References to Cecil B. DeMille’s Madam Satan popped up here and there in this blog in connection with fashion collections or specific designs.
Throughout the decades the strong visual power of this film provided an almost obvious inspiration for many designers.
Indeed Madam Satan’s Art Deco sets manage to fantastically combine different film genres - fantasy, sci-fi and horror - into one movie, while the costumes by Adrian are a veritable orgy of extravagance.
MADAM SATAN Zeppelin Party (1930) #1
While the film is essentially a romantic comedy dealing with wealthy and conservative Angela discovering her husband Bob’s adulterous behaviour, some of its strongest scenes take place during a bizarre costume party organised by Bob’s friend Jimmy on a zeppelin, a wonderfully imaginative location, also thanks to sets by Cedric Gibbons – who was heavily influenced by Parisian Art Deco – and Mitchell Leisen.
Madam Satan #2 Zeppelin Disaster
The theme of the femme fatale is also very important in this film: this figure is filtered in DeMille’s film through the Art Deco codes. When Angela appears at the party she wears a sensual costume that evokes Hell’s damnation in its black, white and silvery tongues of fire, yet it envelops and reveals her figure in a glamorously sensational way (watch her in all her glory in the second video - around 03:18 - as she challenges Trixie who looks rather ridiculous in her sparkling, sequinned and feathery costume).
While she doesn’t look too sinister and she’s in the end no villainess, Angela has surely metamorphosed through her dramatic costume, turning from an ordinary woman into a bold modern heroine.
Fashion and film aficionados may have spotted an uncanny resemblance between the costumes worn during the zeppelin party - outlandish headdresses and fetishistic masks included - with some designs from Gareth Pugh’s Autumn/Winter 2006-2007 and Spring/Summer 2007 collections (check out the first video in this post – around 06:45).
Yet it would probably be more correct to identify a sort of broader connection between Art Deco, Madam Satan and Gareth Pugh.
For the next season, Pugh went back to a darker state of mind, including in his collection thick leather coats, capes and jackets with a strong sculptural quality about them, characterised by a chevron motif, one of the symbols of Art Deco, inspired by the diagonal lines left behind by racing cars that symbolised the direction of the movement.
The motif was replicated in chiffon and leather in full-length evening gowns to create sheer and matte contrasts and evoke a modern decadence, while Adrian’s glamour and sequins was exchanged for Gothic moods and multiple rows of chains used to decorate skinny trousers, tops and tight body-con dresses.
In a way, even Pugh’s obsession with distorting the female body and applying to it rigid and protruding angular shapes to make it look structurally robotic has an Art Deco derivation. Critics technically defined such distortion - that consisted in elongating the female silhouette, eliminate rotundity and accentuate slenderness and dynamism - as “grotesque moderne”, a description that somehow fits also Pugh's designs.
Pugh made very few concessions to softer looks in this collection, adding a few designs such as a cape with frayed edges or a crocheted coat, and predictably transformed men into crossovers between samurais and priests, figures his fans are definitely not unfamiliar with, while a touch of theatricality was added in the harness worn by one of his models that seemed to be borrowed directly from the Madam Satan scene with the zeppelin dancer (check his costumes in the first video in this post - around 03:35).
With this collection Pugh has proved once again that he excels in outerwear and that he is also able to reinvent and update arty and cinematic trends.
Yet, while his modern and gothic Madam Satan is intriguingly, Pugh will have to strengthen his sartorial skills when it comes to dresses and trouser suits.
Modernly satanic women - and Pugh should know it by now - require a more well-rounded wardrobe and, hopefully, the designer will be able to provide it in future.
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