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Fashion Revolution: Fashion Films

published on 6 August 2009

Film’s capacity to show clothing as it behaves on the body, together with its power to capture the spirit of fashion at a specific point in time, means that it is perfectly in tune with a generation of young fashion consumers who look beyond the printed page to experience their world instantly, live and online. Fashion film is perhaps showstudio.com’s single most important contribution to the changing face of how fashion is experienced. from its earliest experiments with moving image, showstudio.com has forged a crucial path to shaping and developing this new genre of film-making. It has forced the industry’s current shift towards the fashion film as more of its budget is committed to online advertising and has also seen some designers choose film over the more conventional catwalk to show their clothes. From iconic portrait sittings to surreal fashion fantasies, this selection of showstudio.com’s extensive archive of fashion films demonstrates the representation of fashion at its most vital, engaging and revolutionary.

Explore the projects included in the 'Fashion Films' section of the SHOWstudio: Fashion Revolution exhibition at Somerset House.

Film’s capacity to show clothing as it behaves on the body, together with its power to capture the spirit of fashion at a specific point in time, means that it is perfectly in tune with a generation of young fashion consumers who look beyond the printed page to experience their world instantly, live and online. Fashion film is perhaps showstudio.com’s single most important contribution to the changing face of how fashion is experienced. from its earliest experiments with moving image, showstudio.com has forged a crucial path to shaping and developing this new genre of film-making. It has forced the industry’s current shift towards the fashion film as more of its budget is committed to online advertising and has also seen some designers choose film over the more conventional catwalk to show their clothes. From iconic portrait sittings to surreal fashion fantasies, this selection of showstudio.com’s extensive archive of fashion films demonstrates the representation of fashion at its most vital, engaging and revolutionary.

The Fashion Body, 2009

Nick Knight

Inspired by the concept of exploring and celebrating the human body through a unique combination of fashion and moving image, The Fashion Body in an ongoing film series specially commissioned to feature as part of SHOWstudio: Fashion Revolution. Building up organically to mirror the body's growth, films will be added to an installation at Somerset House throughout the exhibition, allowing the series to develop over its three-month life into a complete and whole ‘fashion body’. Over thirty fashion creatives—including designers, photographers, models, filmmakers and stylists—have been challenged to contribute a personal and distinctive fashion film to this season. Each will focus on a different area of the body, using items from the Autumn/ Winter 2009 collections to adorn it. Not only functioning as distinct cinematic entities, these individual films are each a vital part of a larger panorama of fashion-focused moving image. This film season is the first in a series of SHOWstudio.com’s planned projects exploring various dimensions of the unifying theme of The Fashion Body.

Political Fashion, 2008

Nick Knight

Foregrounding SHOWstudio.com’s earliest intentions to create a platform for the widest possible interpretations of fashion, Nick Knight asked contributors to express their personal political views through the medium of fashion film. Sixty-one provocative and heartfelt submissions were solicited from a diverse selection of industry figures, ranging from image-makers including Craig McDean, Francois Berthoud and Barnaby Roper to designers Bernhard Willhelm, Boudicca and Vivienne Westwood. Political Fashion features both specially-commissioned entries as well as those created by its online community. In keeping with the site’s growing emphasis on the ‘two-way conversation’ between the site and its audience over the past five years, a further sixteen films by SHOWstudio viewers were also posted in an accompanying gallery. Political Fashion was the third of SHOWstudio.com’s major film seasons following Moving Fashion (2005) and Editing Fashion (2006).

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