Nick Rees-Roberts - Branding the Gaze : The Question of Identity in Contemporary Fashion Film

From online promos to behind-the-scenes documentaries, from short art films to big-budget biopics, ‘fashion film’ is a slippery signifier used to denote different types of filmmaking in different contexts. From within the industry, ‘fashion film’ tends to refer to motion editorial or branded content; it is often problematically perceived as a new form emerging with both the advent of digital technology and the corporate consolidation of global brands, both of which have intensified and accelerated since the start of the new millennium. In this presentation, I will focus specifically on questions of cultural identity—particularly race, gender and sexuality—in relation to the gaze of fashion film to highlight the inbuilt tension between the cultural forms of creativity and the economic power of commerce. Clearly, today’s high fashion and luxury brands manipulate identity for commercial ends. As the product of both culture and industry, fashion film is a quintessentially contemporary form, one that only comes into focus when viewed through the lens of the larger creative economy, one in which designers use digital communications to go beyond the promotion of product to sample the affective ‘experience’ of the brand online. In situating fashion film as a hybrid form of communication, one key fault-line emerges—the often contradictory tension between promotion and criticality, between the form’s basic positioning within advertising and promotion and its more varied potential as a vehicle for forms of cultural critique. This paper seeks to explore this underlying tension in the practices of contemporary fashion with reference to a number of examples drawn from the content production of the luxury mega-brands such as Gucci and Burberry alongside the more critically reflexive potential of fashion moving image used to interrogate the practices and norms of the fashion industry.

Nick Rees-Roberts est Professeur des Universités en Sciences de l'Information et de la Communication à l'Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, où il est directeur du Master Design : Mode et Industries Créatives qu'il coordonne avec l'École Duperré et l'Institut des Métiers d'Excellence du groupe LVMH. Spécialiste des médiacultures contemporaines, ses recherches portent plus particulièrement sur la culture et communication de mode.  Son livre sur la mode et l'image en mouvement intitulé  Fashion Film:  Art and Advertising in the Digital Age (Bloomsbury Visual Arts: Londres) est sorti en 2018.  Il est également l'auteur d'autres publications sur les questions de genre et sexualité au cinéma :  French Queer Cinema  (2008/2014),  Homo exoticus: race, classe et critique queer  (co-écrit avec Maxime Cervulle, 2010), et  Alain Delon: Style, Stardom and Masculinity  (2015).  Il édite actuellement un volume sur l'actrice Isabelle Huppert et travaille sur un nouveau projet sur les directeurs artistiques et créateurs de mode contemporains.