Around the same time, across the Atlantic ocean, another designer was making use of fashion film. Gareth Pugh, newly sprung from Saint Martins, was working with ex-assistant to Nick Knight Ruth Hogben to present his strange monochromatic gothic designs. The effect was startling. For the first time, people were beginning to see the fashion film as an alternative to the expensive, arduous and ultimately transient – you queue for ages, you sit around waiting for the lights to go down and three minutes later you’re outside again, wondering what it was you just saw. In this context, fashion film has its benefits.
Hogben’s films for Gareth Pugh over the following seasons allowed viewers to see the clothes in movement, in three dimensions rather than in the flat. Pugh still shows at Paris Fashion Week, but it was the films that got the critics talking, and they had powerful reverberations throughout the industry. Films can be glossy and expensive, like shows, but they can also be done on a shoestring and still get you serious attention. Shows can’t and won’t – like a large car or a St. Bernard, they need to be fed money to survive.
In a refreshing example of film as creative alternative, Irish designer Alan Taylor recently debuted his latest menswear collection with ‘Untitled (for Dan and Alfred)’. This one-take film has its tongue pretty firmly in its cheek, using models on treadmills to cast a wry eye at the role of the traditional fashion show. Alan says that his idea had its roots in our obsession with the rapid pace of the internet. “10 years ago no one could have even predicted that 1 in 7 people in the world would now have a Facebook account. Every major (and minor) magazine has a website with daily updated content, and the world is a much smaller place.” His film intended to bring fashion up to the same speeds that the rest of us operate at, while showcasing his work without a costly fashion show.
“I think that fashion films are the best way of achieving this acceleration,” he explained. Although I will always love the romanticism of a catwalk show…” Fashion shows are hugely expensive, and with the internet now broadcasting instant 2D stills of every show these days, why not go down Nick Knight’s route and use moving images to show clothes in the round? It doesn’t need to be realistic or arty or intellectual. Rather, the best fashion films are like bags of tricks for designers and directors to delve into, a lively manifestation of everything the internet and new technology can offer us. By showing it in motion and movement, maybe film and fashion can create a movement of their own, moving us forward on to fashion history’s next chapter.
