By Stella Bruzzi
From Audrey Hepburn in Givenchy, to sharp-suited gangsters in Tarantino video clips, garments is vital to movie. In Undressing Cinema, Stella Bruzzi explores how faraway from being mere components, outfits are key parts within the building of cinematic identities, and she or he proposes new and dynamic hyperlinks among cinema, style and gown background, gender, queer conception and psychoanalysis.
Bruzzi makes use of case experiences drawn from modern well known cinema to re-examine proven rules approximately dress and model in cinema, and to problem traditional interpretations of the way masculinity and femininity are built via garments. Her wide-ranging examine encompasses:
* high fashion in movie and the increase of the motion picture dressmaker, from Givenchy to Gaultier
* the eroticism of interval dress in motion pictures similar to The Piano and The Age of Innocence
* garments the trendy femme fatale in Single White Female, Disclosure and The final Seduction
* ordinary male stylish in Goodfellas, Reservoir Dogs, and Leon
* satisfaction, dress and masculinity in `Blaxploitation' motion pictures, Boyz `N The Hood and New Jack City
* drag and gender confusion in cinema, from the unerotic cross-dressing of Mrs Doubtfire to the eroticised ambiguity of Orlando.
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Additional resources for Undressing Cinema: Clothing and identity in the movies
Example text
Vance- Straker's dress of silk chiffon with silk-back satin crepe overlays is showy but conservative and derivative, recalling principally Yves Saint Laurent- his 1959-60 and 1981-2 rouched, torsohugging couture evening dresses or the red Rive Gauche off-the-shoulder cocktail gown shown in Spring 1985 which has a similar 'V' neckline. ,... 5 Richard Gere and Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman Courtesy of Ronald Grant Archive and Audrey Hepburn and William Holden in Sabrina Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs 16 Cinema and haute couture be echoes of Bruce Oldfield's red velvet Tulip Dress of 1986 and Caroline Roehm's 1980s trapunto-stitched satin bustiers with dart necklinesY As Edith Head has intimated, costume designers must remain 'middle of the road' (Head 1983: 97), they are not, as Vance-Straker confirms, 'doing fashion - we're doing characters, building energy, portraying a slice of real life' (Vance-Straker 1991: 15).
Into the latter tradition, for which the starting point is taken as Chane! 's work on Last Year in Marienbad, Wollen places the costume designs of, for example, Jean-Paul Gaultier. In his analysis Wollen expresses the rather contentious and elitist attitude that fashion as art is 'good', and that only extravagant designs can be classified as 'art'. This emphasis on artistry recalls the origins of couture designs; as Anne Hollander suggests, 'In the middle of the nineteenth century the French invented, fostered, and spread the idea of the dress designer as an original genius, like a painter - someone totally responsible for his creations' (Hollander 1993: 351 ).
In such films as Rear Window, Belle de jour and Trop Belle Pour Toil, the role of couture clothes or the haute couture industry are fundamental components in the characterisation of Lisa, Severine and Florence. In the first scene of Rear Window, Lisa (Grace Kelly), who works at the exclusive end of the New York fashion trade, arrives in an evening dress 'right off the Paris plane' at the apartment of her partner Jeff (James Stewart), an intrepid photojournalist. Kelly's dress is intentionally spectacular, contrasting a tight black top half cut to a plunging V both front and back and a full white tulle and chiffon threequarter length skirt embroidered with black sequins in sprig patterns coming down from the waistline.