What's the connection between fashion, vampirism, aging and death? The answer may be Tony Scott's first directorial debut, The Hunger (1983).
The film is actually on tonight at the Cristóbal Balenciaga Museum in Getaria, Spain, (at 7 p.m. - free admission) as it closes the retrospective the museum organised on famous fashion designers who contributed to the big screen.
Cult vampire horror movie The Hunger featured one of the most respected costume designers around, Milena Canonero (who also turned to the Tirelli tailoring house to find the historical costumes for some of the scenes included in the film and even sourced in Italy the proper material to put in the top pocket of David Bowie's beige suit as she couldn't find it in London...), while Catherine Deneuve's wardrobe was by Yves Saint Laurent (also worth mentioning the special effects by Graham Longhurst; makeup illusions by Dick Smith and special makeup by the late Antony Clavet, who worked a lot for Italian Vogue).
The film opens with Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie as Miriam and John Blaylock, scouting for their next victims in a club while The Bauhaus' Peter Murphy sings "Bela Lugosi's Dead" (a currently trendy scene with the David Bowie revival and exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the just opened "Club to Catwalk" exhibition also at the V&A).
Miriam is a centuries-old vampire, but John was human before meeting her, so his aging process was just slowed down. One day John starts aging, a process that transforms him in just a few hours from young and sexy into elderly and repulsive to Miriam's eyes.
As her passion for John dies, Miriam reveals him he will be aging but will be unable to die, so she puts his body in a coffin like she did with all her former lovers, and sets her eyes on premature aging researcher and doctor Sarah (Susan Sarandon).
Based on the novel by Whitley Strieber, the film tackles quite serious themes - love, passion, sexual desire and, above all, our fear of aging and death, issues that could also be analysed from a fashion-related point of view.
While fashion never dies but constantly resurrects itself season after season, quite often fashion houses keep on being alive even when their founders die or are revamped a few decades after their deaths. Besides, current fashion is also displaying a vampirical desire for more and more runways and more and more customers - three days ago, for example, Dior organised a fashion show in Moscow's Red Square.
For what regards the choice of Yves Saint Laurent, in this case it's just perfect not only for the designer's connection with Deneuve, but also for her role. In the film she is a refined immortal creature very different from her more sinister fanged ancestors clad in dark capes and travelling in coffins from Eastern Europe.
She is elegant, enigmatic and stylish, and lives surrounded by rare art pieces in a beautiful house in New York in which lights create mesmerisingly sensual yet scary chiaroscuro effects; Saint Laurent's designs had a timeless quality about them (at least until Saint Laurent himself created them...) and are perfect to hint at the vampire's glamorous immortality (apart from the YSL connection, another fashion-related point to investigate in this film would be the Maripol-like Polaroids...).
Dismissed by critics, The Hunger was not a huge success, though in later years it became a cult in certain circles. The film is definitely worth rewatching not just to ponder about our collective fear of getting old, but also to consider the vampirical role of contemporary fashion, the power of costumes in films and the fact that current designs by Yves Saint Laurent aren't as timeless and cinematic as the ones Catherine Deneuve wears in this movie.
With many thanks to Kutmusic for lending me a copy of this film from its archives to do the screenshots for this post.
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