When fashion designers become directors, they bring movies a much-needed visual stamp
Fashion and film are becoming more interconnected
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Abbey Bender.
Fashion and film have long enjoyed a symbiotic relationship.
In recent years, fashion and film have become even more interconnected as fashion designers have begun to branch out into directing. In 2009, Tom Ford, a designer known for his glamorous clothes and provocative ads, directed his widely acclaimed debut, “A Single Man.” Four years later, the chicly minimalist French designer Agnès B. showed her first fiction feature, “My Name Is Hmmm . . .,” at the New York Film Festival. Now, Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the sisters behind the ethereal label Rodarte, have just released their first film, “Woodshock.”
Tom Ford’s ‘A Single Man’
A Filmmaker magazine interview with Ford timed to “A Single Man” began, “Tom Ford may be the first fashion designer to cross over to the role of filmmaker.”
About: “A Single Man,” an adaptation of a 1964 Christopher Isherwood novel about a middle-aged professor trying to cope with the death of his longtime partner, featured a poignant performance from Colin Firth and evocative 1960s imagery.
Fashion: The film was stylish on the surface.
Reception: it also packed emotional power, securing an Academy Award nomination for Firth.
Agnès B.’s ‘My Name is Hmmm…”
Agnès B. is an avowed cinephile who has produced films by the likes of Harmony Korine and supported productions by directors including Claire Denis and Gaspar Noé.
About: “My Name Is Hmmm…” draws on the experimental elements of the French New Wave, as well as the isolated landscapes of Michelangelo Antonioni, to create an understated tale of a young girl who escapes an abusive father by running away from a school trip with a kindly truck driver.
Fashion: Talking to Film Comment magazine, Agnès B. said she wanted to keep her design “completely separate . . . I didn’t want to be promoting my clothing in the film.” Still, style plays a role: “You can style everything,” she said. There’s evidence of this impulse in the brief, jarring interludes when the film shifts aspect ratios while showing the world through the character’s eyes.
Kate and Laura Mulleavy’s ‘Woodshock’
“Woodshock,” the latest entry in the designer/director cannon, has a dreamy, gauzy aesthetic familiar to anyone who has seen Rodarte’s designs.
About: Rodarte muse Kirsten Dunst plays Theresa, a woman who works at a marijuana dispensary and spins into a disorienting depression after helping her sick mother die with a spiked joint. Much of the film finds Theresa wandering through the woods and her mother’s home in a haunted haze.
Reception: The film makes far more of an impression with aesthetic than it does with story. Its weighty themes of grief, drug use and guilt feel more like shadows of potential drama as the audience is kept from ever really getting to know the characters.
Fashion: What’s most interesting about “Woodshock” is the way it feels of a piece with the Mulleavy sisters’ design work. Their clothes, much like the misty landscapes on-screen, experiment with texture and appear delicate and wood-nymphlike rather than explicitly glamorous and sparkling. Rodarte’s designs frequently feature layers of sheer, sumptuous fabric, and the film often uses dreamlike double exposures, the cinematic equivalent of these layers.
Too many films today are lacking in visual style, with the proliferation of cold-looking digital photography across genres and the blockbuster’s reliance on CGI explosions. More fashion designers should make this artistic leap. Their films may not always be great, but with their experience creating fantasies out of fabric, they show that a well-framed shot can have the same sensual appeal as a well-draped piece of couture.
