I read the Fashion Film Book, it was a great way to enter to this genre of film. There are several points of views about fashion films but for me its about clothing, fashion discourse and narrative, what makes a good fashion film.
- From Hollywood stars to below-the-radar promos, from industry documentaries to big-brand entertainment, the fashion film is a slippery signifier, used to denote different types of filmmaking in different contexts. The paradox of fashion film is precisely the absence of any consensus as to its actual contours. By interweaving short-form commercial film with narrative feature film, I argue that the standard definition of fashion film as a discrete textual form of moving image that evolved as minor form of filmmaking through the twentieth century to display fashionable clothing has been challenged by the expansion of digital media convergence and the increasing importance of fashion brands of an online social media video content that is both immersive and interactive. (Pg4)
- Superseding an analog understanding in which the presentational display of the garment was the focal point, a contemporary digital reconceptualization of fashion film in its multiple guises—as both media image and cultural representation—must account for the popular discourses of the global entertainment industry along with the branded communications of the luxury-designer industry. (Pg4)
- Hilary Radner, for her part, distinguishes between films about the industry, such as Altaman´s, from a more localized understanding of the fashion film in twenty-first-century screen culture as one which transcends product placement to embed narrative within an elaborate consumer environment, which is staged to promote fashion. “The film´s function”, she argues, “as a shop window is not secondary at its story. (pg7)
- …fashion film has now slipped from the fashion industry into popular culture more broadly, and is now more simple understood by a mainstream audience to refer to fiction and nonfiction feature films with fashion as the topic rather than as the vehicle. (Pg7)
- Like fashion, the beauty of the clip is fleeting and ephemeral; it draws on the fragmented memories created by the rapid montage of shots. Daney wrote clinically of the music video as a sort of biopsy taken from a larger body of cinematic work—a sample that concentrates feeling and emotion through a short, sharp burst of energy. (Pg35)
- (…) fashion joins the mixing-board culture of music video in shaping today´s “intensified audiovisual aesthetics”, in which the boundaries and distinctions between online platforms, forms, and technologies are increasingly blurred. (Pg35)
- Elsewhere, however, branded collaborations on creative projects with film directors have tended more often to rely on the dramatic effects of storytelling, a fact that underlines two intersecting trends in cinema and fashion branding; first, the return of narrative dramatization to high-end fashion imagery; and the second, the impact of branded entertainment on the conception, direction, and style of the contemporary features films