Luxury and designer fashion brands today produce as much digital content and branded entertainment as they do design and product. Online video is a key part of that production. In this article, the author questions whether the use of the generic term ‘fashion film’ is still relevant to discussions of the moving image in the digital age. He does this by examining a range of promotional uses of the moving image by the fashion industry – by brands such as Gucci, Burberry and Louis Vuitton – on the social media platforms Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat, which blend design with media. This article seeks to engage critically with the branded dominance of ‘fashion film’ as a commercial phenomenon in contemporary visual culture by positioning it as a shape-shifting form of ‘content’ through the dissemination of moving images on social media, on mobile image-sharing platforms, in which the visual dynamic of the feed (of marketing and data) is now, in part, superseding the aesthetic framework of cinema (of narrative and drama). Rather than situating it primarily as part of film history, here the author situates the contemporary fashion-moving image at the intersection of digital interactivity, fashion branding and celebrity influence.
The arrival of designer Hedi Slimane at Christian Dior in 2000 marked an epoch change in men's style. Slimane's reputation is founded on having streamlined and rejuvenated the male silhouette through the promotion of a skinny style appropriated from youth subcultures. Slimane's rebranding of the Dior menswear line (from the fusty Christian Dior Monsieur to the hip Dior Homme) adapted a range of urban street styles to suit the in-house tradition of classicism and bourgeois elegance. This article sets out to assess the designer's conscious reworking of masculinity, replacing virile men with skinny boys, perceived as the clearest Downloaded by [Ecole Hautes Etudes Commer-Montreal] at 20:35 10 August 2015 8 Nick Rees-Roberts paradigm shift in male fashion imagery since Armani, as well as tracking Slimane's impact on the landscape of contemporary fashion. Along with Tom Ford, Slimane is emblematic of the rise of the "creative director" engineering not only the various collections but also the brand's visual identity right down to store design and the architecture of the Dior Homme boutiques worldwide. This article situates Slimane's designs more broadly within the history of popular culture and the visual arts through a contextual focus on his cultural references and influences (notably David Bowie's Berlin and the British rock music scene), alongside coverage of his recent photographic work on American youth cultures.
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