Cinematic Style

Fashion, Architecture and Interior Design on Film

Jess Berry

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350137639
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

From cinema's silent beginnings, fashion and interior design have been vital to character development and narrative structure. Despite spectacular technological advancements on screen, stunning silhouettes and striking spaces still have the ability to dazzle to dramatic effect. This book is the first to consider the significant interplay between fashion and interiors and their combined contribution to cinematic style from early film to the digital age. With examples from Frank Lloyd Wright inspired architecture in Hitchcock's North by Northwest, to Coco Chanel's costumes for Gloria Swanson and a Great Gatsby film-set turned Ralph Lauren flagship, Cinematic Style describes the reciprocal relationship between these cultural forms. Exposing the bleeding lines between fashion and interiors in cinematic and real-life contexts, Berry presents case studies of cinematic styles adopted as brand identities and design movements promoted through filmic fantasy. Shedding light on consumer culture, social history and gender politics as well as on fashion, film and interior design theory, Cinematic Style considers the leading roles domestic spaces, quaint cafes, little black dresses and sharp suits have played in 20th and 21st-century film.

1

Bedrooms, boudoirs and bathrooms: Modern women, seductive spaces and spectacular silhouettes

The aesthetic limitations of black and white film required tactile and reflective surfaces of fashionable luxury that included silk, satin, velvet, fur and feathers. The sensual nature of these fabrics implied a link between sexuality and consumption and were synonymous with the spaces occupied by the female protagonists of the ‘woman’s film’. Here, I broadly identify this genre as focusing on the lives of women characters engaged with themes of love, marriage, sex, career, fashion and glamour.¹ Bedrooms, boudoirs and bathrooms have been historically gendered as feminine spaces associated with intimacy, romance and sex. On film, they provide equally seductive surfaces to imagine fantasy lifestyles and performative roles. From the era of early silent film onwards, fashion and the domestic interior provided audiences with an appreciation of female characters’ identities, motivations and desires that were aligned with consumer culture. This understanding stemmed from a broader cultural milieu in which domestic interiors and fashion were perceived as an extension of a woman’s inner-being and part of her decorative role in the home. Through a series of examples including The Single Standard (1929), Dinner at Eight (1933) and The Women (1939), this chapter will consider intimate spaces associated with women and their corresponding silhouettes to argue that surface and style have been inextricably linked to women’s sexuality in ways that suggest agency and emancipation, yet are also ultimately tied up with consumption and questionable morality.

In comparing early woman’s films and their representation of fashion and intimate interiors to later examples from the romantic comedy genre of the 1950s such as Pillow Talk (1959), and more recently, post-feminist ‘chick flick’ Pretty Woman (1990) as well as art house romance In the Mood for Love (2000), this chapter will draw on film theories of consumption to examine the pleasure of surface and style and their relationship to changing sexual mores for women. It is not my intention here to suggest a linear and continuous trajectory of representation but rather to identify the recurrence of particular modes of intersection between fashion and the interior in a number of cinematic contexts. Throughout this chapter particular attention will be paid to the history of women’s intimate domestic spaces to provide narrative understanding of the interior motivations of female characters on film, and how these are reinforced through fashion. The translation of these cinematic styles through fashion and interior design magazines such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Good Housekeeping and House Beautiful will be examined to consider the ways in which fantasy representations on film are promoted to modern women consumers beyond the cinema.

Marketing the modern woman

Film historian Charles Eckert’s influential 1978 essay ‘The Carol Lombard in Macy’s Window’ recognized the role of Hollywood film in mass marketing fashion, furnishings and cosmetics to American audiences – particularly women – during the 1920s and 1930s.² Eckert surmises that Hollywood’s role in consumer culture was due to a number of conditions: the dominant role of women as consumers, the film industry’s commitment to schemes of product display and a star-system dominated by women who were ‘merchandising assets’ – which in turn influenced the types of films that were made. So-called ‘woman’s films’ provided the perfect settings for fashion and furnishings to be displayed. With their focus on bedrooms, bathrooms and boudoirs, it is not surprising, as Eckert notes, that by 1929 ‘foreign sales of bedroom and bathroom furnishing had increased 100 percent because of movies’.³

The figure of the ‘modern woman’ – at this point, also known as the flapper or new woman – was particularly important to early woman’s films. As both cultural figure and sociological phenomenon the modern woman was characterized by her non-traditional approach to sexual relationships, employment outside the home, education and economic independence, as well as visibility in the public sphere. As historian Mary Louise Roberts states, ‘the modern woman became associated with the aesthetic of a modern consumerism … [and] became the means by which women expressed a more liberated self’.⁴ Cinema, along with fashion, literature and advertising, was one of the central mediums to promote the image of the modern woman in her various forms to audiences.

Understanding the role of the modern woman in cinema and her relationship to consumer culture is confounded by her position as both subject and object. For example, within the context of Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, the modern woman, indeed any woman, on film is the object of the ‘male gaze’, susceptible to objectification and fetishization for the pleasure of the spectator.⁵ This idea complies with broader psychoanalytic feminist understandings regarding the status of women in patriarchal society where: ‘the use, consumption and circulation of [women’s] sexualised bodies underwrite the organisation and reproduction of the social order’.⁶ Further, cinema not only represents women as objects of desire, they are also desiring subjects – through the positioning of women as consumers, both on screen and in the audience. The feminist film theorist Mary Ann Doane elucidates how:

The female spectator is invited to witness her own commodification, and … to buy an image of herself … this level involves not only the currency of a body but of a space in which to display that body.⁷

In other words, through the medium of film, the female spectator is encouraged to participate in her own objectification and commodification by identifying narcissistically with the woman on screen. Further, she performs the role of consumer by not only desiring to be like the woman on display, but to also consume her fashions, and the interior spaces she inhabits.

The double-bind of this condition is further complicated by the ways in which both fashion and the interior operate as markers of identity formation – especially for women – and the forms of agency and pleasure that these modes of adornment offer. As Elizabeth Wilson outlines in Adorned in Dreams, fashion can be understood as both an object of oppression, but also a cultural, social and aesthetic form that can express the ambiguities of identity, relating the self to body and the world.⁸ With this in mind, I contend that the modern woman character on film, as associated with fashion and the interior, can be seen to both limit and reinforce gender roles and objectified positions, while simultaneously articulating agency. As Liz Conor deftly explains, ‘modern women saw self-display to be part of the quest for mobility, self-determination and sexual identity’.⁹

The modern woman character was established as a particular type in films, beginning with the new woman and flapper of the 1920s, and the femme fatale of the 1930s and 1940s. However, echoes of her type can be seen in future decades, up until the present moment – if we understand her as a reoccurring figure of women’s emancipation, be it social, sexual, economic or political. Undoubtedly these are complex characters. The modern woman, in many of her film guises, is bound to a mode of femininity that much feminist thinking would define as oppressive. That is, bodily adornment through clothing or setting, contributes to women being defined by their sexuality in relation to men.¹⁰ Yet, these women also destabilize the patriarchal order by offering performances of female identities that are morally ambiguous and outside of the constraints of traditional femininity. Many of the female characters outlined here are understood as ‘fallen women’, however, the disjuncture between this image and their association with pleasurable lifestyles and fashionable forms makes them desirable to many female audiences. As such, it is worth considering that female spectatorship of bedrooms, boudoirs and bathrooms and their corresponding silhouettes is not only framed within the context of voyeuristic, narcissistic, sexual desire but also a pleasure in looking at the surfaces and spaces of fashion and the interior that are tied to their embodied experience. Instructive here is art historian Susan Best’s position, that Mulvey’s analysis of ways of looking at cinema ‘leaves us much better informed about the sexual dynamics of looking, but also impoverished when it comes to discussing visual pleasure … [for it excludes] other modes of looking or other sources of pleasure’.¹¹ Perhaps some of the pleasure that female audiences derive from these films is the triangulation that occurs between an embodied understanding of the sensuality of slinky fabrics and shiny surfaces, identification with female characters that primarily seek to fulfil their own desires beyond traditional patriarchal restraints, and the latent possibility of how this fantasy might be enacted beyond the screen.

Bedrooms

When MGM art director Cedric Gibbons introduced ‘modern’ bedrooms to American silent-film audiences in the late 1920s, low beds, gold and black ziggurat wall panels, and geometric light fixtures became immediately associated with the freedoms of the modern woman and her lifestyle.¹² Our Dancing Daughters (1928) is one of the first Hollywood films to be dominated by Art Deco interiors, which was coupled with the exotic short skirts of the flapper. The opening sequence, in which the film’s heroine Diana Medford (Joan Crawford) dances to jazz music in her bedroom highlights how shimmering surfaces and sequined streamlined silhouettes became associated with modern women’s increasing social, sexual and physical mobility. Such luxurious surfaces both on the body and in the home were suggestive of decadence and seduction. The women who inhabited these spaces on screen were generally engaged in some form of impropriety, be it Crawford’s lascivious half-naked dancing as Diana, Greta Garbo’s juggling of numerous suitors as Arden Stuart in The Single Standard (1929) (Figure 1.1), or as the adulteress Irene in The Kiss (1929).

Figure 1.1 Greta Garbo as Arden in The Single Standard (1929). Credits: John S. Robertson (Director), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) (Film Production). Photo: ullstein bild via Getty Images.

In this way ‘modern’ design was synonymous with questionable morals. For example, Arden’s Deco bedroom in The Single Standard represents her free-thinking and free-spirited approach to romantic liaisons. Similarly, her costumes in various scenes remind us of her progressive approach to womanhood. Consisting of stripped pyjamas, black and silver zig-zag embellished top, and lame coat dress, the use of geometric patterns and at times masculine attire, reinforced her modern woman character. Living alone in her stylish apartment wearing an Adrian-designed wardrobe, Arden pursues sexual equality by engaging in relationships with a number of men, yet ultimately ends up as wife and mother in a traditionally styled abode, underscoring the polarity between modern and maternal woman.¹³ Women’s morality was equated with dress, and taste in interior accoutrement, so encapsulating broader sociocultural anxieties of the era. Populist commentators, religious groups and conservative politicians were concerned by modern women’s seemingly loose morals and competition with men in working environments, which they perceived resulted in the erosion of home and family life.¹⁴

In these examples, fashion and the interior in tandem represent the interiority of modern women characters on film and are an extension of her inner being. Women’s fashions and interiors were often designed in correlation with each other, operating to position women as decorative augmentation in the domestic sphere. This close affiliation served the role of aligning women’s identities to consumer products. Film, magazines and advertising artfully suggested that the desirable attributes of the modern woman’s lifestyle – social mobility, economic independence and sexual freedom – might be achieved through surrounding oneself with the style. While Art Deco has frequently been denigrated in design history due to its relationship with the feminine and consumerism, I argue that these spaces and fashionable forms of modernity also allowed women to imagine new social, cultural and professional identities.¹⁵

Art Deco schemes, inspired by the furniture and interiors on display at the 1925 Exposition des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Moderns in Paris, became the hallmark of Gibbons’ sets, influencing American design aesthetics until the 1940s. Whether Gibbons attended the fair in person or not has been debated.¹⁶ However, it is clear that photographs and reports, along with examples of this bold new style reached the art director.¹⁷ The 1925 Paris Exposition’s emphasis on fashion, opulent home décor and women’s luxury goods was represented across multiple pavilions. Modern French bedrooms, boudoirs and bathroom settings coupled with mannequins wearing the latest in haute couture in the Galeries Lafayette Pavilion and the Pavilion de l’Elégance showcased how female consumers might adopt both fashion and interior looks to enhance their lifestyles. As a 1925 review of the Pavilion de l’Elegance proclaimed: ‘this is not a fantasy to seduce the eye: rather instruction for those who wish to realise it in their own home, where the relationship between personal style and beautiful home is never in conflict.’¹⁸

Many of the features that made Gibbons’ sets notable can be found in photographs of ensembles at the 1925 Exposition by Maurice Dufrêne, Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann and Pierre Block, including low set beds, metallic printed geometric wallpapers, pyramid-shaped light fixtures, graphic rugs and angular furnishings. As will be explored further in Chapter 5, while these styles were new to the American audiences of Gibbons’ films in 1928, French avant-garde silent cinema was already employing new modern set designs through the innovations of architect Robert Mallet-Stevens in 1924. Jean Epstein’s Le Double Amour (1925) is another example of the confluence between modern fashions and interiors prior to Hollywood’s championing of the style (Figure 1.2). The melodrama is the story of a countess who partakes in a love affair with a gambler, resulting in her financial ruin and single motherhood, before she becomes a successful cabaret singer. Here, Pierre Kèfer’s geometric set designs, and furniture featuring Francis Jourdain style floral textile prints, are coupled with floaty handkerchief hem dresses by fashion designers Drecoll and Paul Poiret to convey Laure Maresco’s (Nathalie Lissenko) interiority. The contrast between Art Deco geometric gridded windows, abstract patterned covered cushions, and floral-patterned furniture creates an uneasy tension, suggestive of Laure’s inner turmoil in choosin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Cinematic style – fashion, architecture and interior design on film
• 1 Bedrooms, boudoirs and bathrooms: Modern women, seductive spaces and spectacular silhouettes
• 2 Evil lairs and bachelor dandies: Modernist architecture, spies and the suit
• 3 Luxurious longings: Queer heterotopias in décor and dress
• 4 Grand entrances: Staircases, stages and fashion parades
• 5 Windows and screens: Cinema, department stores and boutique display
• 6 Dream spaces: Film sets as fashion flagships and experiential retail environments
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint