The evolution of fashion films
Fashion film productions in London have increased in number significantly. Infact fashion film productions have gained prominence across the globe. London being the hub of British movie making has witnessed a striking rise in the fashion films being churned out every year. Film making and fashion design are the fields that involve collaborative endeavours of highly specialized task force comprising of various individual experts who are delegated responsibilities as per their area of specialization. The task force can be as big as a team of more than a hundred people who are drawn in the process of putting in persistent effort striving together to give shape to an idea of the auteur who in the first place envisaged the entire project. Similarly in the fashion industry, it is the fashion designer who formulates the basic idea, contrives the methodology to shape up the idea and finally gives it an artistic final touch as a finished product.
The amalgamation of both the worlds has given rise to fashion films. Fashion films are not as a matter of course a novel concept. The concept itself had been brewing for quite some time before it caught the fancy of the world. It is certainly not a passing fad either as suggested by its unswerving popularity. Earlier a fashion film comprised of a silent motion picture layered diligently on a background of dreamy kind of live music soundtrack. The motion picture was a heady blend of dance, costume and special effects. The narrative considerations were ignored in the wake of exhibiting the aesthetic appeal of the product. With the steep rise of Hollywood and the metamorphosis of film making from silent cinema to sound, quite a few talented fashion designers collaborated with equally talented= if not more film directors and this collaboration marked a new era in the realm of fashion films. In this era there was a conscious effort on the part of the fashion designers and film makers to arouse narrative via costume and fashion. A very fine example of such collaboration is fashion icon Coco Channel and movie director Jean Cocteau. They worked in tandem behind the camera for the movie The Blood of a Poet where Channel took care of costume designing. Another eminent personality of the fashion world Jean-Paul Gaultier has been an avid participant in the movie making process adding to the decorative accent of the movies.
Contrary to the belief, the big fashion houses remained sceptical about exhibiting their products on film with most of the video exposure being confined to bit and pieces flashed across the news channels. This trend changed in the fifties with the advent of the colour television. Colour television gave them an option through with they can reach out to a wider audience via vision and sound.