FILMS INFLUENCE fashion - whether you're layering plaid shirts on top of tight T's Breakfast Club-style, donning berets like Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde or clearing bars in your white-suited ode to Saturday Night Fever, we all at one time or another pick up on the silver-screen's sartorial allure.
One only needs to look at the fashion runways, where critical or commercial consensus means little to designers: worldwide blockbusters such as Avatar and beautifully costumed flops such as Marie Antoinette strut equally down the runway, the influence of both films acknowledged in recent campaigns by designers Jean-Paul Gaultier and Marc Jacobs. But pre-'60s, that was rarely the case.
'For a long time and probably still now to some extent, directors did not appreciate fashion,' says Diane Pernet, director of the film festival, A Shaded View on Fashion Film. 'Most were worried that the fashion would take away from the impact of their film. But fashion supports the characters and makes the film that much stronger.'
Would Annie Hall hold up without Diane Keaton's 'Annie Hall look'? North by Northwest without Cary Grant's sleek suit? Or even something as mainstream as The Matrix without its millennial tight leather trench coats and wraparound sunglasses?
Be it instant fashion classics or re-appreciated retro revivals, many films have set off fashion fads. Some of the most major were that of the '60s French New Wave - Jean Seberg's understated ballet-slippers-and-pegged-pants style in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless in turn led to Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick and their ragged band of fashion-forward Factory followers.
Pernet regards Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni's era-defining art-house picture, as being the ultimate fashion-influencing film. And it's not hard to see why: its modish dresses and fashion photographer plot (based on real-life snapper David Bailey) all played a large part in shaping swinging '60s culture. Not to mention a cameo by Jane Birkin of Birkin bag fame, whose bizarre scene played an influence on American Apparel's infamous, semi-naked ad campaigns.