The 1914 film Amor Pedestre Love on Foot by the Italian director
The 1914 film Amor Pedestre (Love on Foot), by the Italian director Marcel Fabre, is filmed entirely from the waist down. As legs, feet and – crucially – shoes interact, Fabre forces the viewer to contemplate the relationship between shoes and love, and the fetishistic emotions that inanimate objects can produce in flesh-and-blood humans.In the programme The Enigma of the Fashion Object, clothes take on a life of their own on screen. The disparity in perceived attitudes to fashion at the time is highlighted by another newsreel, Tin Hats for All. Two women are shown modelling army headgear as though it were high fashion, while a male voiceover berates them for being interested in frivolities during wartime.Gender politics aside, clothes have also been granted an inner life on film, free from interference by their human owners. It tells the tale of a resourceful Jewish milliner, May Aubert, who fled Oslo during the Second World War and became a currency smuggler, sewing Nkr100,000 into the linings of her hats. Now 87, Aubert still designs and is the official milliner to Queen Sonja of Norway.Fashion on film is largely a girl’s world, with male protagonists featuring rarely.
Clothes and the Man, an RAF film from 1941, is one such rarity. It links clothes and war, warning viewers that the (male) enemy can be disguised in a wide range of outfits. His highly groomed, sharply tailored and heavily made-up heroines in films such as Vertigo, Rear Window and Marnie possess a dangerous and powerful feminine allure, but they rarely escape lightly. Like Eve, their physical perfection is punished by a male director.A more positive take on fashion and female empowerment comes in the Norwegian director Elsa Kvamme’s 1999 documentary Lady with a Hat. Hawks understood that there was a growing breed of female consumers and ticket-buyers who would go to the cinema and pick up fashion tips there.
The final fashion-show scene is played out in startling Technicolor as Hawks simultaneously rejects the glossy, superficial world of fashion and falls prey to its magical cinematic potential.Some 30 years later, Hitchcock also subscribed to the idea that women’s fashion was potentially liberating but ultimately sinful. “Although it is ultimately criticised and dismissed by the male director, fashion is shown as an arena that offers women some kind of independence from the domestic situation,” says Uhlirova. “It’s not a straightforward rejection,” says Uhlirova.In the 1926 film Fig Leaves, the director Howard Hawks appears to cite fashion as a Satanic force responsible for the fall of womankind. In this Hollywood classic, the heroine, Eve, becomes a model in a Fifth Avenue boutique without telling her husband, who disapproves of fashion and all things frivolous, resulting in considerable marital difficulties.
Chytilova, a Czech director who worked part-time as a model in the 1950s, is one of few female directors to focus on fashion in film. While Ceiling portrays a model who is dissatisfied with her life and eventually finds the courage to escape from the shallow fashion world, it betrays an obsession with clothing and a loving attention to detail that could only come from a former fashionista. Her experience is mirrored by the protagonist of Vera Chytilova’s Ceiling, also made in the 1960s. Klein is critical of fashion but he can’t deny the fact that he also finds it fascinating. The quest for Polly’s identity is his own quest to discover what, if anything, lies beneath the surface of fashion.”Polly Maggoo acts as the festival’s touchstone for a host of female characters whose lives on screen are changed in some way by fashion. “They think there must be something more beneath the surface,” explains Uhlirova.