Last week, Karl Lagerfeld premiered “ Paris-Moscou,” a silent film about the early life of Coco Chanel, coinciding with his annual pre-fall “Metiers d’Art” collection—an unapologetic showcase of luxury that highlights the craftsmanship of the house’s ateliers. The ten-minute film, which stars model Edita Vilkeviciute as Coco, is a day-and-night-in-the-life of the designer. The film is set in 1913 at Chanel’s atelier, and then skips ahead to 1925, where we find Coco at a cabaret. Lagerfeld says the film was meant to draw a link between Chanel’s romantic relationship with Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich at the time and the 2008 Russian-inspired collection he debuted.
Watching this stuff in private, we can experience the titillation along the lines of fashion porn.
Lagerfeld thought his silent film for Chanel was an appropriate format for a contemporary audience, likening the experience of watching a silent film to surfing the Internet. “ Today, people are ready for silent movies again, as they spend time—hours, I would say—looking at text messages and e-mails,” he told WWD.
Indeed, the novelty of watching models move in clothes is akin to early cinema’s fascination with the movement of birds and animals. In today’s fashion films—a new trend that seems to be popping up everywhere—uncomplicated narratives and purely visual spectacles abound. They are like eerie music videos, but starring models prone to striking unsettling postures as they deliver vacant or wistful stares.
The Chanel film, though only ten minutes long, moves at a snail’s pace. The “action” revolving around ladies shopping while Mlle. Chanel smokes in a corner, doles out her opinion (“That one may be a little too big for you”) and asks about the time. We get to see her kiss a lover, Boy Capel, halfway through (even though he’s a bit of a putz, failing to produce tickets to the Ballet Russes that evening), but by that time in the film, I felt like a bored husband in a store distractedly checking email on my Blackberry.
Lagerfeld’s film ends up relying too heavily on cult of personality--the thrill of seeing an embodiment of Chanel. It begs the question—can there be any content in these films that use fashion as their basis, or are they simply commercials—brand identity vehicles—disguised as moving fashion editorials? Do they add anything to the conversation that regular print editorials don’t? Are fashion video-torials good for the industry?
For some designers, fashion films have been used in lieu of producing a runway show. Clearly, these are commercial vehicles. In 2003, AF Vandevorst shot a lush, hauntingly beautiful short featuring models in manors and bleak fields, who ride on horses or recklessly drive station wagons, and participate in slightly cultish group dressing rituals—very Dario Argento, minus the gore. Add to that a soundtrack mixing a melodramatic classical score with 60s psych music, and you have a production that provides a richer setting for the clothes than a catwalk ever could.
Other designers use film as an opportunity for greater creative control—how they see their customer and who they see wearing their clothes might differ from the vision of a fashion editor at a magazine. Kai Kühne, who has described his Spring 2009 oxymoronically as “elaborate minimalism,” chose to work with artist Rita Ackermann for his latest film tie-in to a collection (last year he worked with Chloe Sevigny). As his muse, Ackermann encompasses Kühne’s own perception of himself and his collection.
“As she is as much her work—über sensual, mystical, vibrant, powerful—and her energy is over-the-top, combined with the minimal approach of my latest creations, it feels perfectly Kai Kühne,” says Kühne.
For fashion films that aim to push the genre into the future, there is FLY, a publication that produces a DVD rather than a magazine, and consists of specially-commissioned films, each focusing on a single designer.
“The artists that contribute to FLY are quite varied,” Catherine Camille Cushman, FLY’s creative director says. “We are a collective of artists from various disciplines. The key is finding artists who are open to collaboration and combining their talents, whether film, fashion, design, photography or animation.”
On the latest version of their just re-launched Web site, insidefly.com, visitors can visit FLY16x9, a web channel featuring continually updated videos specifically optimized for portable video players and iPhones.
Sitting down to watch the DVD version is an entirely different experience than watching a quick video on the web or an iPhone—it draws you in much more the way a movie would. The production values are much higher, of course, but it’s more about their ability to play on the audience’s scopophilia. I was initially skeptical about the prospect of spending an hour watching only fashion videos. “Play All” was not an option. But I found myself hypnotized by their cryptic dialogue and mesmerizing music. As with the thrill you get from wearing a gorgeous garment, I found myself getting the same rush from watching cinematography of billowing fabric. Silk and a soundtrack equals seduction.
Tea-a-Tete, a FLY film that deals with “time, identity sublimation and more specifically love, beauty, desire, dissatisfaction, character, contrivance, micro-analysis of actions and loss,” FLY editor-in-chief and director Stephen Blaise explained to The Daily Beast, follows a glamorous cougar-type as she vets a series of potential suitors, all wearing Thom Browne. “There are many components to each film, none of which necessarily possesses greater merit than the other.”
Though FLY’s films ply us with the pleasure in looking or their charming narrative devices, their aims are actually much loftier.
“The primary subject of our films have more to do with the exploration of universal ideas than with one particular thing, such as the clothes the characters might be wearing,” said Blaise. “I'm less interested in how film began than in what it might become.”
The future of fashion films seems to be quite literally in the palm of our hands, an amusing party trick or subway distraction. But at present, the function of these films goes something like this: The other day, when I described the topic of fashion films to a friend, he exclaimed, “Oh, I know exactly what you’re talking about.” He’d just been to see two different movies that week at an art house theater and before both, a short played about a young woman who finds a purse in an envelope on the Staten Island Ferry. She looks scared. She goes a dark alley, and meets a man, they have a moment, she gives him the purse and he walks away. At the end of all that, my friend said, you find out that it was connected to Louis Vuitton, and the real star of the film was the purse. As it turns out, this is one of the new films produced by FLY, entitled Shadow, and it’s available on their Web site. When the audience discovered that it wasn’t a trailer for a new movie, they booed. The second time around, said my friend, there wasn’t booing, just laughter. Its placement in the movie theater registered as a commercial to those in the audience, but it was cleverly disguised as a preview.
Watching this stuff in private, we can experience the titillation along the lines of fashion porn, rock out to the music or maybe even have a semi-transcendent art experience if we’re in the right mood. Watching it in public, on the other hand, exposes these films as just another method of molding of our consumptive urges.
Renata Espinosa is the New York Editor of Fashion Wire Daily. She is also the co-founder of impressionistic fashion and art blog TheNuNu and a sometimes backup dancer for "The Anna Copa Cabanna Show."