Luchino Visconti occasionally placed Louis Vuitton cases in his films as an ironic reference to the initials of his name.
Yet the Italian director never tried to advertise a fashion house through the clothes and accessories he picked for his characters in collaboration with his costume designers, but made sure those pieces somehow helped defining better the personality of that particular character.
If you've been following this blog from the beginning you may have realised how, being mainly interested in the connections between fashion and films, I often explored in previous posts not only the reasons and motivations that led a director or a costume designer to pick a specific creation for a character, but also analysed the costumes, atmospheres and sets from specific movies that influenced particular fashion collections.
In more recent years, though, the relationship between fashion and film has been redefined: films such as The Devil Wears Prada and Sex and the City didn’t only launch fashion trends, but also spawned fashion collections, while working as advertising boards for specific products.
In many ways strengthening the relationship between a film and a fashion product seen in that particular film has now turned into a sort of well-established (and slightly sad) exercise.
The latest example of such a trend is Luca Guadagnino’s film Io sono l’amore (I Am Love).
The movie – presented last year at the Venice Film Festival, and released tomorrow in Italy – chronicles the vicissitudes of a high bourgeois family from the north of Italy.
The Recchis, a powerful family of textile entrepreneurs, live a hypocrital existence regulated by rigid family laws.
Tired about her boring life, Emma, a woman of Russian origins married to a prominent scion of the family, ends up breaking the rules when she falls in love with Antonio, the family cook.
Apart from containing a few clichés (food as a symbol of love/affection/genuine traditions; idyllic love-making scenes in rural environments; pigeons trapped in the grand family mansion symbolising the stifling environment in which Emma lives; a daughter who comes back from London changed and reveals to her understanding mother she is a lesbian - well, at least she didn’t come back with a piercing and green hair, though there is plenty of metaphorical haircutting business in the film...), the story is based around an almost banal metaphor – the juxtaposition between a rigid entrepreneurial society and the return to a simpler and happier life.
It's impossible not to admit that the plot is rescued by Tilda Swinton’s performance as Emma, though the entire film is stifled by the extremely artistic and artificially stylised frames that end up being in some cases almost boring (yes, another metaphor to project on the screen the rigidity and coldness of the main characters...I'm getting lost in metaphors here...).
Style is emphasised also through the clothes worn by the main characters: Emma favours for example minimalistic and clean cut clothes by Jil Sander, and their colours betray the changes she goes through and mark the birth of the passion that will eventually destroy the Recchis.
It's a shame the director focused more on the most romantic (or metaphorical...) aspects of the story, as it would have been interesting to analyse a little bit better the consequences of the fall from grace of the family, but I guess that wasn't the main point of this film.
So, let's now pass to the fashion connections in this film: jewellery designer Delfina Delettrez told me a while back that one of her pieces had been adapted and recreated for the film.
At the time I didn’t find it as a great revelation since her partner, actor Claudio Santamaria, had starred in a previous film directed by Luca Guadagnino and the film is also produced by First Sun, a house co-founded by Silvia Venturini Fendi, her mother.
The Fendi fashion house strengthened the connection with the film providing most of the clothes and accessories worn by Alba Rohrwacher (starring as Emma's daughter) at last year’s Venice Film Festival.
Yet that wasn’t enough. Lady Gaga taught us that what you do is not really that important as long as you can sell it by obnubilating the minds of people by visually hitting them with an avalanche of clothes and accessories and making sure at the same time they know who made them.
In a nutshell, if you are making a film, make sure it features some stunning designs that can generate people's interest.
Io sono l’amore marks a new frontier in the fashion and cinema connection: as announced by an email I recently got with a subject reading ”Shopping by movie”, the iconic cocktail dress – dubbed “The Little Red” – worn by Tilda Swinton in the film is indeed now available (in only 7 samples) on jilsander.com.
The dress is accompanied by backstage footage and an interview with Swinton and Guadagnino talking about Raf Simons’s clothes for Jil Sander and characters’ psychology.
I wonder what kind of potential this new marketing strategy will unleash in the context of fashion and film theories and studies: will marketing destroy the power that the perfect costume can give a character or will this ploy convince more people to go to the movies AND shop at the same time?
Besides, how far will extend the influence of specific fashion houses who also have some interests in the film industry? Will Dario Argento's new Suspiria (First Sun acquired the remake rights a while back) be turned into a furious orgy of IT bags and fur coats?
Time will tell, yet I wish there was a director, who like Visconti, wouldn't try and sell us something with a film, but maybe use a product as an inspiration or to make a few ironic references, pointing out in this way that fashion shouldn’t really take itself too seriously.
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