Vampiric Fashion: Chinese Circulation, Cinema, and Clothing on Screen and off

Abstract

Olivier Assayas’s 1996 film Irma Vep (an anagram for “vampire”) turns on the novelty of casting Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung (playing herself) into an updated version of Musidora, a silent film actress whose career is associated with silent serials of Louis Feuillade. This much discussed transformation requires in the director’s vision a shift from Musidora’s silk body suit to a latex one. Ostensibly such a transformation helps to mark France’s place in a globalizing economy figured in part through the substitution of one screen icon for another. In this essay, I turn toward a more material substitution depicted in the film in order to think about how Chineseness circulates transnationally in relation to clothing. Specifically, Maggie Cheung’s costume facilitates a theoretical discussion of vampiricism that I use to think about silk and rubber and the apparel they shape. What are the relevant histories of these materials and their relationship to global fashion (if indeed such connections exist)? What might be productive about using Cheung’s particular embodiment of the vampire for an analysis of the transnational circulation of certain clothing? How might the vampire’s continual return assist in theorizing certain temporalities of global Chinese fashions?