100 Years of the Fashion Film: Frameworks and Histories

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.