Still from Kenneth Angers short film for Missoni Fall 2010
The marriage of the art film and the couture collection isn’t new. Fashion has always found a home in Hollywood, it was just a matter of time before smaller designers or old school couture houses, wanting to shake things up, went looking for a film aesthetic that was hipper and edgier. It’s a slighting uneasy pairing, fashion courts consumer dollars while art films notoriously spurn them. But who’s to judge art house directors going for those fashion dollars? Certainly not I.
I was tickled when I saw veteran experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s short for Italian fashion house Missoni. Anger is known as the grandfather of experimental cinema, combining surrealist narrative with psychedelic visuals. The short Anger created for Missoni’s Fall 2010 collection uses Anger’s signature style to create a spooky, layered collage of old ghosts and glitchy models drifting in and out of view in Missoni ensembles. Granted, the individual pieces are hard to make out in the film, but the general effect is evocative of the feel of the collection as a whole.
On the heels of the Missoni/Anger collaboration came a short from indie film darling Harmony Korine for celebrity favorite label Proenza Schouler. Korine’s short “Act da Fool” is characteristically gritty in aesthetic and borderline offensive in content. Korine pairs faux documentary style footage of a group of African American women in Schouler garb against a dilapidated urban backdrop with a voice over of lyrical prose recited by a woman who states, “My friends and I are a gang of fools.” Korine often turns his camera on protagonists in rural or urban poverty, and is often accused of exploiting these settings and his characters. I would have been more willing to play along with Korine using his dirty aesthetic to lend street cred to $500 Schouler jeans if the label had made an ounce of effort to bring diversity to their model population on the runway. As it stands Korine uses a cast of black models in his film while only one of more than thirty models on the Schouler Fall 2010 runway appeared, to my eyes at least, to be a person of color. This fact has made a small splash in the fashion commentary world. I don’t credit Korine with starting this conversation, but I’m glad to see the industry wide lack of diversity being discussed.