100 Years of the Fashion Film: Frameworks and Histories

This article is the result of a paper delivered at the international conference ‘Fashion Media: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow’, organised by the London College of Fashion in October 2013. The article is the first to outline a preliminary history of ‘fashion film’ pioneered by the website SHOWstudio.com and subsequently widely adopted by global fashion brands. Challenging the fashion industry’s assumption that this ‘genre’ is the emerging product of the ‘digital age’ (an assumption which is typically mirrored in the way some recent academic writing has framed it), the article demonstrates that the fashion film is a multifaceted form that can be traced as far back as the emergence of cinema. It also broadens the understanding of the form by carefully considering it within the framework of multiple disciplines and areas, namely cinema and the new media, fashion, entertainment, art film, performance and more generally, cultures of movement. Published abstract: This article outlines a preliminary history of the fashion film, a multifaceted form that can be traced as far back as the emergence of cinema but has only recently “exploded” thanks to advances in digital image production and dissemination. The article carefully negotiates the fashion film as a form that must be considered within multiple frameworks, namely cinema and the new media, fashion industry, entertainment, and art practice. Above all, the fashion film has come to embody a growing interest, within the realms of fashion promotion, image-making, and experience, in the expressive and marketing possibilities of movement and time. Unlike photography and other static imagery, the fashion film unfolds in time (as if somehow fulfilling a potential only suggested in photography or illustration), and, unlike the fashion show, it fixes fashion as image. Still, the fashion film is understood here not in isolation from these forms, but rather through their intermedial links, which have intensified in the “digital age”: fashion shows were among the vital early platforms for the exhibition of the fashion film, and fashion photographers were in the early 2000s their principal producers