Film, fabric and canvas

for an aesthetic of materials between fashion and cinema

Abstract

This article highlights the similarities between cinema and fashion through the concept of “materiality”. Following the materiality turn in the social sciences and humanities, in recent years researches has also intensified in film studies and media studies. In its intersection with fashion studies, film materiality acquires highly suggestive aspects not yet explored from the point of view of the affinities between the two fields. If fashion exists essentially through fabric and its wefts, cinema exists through film projected onto a canvas, in a sense also fabric itself. In its early days, moreover, cinema was often associated with the concept of “manufacture” and its assembly was entrusted to women who had experience in fashion ateliers. Both a product of modernity, cinema and fashion maintain an outwardly feminine surface based on a technè. By creating a theoretical and conceptual pathway, the article will focus on how the aesthetic of materials (Cucinotta, 2018) in cinema is also constructed through concepts extrapolated from the world of fashion. By presenting a critical and aesthetic analysis of this union, we want to reconnect to a conceptual space in which the waves of fabric create the movement of images on the canvas and the film itself becomes fabric on which to create narrative lines.