Eugenia Paulicelli - Film, Fashion, and the 1960s

FILM, FASHION, AND THE 1960s

FILM, FASHION, AND THE 1960s

Edited by Eugenia Paulicelli, Drake Stutesman, and Louise Wallenberg

Indiana University Press

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2017 by Indiana University Press

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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Paulicelli, Eugenia, 1958- editor. | Stutesman, Drake editor. | Wallenberg, Louise editor.

Title: Film, fashion, and the 1960s / edited by Eugenia Paulicelli, Drake Stutesman, and Louise Wallenberg.

Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017023249 (print) | LCCN 2017037128 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253026415 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253025593 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253026101 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Motion picture actors and actressesClothing. | Fashion in motion pictures. | Motion picturesHistory20th century.

Classification: LCC PN1995.9.C56 (ebook) | LCC PN1995.9.C56 F545 2017 (print) | DDC 791.4302/6dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017023249

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The editors would like to dedicate this collection to the spirit of the 1960s.

Contents

Acknowledgments

T HE FIRST SEEDS for this volume were planted in March 2010 at an international one-day symposium initiated by Louise Wallenberg and Eugenia Paulicelli and coorganized by the Centre for Fashion Studies at Stockholm University and the Fashion Studies programs at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The intent of the symposium was to revisit the pioneering and iconic era of the 1960s through fashion and film on the occasion of the eras fiftieth anniversary. The symposium was accompanied by a multimedia exhibition curated by Eugenia Paulicelli and entitled Fashion + Film: the 1960s Revisited, which included photographs, stills, costume sketches, and actual costumes from the 1960s.

The symposium also opened up a dialogue with scholars who had not taken part in the conference but were later contacted in order to add their voices to the topics we discussed and to give a more multinational dimension to the volume. In the process of editing the anthology and creating a coherent structure, Drake Stutesman was invited in 2013 to join the team to share the work, reenergize the collection, and refine its content.

This book would not have been possible without the enthusiasm of the staff at Indiana University Press, particularly the editors Raina Nadine Polivka and Janice Frisch and their close attention, and the detailed, thorough comments from the anonymous external readers of the proposal and manuscript. As editors and authors, we have been very grateful for the support, attention, and guidance we have enjoyed throughout this long process of sharing and dialogue, particularly important for a volume of collected essays containing different voices and edited by those who live and work in different continents. Our heartfelt thanks go out to all the contributors for their hard work and the patience they have shown throughout the different stages.

In particular, the editors would like to thank: the Center for the Humanities, the Fashion Studies (MALS and PhD Concentration) and the PhD program in Comparative Literature, and the Womens Studies Certificate program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; the students at Queens College and the Graduate Center; the graduate students and colleagues at the Center for Fashion Studies at Stockholm University; the Costume Design in Film students in the Cinema Studies program at New York University; Stiftelsen Bergmangrdarna on Fr, Sweden; Adriana Berselli; Patrizia Calefato; Nancy Deihl; Jane Gaines; and Torkild Thanem, David Ward, and Anna Ward for their unwavering support.

Notes

. The symposium received generous funds from Stockholm University and from the Center for the Humanities at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and for this, we are grateful.

. Our invited speakers covered topics that ranged from the collaboration between Jean-Luc Godard and costume designer Christiane Fageol in Paris in the 1960s to the outspoken fashion nationalism in romantic American 1960s films and the role of fabric in the texture of cinematic mise-en-abyme of identity in Alfred Hitchcocks work.

FILM, FASHION, AND THE 1960s

Introduction

Eugenia Paulicelli and Louise Wallenberg

T HOMAS, THE PHOTOGRAPHER in Michelangelo Antonionis film Blow-up, played by David Hemmings, epitomizes the spirit of the 1960s. He wears narrow white jeans and a tight shirt as he wanders restlessly through London parks or streets documenting the lives of homeless people, while also working on a fashion shoot in his studio with the glamorous real-life model Veruschka. By blurring the boundaries of photographic genres with other arts and ways of seeing, as well as engaging with the way fashion and youth culture revolutionized social, personal, and political hierarchies, Blow-up remains the film of the period of transformations in society, culture, and media that was the 1960s. Indeed, it was in the 1960s that, against the background of political unrest and protest, the youth became a new protagonist of social change.

The decade of the 1960s was marked by the culmination of the Marshall Plan, also known as the European Recovery Program, a program that provided aid to a continent wreaked by the havoc of World War II. This plan for economic aid, proposed by the US Secretary of State, General George C. Marshall, contributed massively to the reconstruction of Europes economies and brought with it a more general Americanization and hybridization of European societies. Against such a background of political change and unrest, this volume seeks to explore some of the important cultural phenomena that impacted film, music, fashion, and other manifestations of culture in the 1960s, especially the shift in boundaries between popular and high cultures. The blurring of boundaries was apparent not only in a number of institutions, including the family, schools, the workplace, but also in gender relations. This cultural shift was also borne out through the emergence of industries that catered to the new tastes of the era, such as ready-to-wear clothing and street styles. These changes in fashion were often linked to the youth rebellions, protest movements, and pop music of the 1960s and are now considered iconic markers of the period.

At the core of this volume is the question of how and why the year 1960 was so foundational for Western and Eastern aesthetics, politics, and culture. The groundbreaking films of the decadesuch as La Dolce Vita, bout de souffle, LAvventura, Persona, Clo de 5 7, Breakfast at Tiffanys, and Psychobrought with them a revolution in cinematic language and representation that reconfigured time and space and transformed perceptions of reality. Hand in hand with this new kind of filmmaking and film representation that changed the world of cinema, the fashion of the 1960s offered a break with that which came beforeboth as a hierarchical economic system and as an aesthetic expression. Interestingly, not all of the must-see films mentioned above have been revisited through the critical lens of fashion, a perspective that, we argue, allows us to see the cinematic innovations of the period in a new way. It was out of innovation in both fashion and film that a new aesthetic and politics of style were born, redefining cultural and social class boundaries and age hierarchies in an urban environment that was undergoing huge economic and political transformations. Fashion materialized these changes in society and addressed them cinematically.