For my essay I have chosen to explore Stella Bruzzi's ideology that 'deliberately unspectacular fashion can still function in a spectacular way' through Brunel's film, Belle de Jour starring Catherine Deneuve.
http://clothesonfilm.com/belle-de-jour-sex-and-alienation/4470/
I have been considering some points:
- Fetish elements within Belle de Jour - designed to divert the attention from the narrative by focusing on the details and accessories.
- Roger Vivier shoes and their high focus throughout the movie
- The spectacular fashion in film that works to sexualise and objectify the female from versus the unspectacular fashion that fetishises elements of dress
- The classic- How YSL's understated clothing have become contemporary classics in modern-day wardrobes due to the timeless quality of the garments.
- The prospect that designers have fought hard to display their work on screen, which has created an unending dialogue between designer and spectator as consumer- linking back to Charles Eckert and his theory that 'Hollywood gave modern consumerism its distinctive bent'
Quotes to consider:
- 'the act of looking at a garment… frequently has nothing to do with sexual desire….and much to do with an attraction to clothes’ - Bruzzie
- 'the idealized woman is’ very much ‘dictated by male fantasy’- Bruzzi
- 'film ‘positions the female viewer as a desiring consumer who gazes at the silver screen as if into a luxury shop window’ - Anneke Smelik
- 'in-film fashion show acts as ‘a disruptive, jarring force’ - Bruzzi
- Anti-fashion is as much a creature of fashion as fashion itself is the means of its own undoing - Fred Davis
- Fashion can 'intrude on, dominate the scenes they are couched in' - Andrienne Munich
-
'dressing is an act usually undertaken with reference to pictures – mental pictures, which are personally edited versions of actual ones. The style in which the image of the clothed figure is rendered…governs the way we create and perceive our own clothed selves' -Hollander 1975
