Fashion in Film

Film has been an important medium for fashion since the opulent movies of the silent era. Now in its third year, the Fashion in Film Festival will be turning its attention to the significant role costume has played in cinema. This time around entitled Birds of Paradise, the festival will explore the beguiling and alluring presence of costume in the movies, and looking at it how has helped to showcase the basic elements of film – movement, light and colour – throughout the history of European and American cinema. Starting from today, this 12 day extravaganza includes a host of exclusive film screenings never before shown in the UK, at the BFI Southbank, Barbican, Tate Modern, The Horse Hospital, and other London venues. Festival highlights include the experimental masterpieces of Kenneth Anger, the Orientalist films La Princesse Mandane (1928) by Germaine Dulac and Red Heels (1925) by Michael Curtiz, and a rare screening of the Faustian melodrama, Rapsodia Satanica by Nino Oxilia (1915).

Excitingly, this year two incredible installations have also been commissioned especially for the season: the award-winning Jason Bruges Studio have created an installation for Somerset House based on Loïe Fuller’s breathtaking performances in voluminous fabrics, and Mark Garside has designed a London-wide Kinoscope Parlour, inspired by Thomas A. Edison’s late 19th century invention, the Kinetoscope. Exclusively screened on the AnOther site, Annabelle Serpentine Dance is a painstakingly hand-coloured example of the type of film that would have been originally shown using one of these early motion picture devices. Shot in Edison’s Black Maria studio in New Jersey, the film features early cinema’s most prolific star, Annabelle Moore, dancing similarly to her icon and predecessor Fuller, draped beautifully in an abundance of material.

Text by Lucia Davies

The third biennial Fashion in Film Festival, Birds of Paradise runs until 12 December at various venues across London