Fantasy and Fashion: from Alice to Dr Parnassus |

Fantasy always played a great influence over the world of fashion. You could argue, indeed, that there are many similarities between these two apparently different universes, after all fashion, and in particular haute couture, represents an incarnation of fantasy, a dream come true.

Besides, the set of some fantastic stories often contributed to inspire amazing photo shoots.

One fantastic story that has always been rather popular in fashion is definitely Alice in Wonderland.

The image posted here is a mood board for a photo shoot inspired by Alice in Wonderland and by Jeff Noon’s Automated Alice (1996) for a fashion magazine I used to do stuff for a long time ago. The photo shoot was supposed to play with duality, cyber atmospheres, psychedelic visions and the future.

One of the best photo shoots I ever saw about Alice in Wonderland was done by Annie Leibovitz for the American edition of Vogue in 2003.

It featured Natalia Vodianova as Alice clad in haute couture creations and famous designers impersonating the other Alice characters: Tom Ford was the White Rabbit, Galliano starred as the Queen, Gaultier as the Cheshire Cat, Stephen Jones was the Mad Hatter while Lacroix was pictured as the Dormouse and Viktor & Rolf very aptly played the role of two avant-garde versions of Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

I guess that there will be soon further photo shoots about Alice also thanks to Tim Burton’s own version of Lewis Carroll’s story that will be out next year.

Who knows, maybe the colours in the films or the costumes by Colleen Atwood and Marina Marit (for Johnny Depp) will even inspire some fashion collections for the next seasons.

There is another director who, despite being trapped in a fantasy world, often used references to fashion in his work, Terry Gilliam.

You may remember how among the characters featured in the retro-futuristic world of Brazil (1985), there was also Mrs Ida Lowry (Katherine Helmond) who wore a hat that called to mind Elsa Schiaparelli’s shoe hat.

Gilliam’s next film, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, seems to have further fashion references. The film was premiered a few months ago at the Cannes Film Festival, though it will officially be released this Autumn.

The story revolves around Dr Parnassus, a man who has the power to turn people’s imagination into 3D visions in his Imaginarium.

Yet Parnassus has been playing and betting with the devil throughout his life, winning immortality, then trading it with youth and with his own daughter Valentina, and a final new bet awaits him if he wants to win back Valentina.

One of the key characters in the story, Tony, is played by four different actors, the late Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell, while Tom Waits stars as Mr Nick, an incarnation of the devil.

While such a cast surely attracts audience interest, the main connection to fashion in the cast is represented by model Lily Cole starring as Valentina (while trendy singer/actress Paloma Faith also appears in a minor role).

In the film there are two main references to fashion: the first one occurs when Tony tries to convince Dr Parnassus they need to change a bit their look and become more modern if they want to attract the audience’s attention.

To convince Parnassus, he shows him an old battered copy of a fashion magazine that features models in a magically fabulous setting. “This is modern”, Tony exclaims, “It works. Trust me, I understand this world. This kind of mind control.” Tony comes up with a new look for the Imaginarium, but also for Parnassus and his assistants, transforming the magician into a sort of refined Paul Poiret lookalike.

In another scene Tony tries to convince a crowd of women – all of them loaded with shopping bags from designer stores – to enter the Imaginarium.

He eventually drags a woman clad in Louis Vuitton clothes into the Imaginarium, and her capitalistic fantasy ends up generating a pastel-colour setting for a sophisticated shampoo commercial, a never-ending landscape populated by surreal girls sitting on swings attached to soft clouds.

Impressed by the whole experience the woman will get read of her designer clothes and accessories as soon as she gets out of the Imaginarium.

Who knows if the film will convince viewers to get rid of expensive clothes and accessories and believe more in fantasy or if its settings and costumes by Monique Prudhomme or the Venetian mask worn by Heath Ledger (I wonder if it could be by the same Venetian artisan who made the masks for Eyes Wide Shut…) will inspire mysteriously magical photo shoots.

Guess we will just have to wait and see, yet for the time being you can watch clips of the new Terry Gilliam film on YouTube, while you can also download the script from Scribd.com and try to spot in it the various fashionable references.