Get reel: Fashion's impact on the silver screen and vice versa

I was recently in the audience at the Hong Kong Film Archive's screening of Li Han-hsiang's Back Door, a 1960 family drama in which teachers, housewives and dance hostesses alike wear elegant cheongsams.

While watching the likes of acclaimed actress Butterfly Hu (aka Hu Die) sashay about in those beautiful Chinese dresses, I was reminded of another film in which these stylish gowns (also known as qipao) can be seen - and feature so prominently they are almost characters in the piece.

In Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love (2000) - set in 1960s Hong Kong, Maggie Cheung Man-yuk wears a close-fitting qipao in all of her scenes. It has been said that the costume designer, William Cheng Suk-ping, created 46 qipao for her lonely housewife character - though not all of them were featured in the romantic drama.

Cheung wore the cheongsams with such panache that she sparked a mini-revival. Many Hong Kong women decided they, too, wanted to wear these distinctively Chinese dresses that many Westerners first saw modelled by Nancy Kwan in The World of Suzie Wong (1960).

Men are not immune to the power of films, and their wardrobes have also been inspired by certain dashing protagonists. For example, the plain white T-shirt was originally worn mostly as an undergarment.

It was originally issued to US Navy sailors around the turn of the 20th century to hide the men's chest hair, which tended to peek out from their uniforms' V-neck collars. Subsequently, the practice of wearing white round-neck T-shirts spread to the other uniformed services and also into civilian life.

While some military veterans did take to wearing T-shirts without a dress shirt over them after the second world war, it didn't really take off in a big way until millions of cinema-goers saw Marlon Brando doing just that in Elia Kazan's A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).

And after the actor did the same again in The Wild One (1953) and James Dean followed suit in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), the white T-shirt became a fixture in many a wardrobe - as a piece of casual attire that today many women also consider indispensable.