tracing patterns- critical approaches to on-screen fashion

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Film, Fashion & Consumption Volume 1 Number 1

© 2012 Intellect Ltd Review Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ffc.1.1.121_7

FFC 1 (1) pp. 121–132 Intellect Limited 2012

KEYWORDS

audiencecostumefashiongendermultidimensional

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REVIEW ARTICLE

HELEN WARNER University of East Anglia

Tracing patterns: Critical

approaches to on-screen

fashion

ABSTRACT

In 1990, Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog’s hugely influential edited collection, Fabrications, opened up the discussion of the complex relationship between the female consumer and the female viewer; and while an important body of work has developed within this area, the study of on-screen fashion continues to be somewhat marginalised in the academy. This article examines some of the recent contribu-tions to the study of on-screen fashion, situating them in relation to broader debates about fashion, costume, feminism and identity. In so doing, it seeks to examine the fortitude field, 21 years on from Fabrications, in order to examine how the study of on-screen fashion has developed and how it may evolve in the future.

In 2006, in anticipation of the UK theatrical release of The Devil Wears Prada (dir. Frankel), journalist Vera Rule pondered ‘Hollywood’s long fascina-tion with clothes’ in the quality newspaper, The Independent. As Rule traces the use of fashion in a myriad of genres from film noir to what she terms ‘boutique flicks’, she reminds us of the multiple ways in which fashion is, and

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has been, used in cinema. In her discussion of the screen adaptation of Lauren Weisberger’s bestselling novel, she notes: ‘Fashion isn’t really important in The Devil Wears Prada. Shopping is’ (Rule 2006).

While there is a long tradition of the ‘shopping scene’ in Hollywood cinema (see Brunsdon’s 1997 discussion of Pretty Woman [Marshall, 1990]), it is fair to suggest that since The Devil Wears Prada, fashion, and shopping have continued to occupy and important role in popular ‘women’s genres’ (e.g. Confessions of a Shopaholic [Hogan, 2009], Sex and the City 1 and 2 [King, 2008; 2010 respectively]). Thus, the longevity of its audience appeal is notable in itself; however, I would suggest that a productive line of inquiry would be to consider the importance of on-screen fashion, alongside recent claims that the last 5 years has witnessed a ‘transformation of fashion media’ (see Munt and Khamis 2010). The prevalence of new media, particularly fashion blog-ging, for example, has not only altered the way in fashion is produced and consumed by audiences, but it has also forced traditional platforms of print and screen media to adopt innovative strategies in order to reach consumers. It is timely then, that Fashion, Film and Consumption enters the discussion of clothing and the screen industries at a time of intriguing intersection between consumers, fashion and cinema.

In 1990, Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog’s hugely influential edited collection, Fabrications, opened up the discussion of the complex rela-tionship between the female consumer and the female viewer; and while an important body of work has developed within this area, the study of on-screen fashion continues to be somewhat marginalised in the acad-emy. However, the inauguration of this journal, along with the publication of recent studies including Tamar Jeffers McDonald’s Hollywood Catwalk (2010) and Hilary Radner’s forthcoming Neo Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks and Consumer Culture (2011) in the uses of on-screen fash-ion, suggests a promising expansion of the field; moving beyond single case studies, and historically specific analyses, toward a more contextual, multidimensional and interdisciplinary approach to fashion, the screen and audience.

This article has two interrelated aims. First, it offers, albeit in broad strokes, an overview of the scholarship which examines the relationship between costume and cinema. Second, it examines some of the more recent work on fashion in media texts which varies in focus and scope. I have selected to review one edited collection, Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in Literature, Film and Television (2009), and two monographs, Glamour (2010) and Fashion Media Promotion: The New Black Magic (2010), with the aim of identifying how these publications have addressed some of the questions raised by previous studies and posed a number of others. In so doing, this article suggests potentially productive areas which could be the subject of future study.

In the introduction to Fabrications, Gaines locates the study of costume within feminist film criticism. At the time, debates regarding the image of women in media dominated the academy (Doane 1987; Haskell 1987), and Laura Mulvey’s canonical concept of ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ (1989) pervaded early exploration of costume. However, while studies such as Mary Ann Doane’s persuasive, yet rather bleak account of the relationship between the 1940s women’s films, the female spectator and consumption informs some of the discussion in Fabrications, it does not deny the potential pleasures women could derive from fashion and consumer culture. Thus, the collection’s


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importance is not only related to its contribution to the field of costume and cinema, but also in the way in which it took feminine culture seriously.

While all the essays in Fabrications are invaluable to the field, Gaines’ own contribution is often singled out as a foundational text which informs subsequent exploration of costume and film. In her article ‘Costume and Narrative: How Dress Tells the Woman’s Story’ (1990), Gaines examines the relationship between costume, character and narrative flow with regard to classical realist cinema. She argues that film-makers of the time purported the notion that all aspects of mise-en-scène must serve ‘the higher purpose of narrative’ (Gaines 1990: 181). She claims costume in the classical era was motivated by characterisation, and that it was essentially required to remain ‘subservient’ to narrative demands. Failure to do so could ‘distract the viewer from the narrative’ (ibid.: 193). Underpinning this understanding is Mulvey’s well known concept of ‘the gaze’. Just as Mulvey has argued that ‘[t]he pres-ence of woman [on-screen] […] tends to work against the development of a story-line [and] freeze the flow of action’ (1989: 19), Gaines asserts that costume which is not adequately motivated by character could also result in a disruption of narrative, ‘breaking the illusion and the spell of realism’(1990: 193). Thus, the first part of Gaines’ article demonstrates how traditional screen hierarchies which privilege narrative over mise-en-scène were incredibly potent in the classical era.

Other studies of classical cinema and costume also work from this assump-tion (see Sarah Berry’s Screen Style [2000]) and subsequent inquiries into the function of costume in contemporary cinema, such as Sarah Street’s examina-tion of The Talented Mr Ripley (Minghella, 1999) and The Matrix (Wachowski and Wachowski, 1999) in her book Costume and Cinema, and Peter Wollen’s analysis of Prêt a Porter (Altman, 1994) in his article ‘Strike a Pose,’ are also structured by this understanding of costume and narrative. While these stud-ies offer usefully in-depth examinations of film costume, they also show that accepting this screen hierarchy of narrative and costume without reflection on its implications can be reductive. As I have argued elsewhere, it is important to remember that spectacle/narrative dichotomy is informed by gender (Warner 2009). Costume and fashion are coded as ‘feminine’ in opposition to narrative which, in being implicitly positioned as ‘active’, ‘logical’ and ‘forward thrust-ing’, is clearly coded as ‘male’. This has certainly raised wider questions within feminist scholarship of power and gender politics: is the notion that females are apparently inherently ‘distracting’ to be read positively as subversive, or is this simply rendering women as objects of the male gaze? This line of ques-tioning still requires further consideration

The second half of Gaines’ article examines the melodrama; a genre which can permit ‘sartorial excess’ free from the constraints of narrative. The idea that costume, and fashion articulated as costume, could have its own ‘aesthetic discourse’, is an especially appealing thought for scholars working in this area and has been adopted by several leading theorists. Stella Bruzzi’s Undressing Cinema examines film costume as ‘a discourse not wholly dependent on the structure of narrative, and character for signification’ (1997: xvi). Equally, in the edited collection, The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Reloaded, Pamela Church Gibson has argued that there has been a shift in studies of fashion and film which focus on the way in which ‘costume can become detached from plot and character, providing a set of meanings independent of the film’s forward plot’ (2005: 115). While there is the suggestion that ‘excessive’ costume could break down previous screen hierarchies, affording


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costume the same value as narrative, we must also take care not to assemble a different hierarchy in its place, which marginalises ‘everyday’ fashion and refuses to acknowledge its importance as a source of audience pleasure. Bruzzi’s interdisciplinary approach to fashion and film proves especially useful in questioning the use value of Mulvey’s ‘prescriptive’ concept of the gaze and ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ in the study of fashion; particularly with regard to male fashion and masculinity.

The studies above offer close textual analyses of specific case studies, which offer useful insights into how viewers could respond to on-screen fashion. However, analyses which function at a textual level are limited by the wider conceptual and methodological problems of purely textual approaches – the most oft cited of these being the marginalisation of the audience, and the suggestion of a rather deterministic and homogenous reading of audience response. Within previous studies of fashion and film, there has been a tendency to sideline the importance of the viewer, and more general questions of reception, for reasons of scope and focus. This is of course, entirely justified, however audience response seems integral when making assumptions about the way in which spectacle is interpreted in the text. The notion that spectacle ‘disrupts’ narrative can surely only be substantiated through reception studies, which requires analysis beyond the text itself.

While the books reviewed here are not audience studies, they do further the spectacle/narrative debate; and engage with some of the questions raised above regarding audiences and the reception of fashion on-screen. The McNeil et. al. edited collection Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in Literature, Film and Television, as the title suggests, is relatively broad in scope. The book brings together a series of essays by North American, European and Australian scholars, and focuses on film, television and literature in both the historical and contemporary period. For example, essays on artist Andrea Zittel, fashion photography, eighteenth century literature, the Japanese novel Naomi, ‘maga-logs’ and Audrey Hepburn find their way into the edited collection. Thus, the authors claim that the articles are compiled to extend discussions of fashion by suggesting that ‘fiction’ can be ‘considered an expanded category – filmic and television narratives, adaptations, and self-fashioning through memoir, or writing the body through brand identity, cult identification, body patterning, and tattoo’ (McNeil et. al. 2009: 7). In so doing, it allows its readers to draw useful connections between a variety of genres and periods.

In their introduction, the editors define the parameters of the anthology suggesting that the book is ‘less about making fashion significant through its connections to overt political, social and material concerns, than linking fashion to its form, narrative and aesthetics’ (McNeil et. al. 2009: 5). Thus, the spectacle/narrative debate underpins several of the articles, and is there-fore approached from several differing perspectives. These perspectives, when taken together, can illuminate some of the ways in which the debate can be applied to a range of media forms.

The book is divided into three parts. The first deals with ‘Fashion Tales and the Visual Imagination’ which is framed in the introduction to the book as:

[…] a type of ‘fashion-studies response’ to the important exhibition Fashioning Fiction in Photography since 1990 (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2004). This exhibit explored how genres such as the snap-shot and the cinema have provided dominant modes in recent fashion photography, with ‘story lines and interrupted narratives which imbue


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the images with dramatic complexity as well as contribute to the aura of personal intimacy and authenticity.

(Kismaric and Respini cited in McNeil et. al. 2009: 7)

As the above passage makes clear, the spectacle/narrative debate, which is so often employed in film studies, is central to this first section, despite the fact that the first section is primarily concerned with the relationship between dress and various literary texts.

In the first chapter, Clair Hughes examines the function of dress in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. Drawing on Roland Barthes, she examines how dress ‘reveals the self, but also intersects with the social-conforming, rejecting, deceiving or seducing’ (Hughes 2009: 11). The essay concerns the ‘ambitions’ of four fictional characters (Julien Sorel from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Wilhelm Meister from Goethe’s’ The Sorrows of Young Werther and Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Pendennis from Thackeray’s novel of the same name, and Lucien de Rubempre of Balzac’s Lost Illusions) and how they ‘dress for success’. In so doing she details the way in which fashion functions as a complex semiotic system both in the novels and in the ‘real world’ as it both expresses and, at times, disguises, socio-economic status. The novels thus employ sophisticated sartorial codes which readers are invited to decipher. In attempting to decipher these codes, readers can become skilled in fully understanding the some of the many functions of dress both at a textual level, and in contemporary society. In other words, as Hughes concludes:

Dress makes and unmakes [the characters]; it writes them into their world and suggests them still for us. In our world in which Bill Gates has made mandatory work wear of T-shirts and jeans, we can imagine through novels what brought us to where we are now. And the confu-sions around novelistic dress can remind us – forcefully – that we still don’t know (dresswise) where we are now.

(2009: 21–22)

Thus, the function of fashion within the narrative of literature cannot be reduced to simply furthering narrative concerns of developing characterisation (although it may do both); it is complicated by its function in an important interplay between the narrative, the character, the visual imagination of the reader and contemporary social life. Similar thematic territory is explored in Rosy Aindow’s ‘Clothing, Class Deception, and Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century Fiction’ (2009) and Sophia Errey’s ‘Novelist as Stylist, Designer as Storyteller’ (2009) and, as with Hughes’ essay, both articles demonstrate expertise in both the field of literature and fashion studies.

The second section, ‘Crossing Cultures, Queering Cultures’ moves the discussion of fashion away from classical literature, and explores the rela-tionship between dress and sexuality in a variety of storytelling media (such as fashion photography and contemporary Japanese fiction). In his article, ‘Brand Storytelling: Context and Meaning for Cargo Pants’ (2009), Joseph Henry Hancock II examines ‘advertising as a form of storytelling and its func-tion to create contextual significance in order to sell products’(95), and in so doing, makes a valuable contribution to the study of fashion, narrative and its connections to the wider fashion market. The essay narrows its focus by selecting the Abercrombie and Fitch ‘magalog’ (as the Wall Street Journal


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identified it in July 1997), which, Hancock explains, was incredibly popular with consumers, and ‘went beyond a mail-order catalog, evolving into a life-style guide for thousands of consumers’ (Bird 1997: 98). Located within stud-ies of consumer culture (as opposed to literary theory), Hancock uses semiotic analysis to reveal a queer subtext in the magalog’s homoerotic imagery. In his conclusion, Hancock reiterates the way in which Abercrombie and Fitch’s ‘“marketing narratives” create perceptions of garments’ importance in the minds of consumers, who range from college students to older gay men’ (2009: 104).

Hancock’s discussion of the multiple ways in which fashion can be read connects with the final section of the book which deals, for the most part, with film texts and the spectator. In particular, Hancock’s essay complements the work of Sarah Gilligan, who in her article ‘Becoming Neo: Costume and Transforming Masculinity in the Matrix films’ (2009) engages with timely debates about contemporary Hollywood cinema, masculinity, spectacle and the spectator. In her analysis of the representation of Neo, Gilligan identi-fies a ‘radical shift [which] has taken place in the representation of masculine identities within recent sci-fi and action cinema’ (Gilligan 2009: 149). Central to this shift, she argues, ‘is the displacement of the construction and perform-ance of identity from the body onto clothes and gadgets’ (ibid.). Expanding upon Street’s reading of the film in Costume and Cinema, Gilligan suggests that in addition to conjuring notions of ‘regimentation, discipline and power’ (Street 2002: 96), Neo’s costuming ‘also creates a spectacular intervention within the narrative, which both highlights the visual pleasures of spectacle and action and blurs gender boundaries in the fashioning of a new image of the male hero’ (Gilligan 2009: 152). Gilligan goes on to examine in careful detail, the relationship between fetishism, fashion, spectacle and disruptive gender identities. At the same time, it should be noted that she does much more than this. Underpinning Gilligan’s argument then is the notion of the ‘gaze’; however, as with Stella Bruzzi’s (1997) work on the gangster film, this article works to subvert the gendered nature of spectacle/narrative dichotomy. Indeed, Gilligan’s focus on The Matrix serves to bring closer those develop-ments within the study of action cinema with regard to the spectacle/narrative debate (see Tico Romo 2004) to the study of film costume.

What the reader finds in this anthology is a diverse and interdisciplinary study of fashion and text. Some film scholars may be unfamiliar with the wealth of historical and contemporary literary theory; however, they should not be discouraged, as useful connections can and have been drawn between both fields of fashion, literature and film.

The second book I examine within this article covers much more famil-iar ground for film scholars. In her monograph, Glamour: Women, History, Feminism (2010), Carol Dyhouse contextualises afresh the familiar literature on feminism, fashion and film. The strength of this book is in its rich variety of sources (which includes women’s magazines, films, social surveys and life histories) and, as a social historian in the area of gender, family and educa-tion, the author’s provides a unique perspective on well rehearsed debates regarding fashion, history, feminism and ‘glamour’. In her introduction, Dyhouse makes a persuasive case for the similarities between education and fashion, and demonstrates precisely why an investigation into women, fash-ion and feminism can be understood as a logical continuation of her earlier work. She writes, ‘education is also about dreams and aspirations […] and fashion, cinema and magazines, like educational institutions, offer glimpses of


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different worlds, different models and different cultural understandings about ways of being female’ (Dyhouse 2010: 6).

Glamour ambitiously tackles a substantial time period (spanning more than 100 years), and as such perhaps lacks the depth/nuance of previous studies, as central shifts are painted in broad strokes. However, the broad focus of the book offers the reader a clearer picture of the developments (and subsequent reactions to certain developments) as they take place across the decades. In other words, the differences in attitudes towards women and fashion are more marked and easier to identify than if the author were to examine specific peri-ods in isolation. For example, while the book begins with a familiar discus-sion of classical Hollywood, it ends with a discussion of twenty-first century celebrity culture. Thus, it follows the trajectory of how femininity is made and re-made across a substantial period of time, allowing for its readers to trace the history of femininity, and see how these developments shape contempo-rary notions of fashion and femininity.

In her introduction, Dyhouse outlines her primary aims for the book which are underpinned by three interrelated research questions: ‘what did the image of the glamorous woman signify?’, ‘Can ideals of glamour be blamed for femi-nine insecurities […] [or] did glamour offer a kind of agenda to women, even sometimes a way of getting their own back on patriarchy?’(2010: 3). While this line of questioning has often been applied to the study of fashion and feminism, Dyhouse contributes to this dialogue insofar as she interrogates precisely what it means to be ‘glamorous’ at particular moments in history. In other words, her expansive study traces the shifting definition (and ideo-logical meaning) of the term ‘glamour’ over 100 years. For example, in the 1890s and 1900s the term was rarely used; however, by the 1920s the term became increasingly popular and was bound up with notions of modernity, Orientalism and exoticism, and was mostly used in the popular press in refer-ence to travel. It was not until the 1930s that glamour would come to describe fashion. In her conclusion, Dyhouse demonstrates how the term is so ‘widely and loosely used today that we may well argue that t has lost edge and mean-ing. But maintains its power of suggestion, a connection with the dreams of the past, a whole history of associations and longing’ (2010: 168) Thus, Dyhouse usefully reminds us of the distinction between ‘glamour’ and fash-ion. She writes: ‘[w]hat is fashionable is not always glamorous, and glamour has not always been fashionable’ (Dyhouse 2010: 3).Throughout course of the book, Dyhouse continues to clarify and expand upon the debates surround-ing ‘glamour’; in particular, she offers valuable insights into the way in which attitudes towards glamour work to reinforce the hegemonic concepts of femi-ninity. Thus, not only the meaning but also the cultural value of glamour changes over time.

As suggested above, the wide ranging sources here prove especially useful in reassessing previous discussions of women, fashion and cinema. A reader of Glamour finds detailed account of particular industries (her chapter ‘Hollywood Glamour’ provides a history of the fur industry) and also finds a social, political and cultural history of fashion and consumption practices. In particular, the social histories provide incredibly useful anecdotal evidence to support claims about precisely how fashion can be understood by ‘real’ audiences. Moreover, the author sees the value in anecdotal evidence, and the memories of audiences, which are sometimes dismissed by other critics as unreliable ‘hearsay’. While this book is not an audience study, nor is its inten-tion to investigate the relationship between on-screen fashion and the viewer,


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it does offer a discursive approach which allows for an analysis of the complex interrelations between women, fashion and everyday life. In Glamour, the anecdotal evidence is used alongside women’s magazines, fanzines, televi-sion programmes, music and cinema to construct a cultural context in which these debates are located. Moreover, the author’s interest in the everyday life of women prevents the book from reproducing those hierarchies (informed by class) which privilege ‘extraordinary’ designer fashion above ‘popular’ fashion.

Jayne Sheridan’s Fashion, Media, Promotion (2010) covers similar ground to Dyhouse’s Glamour, albeit from an entirely different perspective. As an ex-journalist, Sheridan’s book differs in style from those reviewed above, but proves equally useful for those interested in the field of fashion and its broader connections to the media industries. In her introduction, Sheridan outlines her particular interest in fashion and media promotion:

If ‘fashion now occupies the centre ground in popular understandings of modern culture’, as Breward believes, here it will be suggested that Fashion has achieved this status, above other Design or Art forms, by being able to adapt to shifting means of promotion and to the changing media: magazines, newspapers, websites, advertising, film, music and radio.

(Sheridan 2010: 8)

Thus, as this passage makes clear, Sheridan’s intentions within Fashion, Media, Promotion are to put forward particular designers, films, moments in history, etc., which she believes contribute to shaping the contemporary land-scape of fashion.

Equally broad in scope, Sheridan’s book also begins with an exploration of classical Hollywood cinema and its impact on the fashion industry and audi-ences, and finishes with an examination of Paul Smith and contemporary fashion and media relations. Yet, in contrast to Dyhouse’s Glamour, Fashion Media, Promotion focuses on specific case studies (films, designers, critical theorists) and uses this as a lens through which to examine the economic, cultural and political structures which shape the fashion industry.

Given that she draws upon on Barthes’ canonical works Mythologies and The Language of Fashion, fashion and film scholars will again find themselves in familiar territory in her first two chapters. In Chapter 1, ‘Scarlett O’Hara and the Post-bellum New Look’, Sheridan offers a detailed account of the influence of Victor Fleming’s Gone With the Wind (1939), boldly claiming that ‘[t]his is the movie which began Hollywood’s love affair with Fashion and established a pre-post-Feminist ambience which became a potent marketing force’(Sheridan 2010: 31). While some scholars would question this asser-tion, the chapter does go onto demonstrate the importance of this text in the symbiotic relationship between Hollywood and the wider fashion market. Sheridan begins by locating the film within a sociocultural context, present-ing Gone with the Wind as a product of its time; for example, she briefly sketches the sexual politics of the period and views the production and circu-lation of Vivien Leigh’s star image in this context. In addition, she explores the film’s relationship with Paris, suggesting that the film ‘planted the idea of Paris in the minds of ordinary women all over the USA and Europe’ (ibid.: 42). In so doing, Sheridan makes a connection between the films’ success with female audiences and the widespread popularity of Dior’s New Look,


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which is buttressed by an examination of class dimensions and the French bourgeoisie.

Calling on the work of fashion and film scholars such as Christopher Breward, Pamela Church Gibson, Valerie Steele, Drake Strutesman, Rachel Moseley and Molly Haskell, both this chapter and the second (which exam-ines the career of Audrey Hepburn) serves to remind readers of some of the key moments within the history of fashion and cinema. The remaining chapters move away from the discussion of clothing and cinema and focus on fashion designers and media promotion. In her chapter ‘Mary Quant and the JCPenney blockbuster’, the author begins with a short biography, detail-ing Quant’s childhood and subsequent fashion and entrepreneurial activi-ties. To be sure, Quant is considered to be a crucial figure in London’s youth fashion scene; however, Sheridan focuses on Quant’s business ventures in order to explore the relationship between the creative/commercial aspects of the fashion industry, and the field of fashion journalism. Indeed, this chap-ter will be of interest to those with a more general interest in fashion and fashion journalism as it also includes excerpts from an interview between the author and Quant’s husband, Alexander Plunket Greene, a fashion entrepreneur in his own right. Thus, the strength of this book lies in both its access to this kind of exclusive information, and a detailed knowledge of the promotion industries which Sheridan depicts as creative rather than simply economically driven.

In the conclusion of Fashion, Media, Promotion, the author continues to think through the creative role of the fashion journalist in the fashion system, and in so doing revisits Barthes’ well known work on the written garment, noting what she perceives to be an oversight in his theories. She writes:

[Barthes] wondered why Fashion journalists would build extra stories into their presentation of Fashion. He failed to admit, or realize, that the journalists in question would be feeding their own desire to communi-cate, creatively, with their readers; that they would know which Fashion they wanted to track on any particular day.

(Sheridan 2010: 237)

In so doing, Sheridan work serves to not only further the readers’ knowl-edge of the fashion industry, but it would also be of interest to those scholars working in the field of the cultural industries.

When taken together, these recent additions to the field would suggest a productive move toward an increasingly interdisciplinary and multidimensional approach to on-screen fashion, in which previous debates are re-examined and revised. The studies examined here are testament to the benefits of a more discursive approach to fashion on-screen, though it should be noted that the discussion is nowhere near complete. These books have begun to engage with some of the questions raised by earlier work, but in so doing have raised just as many. Dyhouse explicates the complex and contradictory uses of the term glamour, but studies of equal length are needed to examine a whole range of other taken-for-granted terms that are undoubtedly equally complex. Sheridan has brought the discussion of new media forms of promotion to the fore, but as technology evolves as regularly as the fashion seasons, we must continue to keep the debate at the fore so that we follow its trajectory, taking into account the specificity of all media forms. McNeil et. al.’s Fashion in Fiction has gestured toward the role of the spectator but there remains a


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need for audience studies akin to Stacey’s Stargazing (1994) to address the multiple ways in which fashion is, and has been, produced and consumed by its audience over the last century. In addition to this, there are bound to be countless more questions, which one hopes are the subject of the books and article currently being compiled in order to prevent the study of on-screen fashion from going out of style.

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SUGGESTED CITATION

Warner, H. (2012), ‘Tracing patterns: Critical approaches to on-screen fashion’, Film, Fashion & Consumption 1: 1, pp. 121–132, doi: 10.1386/ffc.1.1.119_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Helen Warner has recently completed her Ph.D. on the intersection between fashion, television and celebrity culture, at the University of East Anglia. She has published articles on fashion in contemporary American television, and fashion and celebrity culture. She is currently researching the celebritisation of the 1960s fashion model for a co-authored project with Dr Su Holmes.

Contact: Associate Tutor, School of Film and Television Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk, NR4 7TJ.E-mail: [email protected]


http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ffc.1.1.119_1

http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ffc.1.1.119_1

tracing patterns- critical approaches to on-screen fashion

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