The Aesthetic of Opulence: Channelling Colour and Darkness in Early Costume and Fashion Film

Colour was unquestionably one of the key elements in the early displays of dress in cinema, and vice versa: costume was from the beginning a central cinematic device through which to showcase colour. Yet, the deliberate channelling of non-colour (as darkness, emptiness) was also enormously significant for fashion film – and was, as recent scholarship shows, much more than a stylistic footnote in the history of early cinema. This paper considers both colour and darkness by linking ‘fashion films’ of the 1910s and 20s to earlier ‘costume films’ of the 1890s-1900s and, more broadly, certain visual spectacles of the popular stage of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With a particular reference to Ivo Osolsobe’s term ‘the aesthetic of opulence’, the paper also highlights some changes in discourses about ‘fantastical’ and ‘natural’ functions of colour in films that foreground dress.