I've often explored the connections between cinema and fashion in previous posts. I do find the "film plus fashion" equation particularly interesting to investigate, but it's also fascinating to analyse how one inspiration can be applied to different aspects of the fashion industry and how it can lead to completely different results.
So let's go back to the mid-'80s for today's post and explore what happened when the film Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), directed by Héctor Babenco and adapted from the Manuel Puig 1976 novel El beso de la mujer araña was released.
As you may remember, the film mainly revolves around two men sharing the same cell, political prisoner Valentin Arregui (Raúl Juliá) and Luis Molina (William Hurt), a homosexual jailed for having had sex with an underage boy.
The story goes continuosly back and forth between the present with the two men in the cell and a sort of fantasy time instigated by Molina's detailed memories of films he watched. Molina tells these stories to distract Valentin from the physical and psychological pain of imprisonment while also trying to make friendship with him and eventually get some information about the revolutionary group Valentin is part of.
While in the novel Molina recounts Valentin five movies, in the actual film Molina tells him only two: the first one is a pastiche of a Nazi propaganda film with 1925 movie Paris Underground, the second is the story of a spider woman living on an island (based on Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie).
For the 1985 edition of Pitti Filati (a tradeshow about yarns taking place in Florence twice a year), Mariapia Gambaro (she owned her own fashion company, worked as advisor for different Italian houses, collaborated with knitwear publications, carried out important studies on yarns and organised the Pitti Filati show since it first started in 1977) took inspiration from this film to create an installation showing the new trends in terms of yarns.
I have an interview with Gambaro on an old Italian magazine in which she said that people working in the fashion industry should constantly keep up to date with everything that happens in the world, studying how consumers' tastes and styles change and keeping themselves informed about what happens in different fields, including art, film, culture and technology.
Gambaro often moved from one detail or character in a film and tried to recreate the magic of that specific movie using different yarns and materials. The metaphor of the spider and the web worked pretty well in Gambaro's installation for that edition of Pitti Filati.
In the same year, moving from the same scene that Gambaro had in mind and inspired also by actress Sonia Braga who starred in Babenco's film as Leni Lamaison, Marta and the Spider Woman, Regina Schrecker came up with entirely different results for her Spring/Summer 1986 collection, recreating a spider web-like print in her swimsuits and beachwear.
Can you think about other examples of fashion collections inspired by the same scene in a specific film?
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