Wearing Time: Returns, Recalls, Renewals

The four-day festival program, co-curated by Tom Gunning and Marketa Uhlirova, explored how film and fashion together evoke and reflect on the past, and its connections with the present, and future.

The diverse historical and contemporary films included commercial cinema features, documentaries, artists films, newsreel items, and fashion films. The festival asked what concrete manifestations of time fashion and clothing enable: What kind of chronologies and histories? Origins and memories? Echoes and shadows? Projections, visions, or premonitions?

Few things indicate the past as immediately as styles of dress. Period films are often referred to as “costume dramas” for this reason. As well as designating the past, clothing also marks the periods and stages of individual lives. Narratives of aging and rejuvenation depend on convincing changes in fashions, hair, and make-up. The opening of an old closet arouses nostalgia and feelings of loss for the body that inhabited the now-empty clothes. There is something uncanny about rediscovering an old familiar dress and indeed, it can awaken ghosts and revenants that return to haunt the living.

Clothes can also signal different times of day and rituals that accompany these. As a major source of visual spectacle, Hollywood films in the studio era often announced the number of costume changes a leading lady would go through. Not only can dress become a vehicle with which to travel through time, is can also measure time; it allows us to wear time, even as time wears us out.

From the earliest trick films to the dance numbers of contemporary Bollywood films, cinema can magically make clothing transform, appear, and disappear – but also, importantly, re-appear. Fashion in film has always been an important sign-posting device, deployed in multiple ways: to guide the viewer through time; to confuse, deceive, and disorient; or even to dress the wounds of time.

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