Still 'Fashionably Laid'? Costume & Contemporary Pornography

In 'Fashionably Laid: The Styling of Hard Core', Pamela Church Gibson wrote that 'the concept of ‘clothes and pornography’ might seem puzzling – the two do not, automatically, go hand in hand in the popular imagination'. Indeed, key academic studies of hard core film tend to stress what Linda Williams termed the 'frenzy of the visible' and pay little attention to the costuming of performers in pornographic moving images.

But costume and dress play a significant role in the function of sexual representations. As is the case in mainstream cinema, they can signify aspects of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class, as well as functioning as a spectacular addition to the sexual tableau. This paper therefore studies the role of costume in contemporary hard core film pornography, continuing Church Gibson's earlier work by focusing on the proliferation of new sub-generic forms of pornographic expression over the last decade.

It analysed the recent rise in long form 'narrative' hard-core films, as well as studying costume's role within the representation of the sexual performance itself. It will also approach the recent trend for 'clothed' or 'non nude' softcore pornography and assess how this has impacted both moving images and wider consumer culture (in line with academic work on the 'pornification' or 'sexualisation' of the mainstream (Paasonen et al, 2007; Attwood (ed) 2009)).

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