It’s always a pleasure to see new experiments that try to link fashion and film together. In the last few years we have seen entire festivals based on this connection mushrooming a bit all over the world, but there wasn’t yet an online platform dedicated to such topics. Well, there wasn't one until Test arrived on the scene.
Named after the “test shoot” concept, this unconventional magazine launched as a personal project of British Vogue Art Director Jaime Perlman, tries to break the boundaries between static fashion photographs and stylish films by showcasing the work of creative teams assembled with talented representatives of the art, fashion, film, design and music industry.
The list of directors, photographers, stylists, make up artists, set designers and models who contributed with their work to the photo shoots and films currently uploaded on the site is long (you can check it out here). Among the fashion designers featured in the videos there are Dr Noki, Richard Nicoll, Maria Francesca Pepe, Gabriella Maria Gonzalez and milliner Nasir Mazhar.
During London Fashion Week, Test will organise an exhibition open to the public from 21st to 24th February, check the magazine site to know more about it.
Talking about London events, films and fashion, Galerianki (Mall Girls, 2009), by young and talented Polish director Katarzyna Roslaniec features in the programme of the 8th Polish Film Festival. and will be screened, followed by a Q&A with the director, at BFI Southbank on 9th March 2010.
The film is very interesting since it tackles a tragic social problem, the sexual exploitation of women.
Galerianki focuses on main character Alicja, a young teenager who would like to be as popular as the other girls in her class. After discovering that the hip but poor girls who surround her manage to buy the latest trendy clothes and accessories by going to shopping malls and selling sexual favours to strangers, Alicja finds herself divided between her new acquaintances and her genuine love for a friend.
The film is obviously not about superficial fashion and happy shopping, but tackles themes such as poverty, violence, prostitution and self-destruction by analysing the pressures put upon adolescents, one of them being the need to wear the latest styles and own the newest mobile phone to be accepted in a specific group and not feel like an outsider.
Roslaniec perfectly manages to show the contrasts between poverty and the squalid reality the girls in the film live in and the easy money they can make by selling their bodies in the colourful shopping malls, modern temples of Western-styled consumerism clashing in this sort of Ken Loach-evoking film with the reality of a country going through many vital social changes and facing economic troubles.
While I find rather interesting the approach Test Magazine is showing towards film and fashion, concentrating on stylish and well-crafted shorts, I also think it would be refreshing to use fashion in film to analyse other aspects of our lives or maybe come up with more thought-provoking fashion films that could also reveal the most sordid aspects of this industry (anybody up to recount the misadventures of Rome Gigli's own label?).
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