Can movies affect personal style?
Sunday, March 7, 2010
The Academy Awards were on last night and I hope you were watching. The award for costume design was once again given to the very deserving Sandy Powell, one of my all time favorites. Sandy is capable of doing great work in period as well as modern (how we dress today) design. Interestingly in her brief acceptance speech she noted that once again she received her award for "The Young Victoria"--a period piece--but wished the academy would reward contemporary work at times. She said it's equally difficult --and I so agree! Predictably I too knew the award would go to a period design feature or--I'd hoped--perhaps something very imaginative like Avatar.
Avatar certainly has been either very timely for "ethnic" looks on this summer's runway collections or served as inspiration. Jean Paul Gaultier was feeling an "Avatar" moment way back in January. Just a month after the release of the James Cameron blockbuster, he injected strains of its Edenic imagery into his couture collection.
The NY Times article I'm quoting proceeded- "Nor did the editors of Vogue waste time paying homage to that movie's blue-skinned tribes. A 10-page fashion feature in its March issue is photographed in a mossy forest, the models stamped with fierce tattoos. "Avatar," prompts the accompanying text. "You can't miss the sci-fi angle."
Few films in recent memory have had such a vivid and instantaneous impact on the world of style. So it seems perverse that last month, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the nominees for best costume design, Mayes C. Rubeo and Deborah Lynn Scott's luridly exotic designs for the film were not in the running. Come Sunday, when Oscars are bestowed, the award will go to one in a lineup of more reliably conventional period fare, films that include "Bright Star," "Nine" and "Coco Before Chanel."
In earlier eras, such a slight would have stung. Film and fashion, after all, once enjoyed a relationship so intertwined as to border on incestuous. Today, among style-world insiders at least, the insult scarcely registers. Clearly a long and fabled love affair has lost its heat.
The NYTimes Styles article "Film and Fashion:Just Friends" makes the case that once upon a time (think "Annie Hall, Bonnie and Clyde, Out of Africa, Saturday Night Fever, and "Love Story") films most certainly did affect personal style. But several experts like Simon Doonan claim that it's become less so than ever.
In both my books I noted that movies can be a guide for great style (color, form, texture), not necessarily for fashion itself (fashion for fashion's sake) but for honing one's taste through observation. Movies also have cues as to what to avoid. Of course people have to notice all this --or it goes right by--just like life itself.
