Undressing Cinema

Clothing and identity in the movies

Stella Bruzzi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415139564
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134770595
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

From Audrey Hepburn in Givenchy, to sharp-suited gangsters in Tarantino movies, clothing is central to film. In Undressing Cinema, Stella Bruzzi explores how far from being mere accessories, clothes are key elements in the construction of cinematic identities, and she proposes new and dynamic links between cinema, fashion and costume history, gender, queer theory and psychoanalysis.
Bruzzi uses case studies drawn from contemporary popular cinema to reassess established ideas about costume and fashion in cinema, and to challenge conventional interpretations of how masculinity and femininity are constructed through clothing. Her wide-ranging study encompasses:
* haute couture in film and the rise of the movie fashion designer, from Givenchy to Gaultier
* the eroticism of period costume in films such as The Piano and The Age of Innocence
* clothing the modern femme fatale in Single White Female, Disclosure and The Last Seduction
* generic male chic in Goodfellas, Reservoir Dogs, and Leon
* pride, costume and masculinity in `Blaxploitation' films, Boyz `N The Hood and New Jack City
* drag and gender confusion in cinema, from the unerotic cross-dressing of Mrs Doubtfire to the eroticised ambiguity of Orlando.

Part I

DRESSING UP

1

CINEMA AND HAUTE COUTURE

Sabrina to Pretty Woman, Trop Belle Pour Toi!, Prêt-à-Porter

All the films included in this chapter, featuring designs by a diverse range of couturiers such as Jean-Paul Gaultier, Coco Chanel and Giorgio Armani, articulate very different attitudes to the central premise, namely the use of clothes as spectacle and mechanisms for display. A result of having arrived at the distinction between costume and couture design is the belief that clothes can function independently of the body, character and narrative, that through them alternative discursive strategies can be evolved that, in turn, question existing assumptions about the relationship between spectator and image, not necessarily problematised through the use of conventional costumes. Couture’s involvement with cinema has an elaborate and fragmented history. From 1931 when Sam Goldwyn offered Coco Chanel one million dollars to design for MGM, high fashion has been brought in to a production to contribute a quality which eludes even the most prolific and proficient costume designers: the glamour of a name. Chanel’s reputed disagreements with Gloria Swanson, whom she dressed in Tonight or Never, led to her premature departure from Hollywood after barely a year, as, despite proving an imaginative and meticulous costume designer, she was inflexible when asked to tailor her style to the needs of the film or to divest her costumes of the understated chic which had become her couture trademark.¹ Chanel’s attitude, exemplified by her 1931 designs for Palmy Days for which she made at least four ostensibly identical versions of each dress, slightly differently cut to show the design at its best for a specific movement or action (Leese 1976: 14), was in a subtle way to prioritise the clothes over the narrative, an attitude which runs counter to the traditional ethos of costume design, namely to create looks that complement the narrative, character and stars.² The creation of clothes as spectacle is the prerogative of the couturier; the overriding ethos of the costume designer is conversely to fabricate clothes which serve the purposes of the narrative. From the earliest fashion show films of the 1910s to the recent cinematic contributions of Vivienne Westwood (Elizabeth Shue’s corsets in Leaving Las Vegas) or Jean-Paul Gaultier (The City of Lost Children) the issue of couture designs as screen costumes has remained significant. Although discussions of the role fashion plays in film consistently collapse the difference between couture and costume design, the intention of this chapter is to emphasise the distinction and focus on cinema’s specific use of couture, in such recent examples as Kika, Pretty Woman, Trop Belle Pour Toi!, Voyager and Prêt-à-Porter.

The earliest films to feature fashion were cinematic fashion shows, the earliest example to be documented by the costume historian Elizabeth Leese being Fifty Years of Paris Fashions 1859–1909. This and subsequent fashion show shorts proved increasingly popular, Pathé, for instance, expanding its coverage in 1911 by producing a series of films devoted exclusively to forthcoming collections. Soon, with Jacob Wilk of World Film Productions’ filming of a fashion tour of the USA in 1915 (organised by Mrs Armstrong Whitney), the primitive fashion show film developed into a narrative based genre with definite (if simple) story-lines. As Leese comments, on both sides of the Atlantic ‘Fashion films had started out by being simple displays of gowns, then progressed to a story-line built round the display’ (Leese 1976: 11). In her discussion of the ways in which the fashion show has been incorporated into features, Charlotte Herzog further distinguishes between films which position a show as essential to the action and those which treat the display of fashion as incidental (Herzog 1990: 136), thereby highlighting fundamentally different motivations for incorporating fashion into narrative film. The narrativised fashion film has clearly survived, and is a form adopted by such later examples as Funny Face or Prêt-à-Porter, which are both structured around the staged exhibition of fashion on the catwalk. From the late 1920s, Hollywood openly declared its desire to supplant Paris as the leading fashion innovator, a move precipitated by having been left behind after Jean Patou dropped his hem lines in 1929, an innovation that made Hollywood films populated with ‘Flapper’ dresses (shot up to two years before) look hopelessly démodé. The couturier Madame Vionnet introduced the longer bias cut dress also in 1929, a style which was to dominate Hollywood’s visions of glamorous femininity through the 1930s, epitomised by Jean Harlow’s silver-beaded negligée and 22-inch ostrich feathers in Dinner at Eight. As cinema took the initiative in the 1930s and 1940s, the distance between costume and couture fashion was minimised, and Hollywood recruited to its increasingly important design departments several fledgling couturiers such as Howard Greer and Gilbert Adrian, who was brought to work for Cecil B. DeMille and later MGM after allegedly being discovered by Rudolph Valentino and his wife.³ As the Paris-based couturier Elsa Schiaparelli commented, ‘what Hollywood designs today, you will be wearing tomorrow’ (Haggard 1990: 6). There are numerous examples from the classical Hollywood period of the effect film styles had on contemporary fashion trends; both Adrian’s white, puff-sleeved dress for Crawford in Letty Lynton and Edith Head’s strapless, violet-encrusted New Look gown for Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun, for instance, spawned a rush of mass-produced imitations,⁴ whilst the appearance of Clark Gable bare chested in It Happened One Night in 1934 led to an immediate drop in the American sales of men’s undershirts of around 30 per cent (Chenoune 1993: 182). Anne Hollander, in her examination of art and clothes, posits that ‘dressing is an act usually undertaken with reference to pictures – mental pictures, which are personally edited versions of actual ones. The style in which the image of the clothed figure is rendered … governs the way we create and perceive our own clothed selves’ (Hollander 1975: 349–50). Cinema, and particularly Hollywood, had a similar relationship with its (largely female) audience in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when spectators swiftly emulated and adopted the styles worn by their favourite film stars in their latest films.⁵

The supremacy of the costume designer as a dictator of fashion and the domination of Head, Adrian, Orry-Kelly and Branton was lessened with the introduction of another French couturier, Hubert de Givenchy, as the major designer for Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina, a collaboration which heralded a new relationship between stars and clothes. By the 1950s Edith Head, who was the costume designer for Sabrina, readily acknowledged that her role was far less influential in fashion terms than that of the couturier, saying of the gown she designed for Taylor in A Place in the Sun, ‘People have said … that I was a great fashion trend-setter in 1951. That’s very funny. My clothes were middle of the road in terms of the current fashion trends’ (Head 1983: 97). Head, like many other costume designers, did not create looks that were so fashionable that they would quickly become obsolete. She learnt her lesson

the hard way. Just after Dior brought out the New Look (in 1947), every film that I had done in the past few months looked like something from the bread lines. With each screening, I was reminded. I vowed that I would never get caught by a fashion trend again.

(Head 1983: 69–70)

Head’s relationship with Givenchy became symbolic of the divergence between the respective roles of the costume designer and the couturier. Accounts of how Givenchy came to be assigned the task of creating Hepburn’s Parisian wardrobe for Sabrina differ; Head herself attributes the decision to the director Billy Wilder, commenting, ‘(he) broke my heart by suggesting that while the “chauffeur’s daughter” was in Paris she actually buy a Paris suit designed by a French designer’ (Head 1959: 119), whilst others have stated that Hepburn arrived at the initial costume discussion armed with a series of Givenchy sketches to show Head exactly what she wanted (Head 1983: 104). Symptomatic of the friction was the controversy surrounding the ‘authorship’ of the most innovative design in the film, the black bateau neckline evening dress which, to her death in 1981, Head had claimed as hers. Givenchy and even Head’s colleagues at Paramount have since confided that the dress was too innovative for Head, and had instead been made up from one of Givenchy’s original sketches for the film.⁶ The demise of the costume designer and inverse rise of the couturier is thus contextualised within the narratives of both Sabrina and Funny Face. Both films centre on the transformation of Audrey Hepburn from gauche girl to sophisticated gamine, and in both the roles filled by Head and Givenchy are clearly demarcated: whilst Head is given the pre-transformation clothes, it is Givenchy who designs all the show-stopping Parisian fantasies. Since the success of Givenchy’s relationship with Audrey Hepburn (whom he dressed off-screen as well) the use of a couturier on a film has become closely aligned with a desire to bequeath to the clothes the kind of star status usually denied to costume. Givenchy and other couturiers since have used films to showcase their designs. Givenchy’s signature styles, his strapless, square-necked sheaths in heavy silks and satins, his wraps and trains and his elaborate hats infiltrated every film he worked on with Hepburn up to their final collaboration on Bloodline. Film fashions no longer had to remain subservient to narrative and character, and could become much more intrusive, a legacy which, taking in several designers along the way, finds its surest modern expression in the spectacular, innovative costumes of Jean-Paul Gaultier.

1.1 Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, William Holden in Sabrina
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

From the late 1950s through to basically 1980, when Giorgio Armani designed Richard Gere’s wardrobe for American Gigolo and effectively redefined the role of the film couturier, a fluid mutual relationship existed between fashion and costume design. Over these years a film tended towards being a general reflector of outside fashions and trends. There were obviously exceptions, such as Chanel’s designs for Delphine Seyrig in Last Year in Marienbad which were far more flamboyant than the clothes she had created for Jeanne Moreau in Les Amants three years earlier, and Paco Rabanne’s space-age look for Jane Fonda in the final sequence of Barbarella, both of which are examples of fashions being created for films that, although they bore some relation to the trends of the day, were nevertheless non-functional flights of fancy. Over this period costume design started certain notable trends, usually pertaining to street rather than high fashion, such as Marlon Brando’s ‘slob look’ of flying jacket and white T-shirt in The Wild One (which he reputedly provided himself, in an era when this was no longer expected of male stars) and James Dean’s tortured adolescent in similar T-shirt and wind-cheater in Rebel Without A Cause. With the ascendancy of European cinema in the early 1960s, there arrived a more harmonious relationship between couture and street styles – the appropriation of haute couture glamour by a landmark film such as La Dolce Vita, or the throwaway use of a Dior day dress on Jean Seberg in A bout de souffle. Films of the mid-1960s such as Darling and Two For the Road brought in the by now common practice of ‘shopping’ rather than designing film costume, of buying in designer off-the-peg items. The latter (another Hepburn/Givenchy collaboration) trawled the ready-to-wear collections of designers such as Mary Quant, Yves Saint Laurent and Givenchy himself.⁷ Apparent through the 1960s, therefore, is a growing desire to treat haute couture (and perhaps spectacular costume designs in general) with less reverence and more irony, a tendency exemplified by the quintessentially 1960s André Courrèges-inspired costumes by Hardy Amies for 2001: A Space Odyssey. As Amies was at the time the Queen’s favourite designer, his costumes are particularly unexpected. The very notion of couture styles being synonymous with art and pure exhibitionism was questioned and mocked by Saint Laurent’s exquisitely mundane wardrobe for Belle de Jour, a film whose attitude to unexceptional but very expensive clothes still resonates in the designs of the markedly unflamboyant cinema work of modern couturiers such as Cerruti, Armani and the house of Chanel, who dressed Carole Bouquet in Trop Belle Pour Toi!.

As a troublesome epitaph to the ability of film fashion to inspire particularly bland contemporary trends, there is the work of Ralph Lauren on two highly influential films of the 1970s, The Great Gatsby and Annie Hall, both of which testify to the designer’s obsessive nostalgia for a bourgeois past of leisure wear and natural fabrics in pale shades. As one writer says of Lauren’s wardrobe for Robert Redford as Gatsby, the fact that the suits worn in the film (set in the 1920s) could have been worn in 1974 without causing comment, is a reflection on the moribund state of male dress (McDowell 1992: 96). The costumes are also, for all the suave ease they evoke, a sad reflection on the misuse of couturiers in cinema as subsidiary costume designers who subsume their styles to the narratives and characters. Since then, even the less extrovert designers (Armani being the strongest example) have begun to restate their presence as dictators of fashion outside cinema, a re-evaluation which has likewise reinstated the element of display into couturier film designs. Nino Cerruti, another prolific men’s couturier who has worked on several films, has identified his intention to manufacture a look that is ‘common’, to subtly infuse reality with invisible style (Irvine 1995: 157), indicating that clothes can be items of display in cinema without being spectacularly extrovert. Certain fashion writers have related the rise in prominence of all technicians and stylists involved in cinema during the late 1970s and 1980s (including fashion designers) with the demise of the classic era star (Butazzi and Molfino 1986: 19–20), but it may be more appropriate to simplify matters by equating the emergence of the design movie with the 1980s’ idolisation of the label. In an age when ‘shopping’ a film falls within the remit of the costume designer, the involvement of the couturier in film is far from standardised.

The most interesting debates surrounding the involvement of fashion in film still centre on the questions of exhibitionism and art; whether clothes should perform a spectacular as opposed to a subservient visual role in film; and whether those same costumes should remain functional intermediaries to narrative and character, or stand out as art objects in themselves. Peter Wollen makes the distinction between Hollywood’s ‘play safe’ attitude to fashion, and the predominantly European art cinema tradition that made fashion into ‘an integral part of the overall look of the film which was genuinely treated as another art-form in its own right; incorporated into the cinema but not reduced to an ornament or an accessory’ (Wollen, P. 1995: 13). Into the latter tradition, for which the starting point is taken as Chanel’s work on Last Year in Marienbad, Wollen places the costume designs of, for example, Jean-Paul Gaultier. In his analysis Wollen expresses the rather contentious and elitist attitude that fashion as art is ‘good’, and that only extravagant designs can be classified as ‘art’. This emphasis on artistry recalls the origins of couture designs; as Anne Hollander suggests, ‘In the middle of the nineteenth century the French invented, fostered, and spread the idea of the dress designer as an original genius, like a painter – someone totally responsible for his creations’ (Hollander 1993: 351). The outmoded attitude, expressed by Wollen, that only the spectacular can be art, and that ‘good’ fashion designers necessarily create designs for display and effect will be contested later with reference to Yves Saint Laurent and Armani.

As mentioned above, Jean-Paul Gaultier is one of the couturiers who also design for film and who Wollen classifies as an ‘artist’. When working for film Gaultier, a designer whose signature styles off the screen have been radical, spectacular garments such as his early 1980s male skirt and the 1986 ‘Cone Dress’, often creates costumes anew, rather than lend or adapt existent lines. He has seemingly approached his film work (which to date includes The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Kika, My Life Is Hell, The City of Lost Children and Prêt-à-Porter) as if it were art, saying, for instance, that cinema has afforded him the opportunity of letting his imagination run wild and has, in turn, proved ‘food for my fashion’ (Irvine 1995: 157). His involvement in cinema projects is also often greater than that of many other couturiers, designing entirely original costumes for all one hundred characters in The City of Lost Children and one-offs for the protagonists in The Cook, the Thief often for negligible financial rewards.

1.2 Helen Mirren and Michael Gambon in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
Courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs

Gaultier’s designs for Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover are wildly eclectic. Helen Mirren’s caged cobweb dress and the waitresses’ corsets bear the trademarks of past Gaultier collections, whilst elsewhere his reference points are a heady blend of 1960s ‘space age’ fashions, Cavalier uniforms, seventeenth-century Cardinals’ robes and modern business suits. Although the items for the leads (except Alan Howard’s clothes as ‘the lover’) are specially designed one-offs, many of the other costumes are from Gaultier’s regular ready-to-wear collection, the extras reputedly having been ‘let loose amongst his rails and told to deck themselves out in whatever they would wear to a swanky restaurant’ (Maiberger 1989: 159). Gaultier, belying Wollen’s suggestion that ‘artistic’ costume designers seem to find their inspiration from outside rather than inside mainstream cinema, includes several touches of traditional Hollywood glamour in his The Cook, the Thief costumes, particularly the long gloves, whipped hair and yards of chiffon used for Helen Mirren as Georgina. The self-conscious affiliation with an existent film tradition is further signalled by Mirren’s cape with its collar of dark, upright feathers that frame her face, a direct re...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Dressing Up
• 1 Cinema and Haute Couture Sabrina to Pretty Woman, Trop Belle Pour Toil, Prêt-à-Porter
• 2 Desire and the Costume Film Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Age of Innocence, The Piano
• Part II Gender
• 3 The Instabilities of the Franco-American Gangster Scarface to Pulp Fiction, Casino, Leon
• 4 The Screen's Fashioning of Blackness Shaft, New Jack City, Boyz N the Hood, Waiting to Exhale
• 5 Clothes, Power and the Modern Femme Fatale The Last Seduction, Disclosure, Single White Female
• Part III Beyond Gender
• 6 The Comedy of Cross-Dressing Glen or Glenda, Mrs Doubtfire, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
• 7 The Erotic Strategies of Androgyny The Ballad of Little Jo, The Crying Game, Orlando
• Notes
• Filmooraphy
• Bibliooraphy
• Index