If you've followed this blog for a while, by now you will have probably understood I have a rather extreme obsession about cinema and fashion.
A while back watching an old black and white Italian film on TV with my mum and aunt I pointed out how you could spot the quality of the fabric in a dress worn by the lead actress from miles. Obviously they looked at me as I had gone crazy.
Though that was nothing compared to a lecture I did a while back during which I subjected 20 people to watch and re-watch the details of the Roger Vivier shoes worn by Catherine Deneuve in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (I swear to you some of the people in the audience - shoes addict mainly - enjoyed it).
I do tend to prefer films that do not contain any explicit references to the costumes or designs used and which offer therefore a challenge: finding who designed a specific dress, garment or piece of accessory and discovering why a costume designer chose it.
Contemporary films do not offer such challenges anymore since specific designer items are often used as product placements and you can anyway spot them in the credits.
For a long time I have been obsessed with a reversible short coat worn by Marisa Mell as Monica Weston/Susan Dumurrier in the airport scene of Lucio Fulci’s thriller Una sull’altra (Perversion Story/One on Top of the Other, 1969), probably the best film Fulci ever directed.
The film focuses on the mysterious death of Susan, George Dumurrier’s asthmatic wife and features a well-developed plot based on the theme of duality that calls back to mind Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
The film was shot in the late 60s, so the clothes worn by the characters are in typical 1968-69 fashion. There is one bit in the film that always interested me from a fashion point of view: the part in which Marisa Mell enters the airport as Monica Weston and boards a plane as Susan Dumurrier, undergoing a radical transformation, from blonde with green eyes to brunette with dark eyes.
Monica is also wearing a short white coat with an orange plaid motif and when she turns into Susan she reverses it and wears it on its white side (see video at the end of this post).
During the 60s in Italy double face coats were rather popular and were often characterised by round shoulders, ample sleeves, tall funnel collar and dropped waistline.
French designers also opted for cocooning capes and coats at the time, made with heavy and elaborate yet ultra soft fabrics. For example, Pierre Cardin launched in the early 60s the "siberiennes", tartan coats made using a heavy woolen fabric.
In the pages of Italian tailoring magazine Vestire, Autumn/Winter 1964-64 issue, I recently found a sketch that reminds me a lot of the coat Marisa Mell wears: the sketch is in black and it's printed on thick brown cardboard-like paper, but it shows a tartan coat with an oversized funnel neck and raglan sleeves. The magazine says it was designed by Schwabe and it was rather popular at the time.
It’s impossible to deny there is an interesting resemblance between Mell’s coat and Schwabe’s design: was it possible that a design popular between 1963-64 was used for a film shot a few years afterwards and released in 1969?
I will probably have to investigate the matter further, yet I’d like to think that I have somehow managed to find the elusive mystery coat. For the time being, though, I think I have just found another clip to torture people with during cinema and fashion lectures.
Add to Technorati Favorites
Lijit Search
Comments