Almost every season, we see cinema’s mise-en-scene reconstituted through the eyes of a designer and while this is usually subtle – a wallpaper print, a score, a scene’s colour palette – it’s key to uncovering the kernels of meaning burrowed deep within a collection. More Mubi than Netflix, these references tend to circuit back to movieland’s chinstrokey, cult classics. See Salvatore Ferragamo, who this season, built a collection indebted to Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke’s uniforms in the 1997 sci-fi classic, Gattaca. For AW21, Ferragamo’s creative director, Paul Andrew, proposed “a new uniform for our new world”, made up of colours like “boy-scout green, janitor brown, girl-guide mauve, and cheerleader pink”.
While often reduced to an aside in show notes, these cult-crossovers are not only proof of fashion’s polyphonic set of influences but are testament to a designer's capacity to melt down pre-existing worlds and remould them under a new, future vision. After all, a designer’s universe spans further than just clothing and the interrelationship between film and fashion is only the beginning. Below, we take a further look at some of the traces that cult cinema has left on the runway.
ALEXANDER MCQUEEN SS96: THE HUNGER
Tony Scott’s horny vampire flick The Hunger was the subject of Alexander McQueen’s SS96 show. In the film, an icey David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve romp about, feeding on the blood of goths and luring hopeless victims into sex-fuelled death traps.
It was this almost comedic level of blood lust that was translated onto the McQueen catwalk. Models staggered onto the runway like drunken revellers, writhing in grotesque shapes and flipping off the front row. Shirts were stained with bloody handprints, claw-slashed tops and spliced trews came together like gaping wounds, and transparent bustiers were sent out filled with real life worms.
GUCCI AW15: THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS
Alessandro Michele’s dreamy-kitsch Gucci cacophonies are often compared to the light-headed cinematic world of Wes Anderson. Yet no character features quite as heavily as The Royal Tenanbaum’s Margot Tenenbaum.
As part of Gucci’s AW15 show, Michele’s first as creative director, the designer sent out a series of doppelgängers of the chain-smoking ingenue, complete with blonde bob, vintage-looking fur coats, and moneyed loafers. Then, as part of his SS17 collection, the designer turned out the same blood orange zebra print that covered the walls of Margot Tenenbaum’s bedroom. If the Margot clones of AW15 were too heavy-handed, then this was so niche it almost passed off as just another garish Gucci print.
MOSCHINO SS17: VALLEY OF THE DOLLS
For SS17, Jeremy Scott sent out a parade of life-size paper dolls, honouring the classic novel turned 1967 film Valley of the Dolls. Now, we’ve come to expect trompe l’oeil as part and parcel of the camp revelry that is a Moschino show, but this collection took it to a whole new level – every crease and every fold of fabric had been printed on, and as models turned, they exposed stark white, 2D backs as if every garment had been cut out of a stencil.
Within the film, the word “doll” is used interchangeably with “pill”, as the protagonists reach for prescription meds to numb the pain of their lives. Accordingly, the invitation for Scott’s show was actually a prescription pill bottle, filled with placebos, and a scrawled doctor's note. Dresses, too, came laden with kitsch pill motifts. Hammering home these references were the stiff paper tabs, which cut a dramatic silhouette as they stuck out of clothing, as if they were to be folded back and clipped onto a retro child’s toy.
As cult films go, The Night Porter sits high within fashion’s pantheon of references. A particular mention goes to Gareth Pugh, whose AW17 collection featured a look so overt in influence, that it could have been a screenshot from the film itself – particularly its flashback sequence where the film’s lead serenades a smoky jazz club, wearing only trousers, suspenders, and an SS cap.
Pugh’s collection was laced with allusions to Liliana Cavani’s controversial Nazi BDSM nightmare: there were black leather trenches, peaked caps, billowing capes, arm bands, and gloves, which dangled heavy sets of prison keys. It was menacing and uncomfortable, a comment on the (increasingly far right) structures of Trumpian power and abuse.
Pugh’s collection was laced with allusions to Liliana Cavani’s controversial Nazi BDSM nightmare: there were black leather trenches, peaked caps, billowing capes, arm bands, and gloves, which dangled heavy sets of prison keys. It was menacing and uncomfortable, a comment on the (increasingly far right) structures of Trumpian power and abuse.
The visceral 1981 drama, Christiane F. – We children from Bahnhof Zoo, has been a constant reference point within Raf Simons’ body of work. First for AW01, where the film’s poster had been tacked onto clothing like DIY band merch, and then later for AW18, which took the gritty classic as its creative stimulus.
Set in a train station in former West Berlin, Uli Edel’s seminal film journals the true story of a 13-year-old tearaway’s descent into drug abuse and heroin addiction. The exploration of the film’s adolescent protagonists, whose sullen faces were printed onto shirts, coat patches, and jean pockets demonstrates Raf’s proclivity to subvert the tropes of youth culture and mine the darkest corners of the human psyche.
Set in a train station in former West Berlin, Uli Edel’s seminal film journals the true story of a 13-year-old tearaway’s descent into drug abuse and heroin addiction. The exploration of the film’s adolescent protagonists, whose sullen faces were printed onto shirts, coat patches, and jean pockets demonstrates Raf’s proclivity to subvert the tropes of youth culture and mine the darkest corners of the human psyche.
For AW19, Julien Dossena, Paco Rabanne’s creative director, sought inspiration from the monumental Mulholland Drive. Directed by David Lynch, the film follows the life of a young woman who, after surviving a car crash along Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills, is left with complete memory loss. From there, a surreal, neo-noir narrative emerges, tracking the character’s efforts to fit the pieces of her mystery life back together.
The film speaks to the corruption of Hollywood, which Lynch presents as some merciless beast with a bottomless hunger for profit and power. In response, Dossena imagined the show’s setting as a “dream hotel lobby”, a wonderland where “everyone you want to meet passes by”. Here, art deco prints collide with animal stripes across decadent gowns, capturing a very Lynchian sense of glamour disrupted. And above the catwalk hangs fluorescent chandeliers, looming as if they could collapse at any given moment.
The film speaks to the corruption of Hollywood, which Lynch presents as some merciless beast with a bottomless hunger for profit and power. In response, Dossena imagined the show’s setting as a “dream hotel lobby”, a wonderland where “everyone you want to meet passes by”. Here, art deco prints collide with animal stripes across decadent gowns, capturing a very Lynchian sense of glamour disrupted. And above the catwalk hangs fluorescent chandeliers, looming as if they could collapse at any given moment.
UNDERCOVER AW19: SUSPIRIA
From A Clockwork Orange, to 2001: A Space Odyssey, to The Shining, Jun Takahashi’s back catalogue of Undercover collections read like an anthology of cult film classics.
For AW19, the Japanese designer leafed through its pages and picked out Suspiria. Not the 1977 Dario Argento movie, but its 2018 Luca Guadagnino remake, which, despite being a full hour longer than the original, tells the same, unsettling story of a Berlin dance company-cum-coven. In fact, Takahashi even approached Guadagnino about using stills from the film as part of the collection. The result? Lurid scenes and characters screen printed on trapeze dresses and blouson hoodies. Tilda Swinton stood emblazoned on a knee length coat. Truly styles to unite the arthouse and the hypebeast.
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