In previous posts I explored Michelangelo Antonioni’s films in connection with fashion and style, briefly analysing the metaphors behind his characters’ attires and costumes.
Today I’d like to move from one film by Antonioni that has unlikely connections with fashion, Zabriskie Point (1970), and look at it via a fashion collection.
Antonioni’s fans will probably remember how this film, a representation of the 60s in America, follows the vicissitudes of a young man and woman, Mark and Daria, both in their early 20s.
Authorities are after Mark for the alleged murder of a policeman during a student demo, while Daria is a student and part-time secretary working for a property developer on her way to an appointment with her boss in Phoenix.
Mark travels by plane, Daria by car, but their paths meet and together they end up in a valley surrounded by little mountains and peaks, a sort of lunar and mysterious landscape, immersed in the total silence, Zabriskie Point.
Soon they realise that consumerism has actually reached also this apparently quiet landscape and they set on continuing their journeys towards their destinies.
The best part of the film is undoubtedly Daria’ witnessing the explosion of her boss’s villa. Antonioni first filmed this scene from far away, but, gradually, the camera gets nearer, showing clothes rack, books and food exploding. The director employed these scenes as a commentary upon capitalist society.
I was pleased to see that Vena Cava's Sophie Buhai and Lisa Mayock mixed in their Spring/Summer 2011 Resort collection, a trip to the Death Valley National Park with a Zabriskie Point palette.
The neutral and orangey nuances of the collection evoke indeed the desert dust and the shades of the flaming sun towards which Daria directs her car at the end of the film.
The collection also includes 70s inspired garments characterised by a casual cut such as jumpsuits and shorts, while the tribal motifs on dresses and shirts call to mind the psychedelic decorations on Mark’s stolen plane, the “Lilly 7”.
In a way, though, Vena Cava missed a great opportunity: using the film to criticise contemporary society and the fashion industry.
Zabriskie Point could indeed be divided in three parts: the presentation of Mark and Daria’s worlds; their desert experience and the final and impossible return to their lives before they met.
Vena Cava sort of stopped at the second point, coming up with practical clothes evoking in their colours the freedom of the desert.
It would have been interesting to see where experimenting a little bit with the themes of “mind geographies” would have led the collection.
In the film, the desert and its geography change in accordance with the point of view of the people who see it: for Mark and Daria the desert is a place where everything is still possible, where people can still be free and meditate; for the family of tourists they meet this is instead the perfect place to open a drive in.
The juxtaposition between consumerism (see the almost Pop Art posters of the ads that cover the streets) and the solitude of the desert may have also generated interesting contrasts in the collection.
The metaphors behind the film should have been explored further: through characters such as the policemen and the family of tourists, Antonioni alerted the audience about the human and moral decadence of a society in which the mental torpor and idiocy of some of its representatives seemed to prevail, oppressing young people like Mark and Daria, who represented in the film a younger generation endowed with a critical conscience and a higher sensibility yet condemned to be defeated.
The final explosion scene - that, as the New York Times wrote in a 1970 review, represented “the psychological separation from corporate greed, superficiality, and racial injustice” – could be read not only as Daria’s deepest desire, but also as a call to young people to rebel and revolt to a world based on consumerism that is destroying freedom and imagination.
The message hidden away in that explosion, a metaphor for Daria’s rage, could be seen also as the answer to many contemporary questions: the dreams of today’s younger generations are trapped and squashed by a society that has turned them into redundant beings enslaved in unimaginative temp jobs or in endless cycles of unemployment.
The explosion could therefore be the liberating answer to many constrictions, and, if applied to fashion the explosion could generate further interesting questions.
Nowadays, Antonioni's clothes rack exploding in the sky could indeed be interpreted as a revolt against the unfair working conditions in which many of our garments and accessories are produced, but also as ordinary people's revolt against the concept of designer clothes as something exclusive for a few pretentious and privileged aristoi.
Being inspired by the palette or a theme behind a film is not a bad idea, but, at times, going behind the metaphors it may feature is much better as it can lead to more intriguing, stimulating and even provocative inspirations.
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