Understanding Fashion Film, Form and Genre

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Abstract

Since the birth of cinema, film and fashion have had an intimate relation, which by the turn of the century evolved into fashion film as a more or less well-defined standalone genre. The breakthrough of the fashion film was boosted partly by digital production and distribution technologies, giving birth to platforms such as SHOWstudio in year 2000, and the promotion of brands and individual designers sharing moving images online. Consequently, theory covering the field has conceptualized the phenomenon primarily as the online promotion of garments by means of storytelling and digital moving images (Soloaga 2017). On the one hand, fashion film has been understood as experimental marketing, borrowing its visual style and narrative techniques from classic and experimental cinema. On the other hand, fashion films were framed by viewing practise related to the interactive possibilities and the permanent presence of digital media content online (Khan 2012b: 252). Both positions point to the changes in the structures of production, consumption and, to some extent, aesthetics made possible by computing.

While an adequate definition of the fashion film awaits (Uhlirova 2013a, 2013b, Schuller 2017, Kubka 2013), I propose a less exclusive understanding of the phenomenon, noting that fashion film experiments had a pre-digital existence and not all films were and are made for specific promotional commercial use. I investigate the fashion film as a boundary case defined by its ambiguous relation to existing established narrative forms of moving images and use formalist theory in order to define the phenomenon.
Original languageEnglish
JournalKosmorama
Volume274
Issue number274
ISSN0023-4222
Publication statusPublished - 29 Jan 2019

Artistic research

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