Fashion Film: Art and Advertising in the Digital Age

The moving image has become a key marketing tool for luxury fashion, central in enabling brands to shape their visual codes and extend their brand awareness. Fashion Film is the first detailed study of the shifting shape of fashion imagery in the digital age, investigating the role of the moving image in the promotion, communication and spectacle of contemporary fashion. Combining interdisciplinary analysis of cinema and digital culture, this ground-breaking book traces the emergence of fashion film in the 21st century through its historical roots in pre-digital forms of photography, experimental cinema, mass-media advertising and documentary film-making, right up to today’s visual spread of contemporary fashion on video blogs, online magazines and live-streamed catwalk shows.

Examining collaborations between fashion designers and pioneering image-makers such as Guy Bourdin, Jean-Paul Goode, William Klein and Nick Knight, the book highlights the critical tension between the fashion film conceived as a creative endeavour and as commercial enterprise. Fashion Film also includes a parallel focus on factual representations of fashion through the recent rise of documentary fashion film that goes behind the scenes to follow the processes and personalities involved in making fashion.

Accessible and well-illustrated, Fashion Film will appeal to students and scholars of fashion, film, media, photography, celebrity, sociology and cultural studies.