On Fire: When Fashion Meets Cinema

Fashion and dress have been major forces in the cinema, with far greater significance than that of the various commercial relationships they have enjoyed. Their study offers a prism through which to reframe our understanding of cinema’s workings across its narrative and non-narrative forms. As two industries, art forms, institutions, and cultures, fashion and cinema have been profoundly intertwined — albeit with frictions and contradictions — and, crucially, have at times been mutually transformative. This is true not only in terms of their many converging practices but also in terms of their materialities, technologies, visual effects, and affects. The many and varied intersections between fashion and film are here used in part to problematise a conceptual separation that exists between “fashion” and “costume,” which, it is argued, is shared by both film and fashion studies, and has presented a major conundrum in the development of a unified field. A third term, “clothes,” is then added to the discussion, in order to emphasise another overlooked aspect of how clothing functions and performs in film.