 98, 100, 129 Performativity 6, 8, 13–14, 18–19 Personal Identity 23, 26, 80 Personal Shopper (2016) 111–12, 116, 124, 137 Personal style 19, 25–7, 80, 110 Petit Trianon 99 Phantom Thread (2017) 87, 103 Phenomenological 23, 68, 110, 137 Phillips, Arianne 91, 92, 95 Philosophical value of film 28, 51, 128 Philosophy of fashion 2, 28, 30, 127–9, 133, 135, 137, 139 Photography 18, 48–9, 94 Plato 3, 55 Plato’s Atlantis 119 Poiret, Paul 20, 85

Index Powell, Michael 89 Powell, Sandy 44, 47 Prada, Miuccia 21, 86 Prada Sport 21 Press, Richard 118 Pressburger, Emeric 89 Pret-a-Porter (1994) 86 Prosthetic 67, 75, 133 Protagonist 6, 43, 53, 94, 122 Psycho (1960) 84 Puerto Rico 89 Putnam, Hilary 3 Qipaos 51–4, 86 Quaid, Dennis 45 Quann sisters 24, 60 Race 8–9, 25–6, 30, 56, 60–1, 71, 73, 75, 77, 80, 130, 133, 136 Racism 44–6 Radical catwalk 16 Red dress 37, 42, 44–6, 50 The Red Shoes (1948) 89 The Remains of the Day (1993) 64 Reed, Harris 21 Repetition 8–9, 22, 33–9, 41–54, 77, 89, 99, 111, 118, 121–3, 129–30, 137 Resnais, Alain 52, 82, 111, 120–1, 123 Reynolds, William 42 Rhodes, Trevante 72–3 Ritual 6, 99 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 121 Robe 35–6, 48–9 Rodarte 86 Rolex 36 Romance 42, 47–8, 54, 90 Romney 114 Roseberry, Daniel 17 Rothko 94 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 96 Rubirosa, Porfirio 89 Runway 9, 17, 79, 100–2, 116–20

163

Sabrina (1954) 81 Saint Laurent, Yves 10, 81–2, 85 Sartorial 1, 13, 26, 34, 73, 79 Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) 100 Scarf 44–6, 50 Schectman, Marya 108 Schiaparelli 17 Schrader, Paul 81 Sci-fi 76 Scorsese, Martin 86 Scott, Cary 38–42, 47, 51 Seamstress 88 Second World War 14 Seidelman, Susan 85 Self-investigation 27, 106 Sense and Sensibility (1995) 64 The September Issue (2009) 86 Sequin dress 113, 124 Sexual identity 25, 73, 115 Sexuality 24–6, 58, 74, 115, 133 Seyrig, Delphine 121–3, 125 Shanghai 51–2 Sheffield, Edward 92 Shelby, Tommy 71 Shoe Reels: The History and Philosophy of Footwear in Film 82 Shopping 48, 98, 100 Shuri 69 Siebers, Tobin 62–3 Sight and Sound 88 Silk 44, 52 A Single Man (2009) 92 Sinnerbrink, Robert 4, 30 Sirk, Douglas 37–40, 43–6, 50 Sleep (fashion show) 16 Smuts, Aaron 5, 29, 127 Social justice 59 The Sopranos (1999–2007) 4 Spanish 90 Speed 6, 16, 21, 31, 65, 89 Staring 56, 61–2, 67, 76, 133 Steele, Valerie 85 Stewart, Kristen 111–13, 115

164 Strawson, Galen 109, 114, 134 Streep, Meryl 79 Su-li Zhen 52 Suit 37, 41–2, 69–70, 75, 80, 125 Superhero 67, 70, 72, 84, 86 Supremacy 68 Surface 11, 45, 121–2 Surrealism 100 Sustainable fashion 17 Svendsen, Lars 21–2, 34, 108 Swiss Alps 112 Switzerland 89 Swoon (1992) 100 T’Challa 69 Tailleur 41 Talley, Leon 36 Tarantino, Quentin 95 Taylor-Johnson, Aaron 94 Taylor, Breonna 142 Taylor, Paul 24, 56, 60, 68, 69, 71 Technology 69–70 Tentativeness 80, 116, 119, 137 Testa, Jessica 142 Texas 92 The “Josephine” 20 Therese 47–9 Theron, Charlize 65 The Thin Blue Line (1988) 117 Thought experiment 3–7, 28 Three Stories about Food 51 Tony and Susan 92 Transformative 27, 34, 63, 111, 132, 136 Trends 21–2, 25–6, 34–5, 37, 69, 71, 80–1, 85, 108, 110, 130 Trendsetter 21 Trying on 110, 115–16, 124, 135 Tuareg 69 Tulloch, Carol 61 Uniform 35, 109–10 UNIQLO, 21 Uniqueness 54, 63, 119

Index Valentine 112 Valentino 118 Van Herpen, Iris 21 Vanderwalt, Lesley 64–5 Venice Film Festival 121 Venus of Milo 62–3 Versailles 96–9 Victoria and Albert Museum 82, 88 Victoria and Albert’s Clothworkers Center Archive 88 Victorian 37, 88 Vintage 1, 36, 82, 94, 112 Virgil Abloh 21, 81 The Virgin Suicides (1999) 97 Vogue 17, 36 Voss Collection 119 Vuitton Foundation 20 Wakanda 67, 69–71 Walden 39 Wales Bonner 142 Wang, Vera 86 War Boys 65 Wardrobe 19, 44, 52, 84, 93, 100, 117 Wartenberg, Thomas 28 Wedgewood,39 Westwood, Vivianne 85 Whitaker, Cathy 43 Who are you Polly Magoo? (1966) 86 Wig 96, 97, 99 Wilder, Billy 81 Wilson, Elizabeth 14 Won Kar Wai 37, 51, 53–4, 86 Woodcock, Reynolds 87–91, 103 Wright, Austin 92 Wright, Letitia 70 Wyman, Jane 38, 50 Young, Iris Marion 55 Yves Saint Laurent 10, 81, 85, 86 Zara 21 Zemler, Emily 93 Zuckor, Adolph 83, 85 Zulu 70

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