Undressing Cinema: Clothing and identity in the movies

From Audrey Hepburn in Givenchy, to sharp suited gangsters in Tarantino movies, clothing is central to film. Clothes are not mere accessories, but are key elements in the construction of cinematic identities. Undressing Cinema focuses on the narrative significance of clothes in film, and proposes new and synamic links between cinema, fashion and costume history, gender, queer theory and psychoanalysis. Udressing Cinema explores the difference between the referential relationship of film and fashion, and the notion that clothing, in such films as The Piano and The Age of Innocence , can be a repressive or expressive statement of sexualtiy. Discussing new film noir, the gangster movie and New Black Cinema, Bruzzi analyses assumptions about feminity and masculinity and examines the relationship between gender and dress in recent cinema: the emergence of the modern femme-fatale in Basic Instinct, Disclosure and The Last Seduction ; generic male chic in Goodfellas, Reservoir Dogs, Nikita and Leon ; and pride, costume and masculinity in Malcolm X, Boyz ‘N the Hood and New Jack City . The concluding chapters further problematise gender identities through a consideration of drag in films, proposing a radical differentiation between the unerotic cross-dressing of Mrs Doubtfire as opposed to the eroticised ambiguity of the androgynous Orlando . Undressing Cinema challenges and reassesses the received notions of costume and fashion in film. It radically departs from conventional interpretations of how masculinity and femininity are constructed through clothes and reconsiders the role dressing up plays in the manufacturing of gender, identity, sexuality and desire.