Film, Fashion, and the 1960s ed. by Eugenia Paulicelli, Drake Stutesman, Louise Wallenberg

Abstract

Reviewed by: Film, Fashion, and the 1960s ed. by Eugenia Paulicelli, Drake Stutesman, Louise Wallenberg Hilary Radner Paulicelli, Eugenia, Drake Stutesman, andLouise Wallenberg, eds. Film, Fashion, and the 1960s. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2017. Pp. x+231. $80.00 US hardcover, $35.00 US paperback, $34.99 US ebook. The last decade has greeted a wealth of new research on film and fashion, a relatively neglected area throughout the twentieth century, its increasing importance in the twenty-first signaled by the inauguration of the journal Film, Fashion, and Consumption under the editorship of Pamela Church Gibson, the first issue of which appeared in January 2011. Film, Fashion, and the 1960s constitutes a welcome addition to this growing body of published work and includes a number of authors whose names will be familiar to scholars in the field such as Pamela Church Gibson herself, Stella Bruzzi, Drake Stutesman, and Nick Rees-Roberts, among others. The chapters are loosely grouped according to topics, into three sections that suggest the scope of the project: “1960s: Youth Culture and Sexual Liberation”; “Cities, Nations, and Fashion”; and “Gender: Modernity/Tradition.” An epilogue by the costume designer Adriana Berselli, noted for her work on Michelangelo Antonio’s L’Avventura (1960), with a preface by the lead editor Eugenia Paulicelli concludes the volume. In the introduction to the volume, the editors ambitiously proclaim that “[t]he chapters in this volume demonstrate the conscious relationship that cinema of the 1960s had with fashion as an industry, as spectacle and aesthetic, and as a means of performing gender” (5). To a greater or lesser degree, the chapters touch on these crucial issues, with Ronald Gregg’s opening chapter, “Sanitizing the Beatles for the Revolution,” and Pamela Church Gibson’s chapter tucked away in Section Three, “The Fashioning of Julie Christie and the Mythologizing of ‘Swinging London’: Changing Images in 1960s Britain,” highlighting the nexus of influences that determined the leading role accorded to fashion in this period. Nick Ree-Roberts’s “Single Men: Sixties Aesthetics and Vintage Style in Contemporary Cinema,” the final chapter in the section “Gender: Modernity and Tradition,” appropriately argues that we consider the ongoing influence of the developments that originated in this crucial decade, especially with regard to “heritage, masculinity, and style in contemporary European cinema” (207). As the above chapters suggest, scholars in fashion studies, popular culture studies, [End Page 182] and cinema studies will find a wide range of material from which to cull readings that might usefully augment their current course readers, from Anupama Kapse on Bombay cinema to Louise Wallenberg on the costume designer Mago (Max Goldstein), who contributed to Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s distinctive style. Both of these appear in the volume’s final section, following Pamela Church Gibson’s chapter on Julie Christie. In addition to Gregg’s chapter on the Beatles, Section One, “The 1960s: Youth, Culture, and Sexual Liberation” boasts Amy Herzog discussing the relations between Andy Warhol’s portrait film and 1960s pornographic peep show loops with regard to what she calls the “art of undressing,” and Stella Bruzzi looking at Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema [Theorem] (1968) and its use of costume “to introduce a different sartorial sensibility altogether, one very much rooted in the sixties” (57). In the same section, Drake Stutesman adumbrates the use of the hat in A New Kind of Love (1963) and Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970). Astrid Söderburgh Widding’s chapter opens Section Two, “Cities, Nations, and Fashion,” focusing on the French New Wave and how changes in cinema and fashion heralded a reformulation of urban space. Also in this section, Eugenia Paulicelli’s chapter “Fashion, Film, and Rome,” which explores how post-World War Two Italy regenerated its film and fashion industries as synergistic cultural attractions that contributed to a burgeoning tourist industry, is especially welcome. Pat Kirkham and Marilyn Cohen’s chapter closes this section, offering an analysis of the intersections between fashion and costume in two American films, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and That Touch of Mink (1962), that exemplify the complicated relations between American culture and French fashion that mark the post-War period. Notwithstanding...