Transglobal Fashion Narratives: Clothing Communication, Style Statements and Brand Storytelling

Section 1

Clothing Communication: Fashion as Written/Image

Introduction

This section features the use of fashion on page and screen to portray fictional characters or to provide social guidelines on how to dress. In this sense, fashion and clothing appear ‘in’ fiction to supplement characterization or to assist in framing the context of the storyline and plot. At the same time, fashion appears ‘as’ fiction, or as narrative and informational content, in editorials, documentaries and blogs when it is a topic in its own right for the edification of consumers in terms of the appropriate attire to adopt and how to source desired items of clothing and accessories considered to be fashionable.

Fashion as a text worn by a fictional persona signifies personality and status within an imaginary text, be it short story, comic book, novel, film or film adaptation. This usage of fashion and clothing as a means of enhancing the story by dressing the character to signify their standing (Hughes 2009), class and intention, is interpreted in various iterations depending on the author/auteur and the cultural, geographic or political context in which it appears (see Hargassner in this section). The mythic, hyper-feminine recreation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Nabokov’s Lolita, for example, is on full public display by the Loli style tribes and its adoption as a fashion outfit (see Hardy Bernal in this volume). The interpretation of the ‘look’ of a book or film character, while represented in different modes – visual and/or verbal, moving or static, real or virtual – often extends beyond the text and is commoditized by marketers in new fashion lines. Consequently, the sartorial trend is taken up as a form of fetishist mimicry by consumers desirous to copy the fashionable look of a Hollywood film idol or celebrity actress, in film adaptations of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, for example (see Church Gibson in this section).

Fashion writing in its many creative forms also delineates various critical discourses as a way of conveying fashion information in representing it as a marker of social control or liberation. This is in evidence in the functional garments designed and domestically produced during the revolutionary period in China (see Finnane in this section); in the prescriptive dress recommended by the Victorian Rational Dress Society (see Cavendish-Jones in this section); or in fashion trends featured in ‘silver-fork fiction’ (see Mahawatte in this section).

The authors in this section suggest that literary texts featuring fashion and non-fiction fashion writing are not merely to be read in terms of their surface communicative value but as markers of, or in resistance to social, cultural, political and economic status. This type of fashion writing can also operate as a historic archive providing useful insights into the clothing concerns and styles of the day in a given time period, such as twentieth-century revolutionary China (see Finnane in this section). Fashion used in film characterization can also represent the circuitous flow of mediated influences migrating across geographic borders and operating beyond political constraints, as in mid-century Soviet Union (see Hargassner in this section). Hence, closer attention should be paid to the multi-layered, symbolic meanings attached to written and mediated fashion in terms of why and how it communicates messages and how they are actively consumed, interpreted and appropriated by the reader and viewer in the process of finding multiple pleasures in the text.

Chapter 1

Fashioning Adaptations: Anna Karenina on Screen

Pamela Church Gibson

Tolstoy’s nineteenth-century novel has been the subject of numerous adaptations, each new version slightly reworked to fit changing mores; this chapter considers three films made across an 80-year period. I am concerned here with ‘fashioning’ in the widest sense of the word, not merely with the dressing of the heroine, but with her portrayal by leading stars and the different inflections of her character that are created and widely communicated. Each film has at its centre a star popular for her characteristic style as well as for her acting, and each heroine is costumed by designers whose talents reach beyond the screen to influence the fashions of their day. Period films have played a vital part in the complex, changing relationship between fashion and cinema. This chapter looks at each of the three films in this context, using a close textual analysis of each, and considers relevant contemporary material in that process. It closes with a consideration of the genre in the age of viral fashion film and digital platforms.

When we first encounter Tolstoy’s heroine, 60 or more pages into the novel named after her, she is presented to the reader through the eyes of Count Vronsky, an officer in the Imperial Guard soon to become her lover, as they meet for the first time. He has gone to the station in Moscow to fetch his mother, and as he approaches the train where she waits for him, Vronsky steps aside to allow a much younger lady to alight. One swift glance tells him that she is someone ‘belonging to the very best society’ (Tolstoy [1877] 1966: 68). He feels compelled to turn and look at her once more, not only because of her extraordinary good looks, but also to see again the ‘attractive expression on her face’ (Tolstoy [1877] 1966: 68). This meeting will later lead to an affair with catastrophic consequences for both.

Surely, it is the period setting of this liaison between a lady who moves in the most elegant circles in Russia and a dashing officer, combining as it does beauty, elegance and tragedy with the lavish, cinema-friendly fashions of St. Petersburg in the 1870s, which makes this heroine so very interesting to producers, screenwriters and directors. So far, there have been fifteen cinematic adaptations and several televised versions of Anna Karenina. Actors as well as actresses have had the chance for memorable roles – Sean Connery, Sean Bean and Christopher Reeve, for example, have all played the part of Vronsky. Designers too have been pleased to participate, tempted of course by the inherent spectacularity of these particular fashions. In 1935, Greta Garbo was dressed by the leading Hollywood designer Gilbert Adrian, while in 1948, Vivien Leigh was costumed by photographer, designer, illustrator and frequent contributor to Vogue, Cecil Beaton. In 2012, Keira Knightley, the favourite cover girl of so many fashion editors, had a vast array of clothes created for her role as Anna by the costume designer, Jacqueline Durran.

We should also mention at the start the emphasis in the novel upon Anna’s fashionable attire, as it is mentioned on several significant occasions by those around her. Tolstoy carefully describes an elegant black dress, which Anna wears to the ball that is held soon after her arrival in Moscow, as being in every way more stylish than the dresses of the ladies around her, and marked off from them by its cut, as well as its sombre hue. We might note too that in the nineteenth-century novel, being overly fashionable is not necessarily a good thing. Jane Austen and George Eliot clearly showed their readers the correlation between a too-voracious interest in the latest fashions and an imperfect or weak moral sense (see Mahawatte in this volume).

Those who have set out to film the novel have always been aware of the palpable pleasures that costumes in a period drama provide for an audience, and very generous budgets were provided for the dress and décor of all three films. We might consider the relationships between these three cinematic portrayals, the stars that created them and the real-life women who watched the films, to see how these could perhaps be reflected in the tripartite relationship of star, designer and contemporary fashion.

Greta Garbo and the ‘Woman’s Picture’: Anna in the Depression Era

Garbo was one of MGM’s leading stars; she was also an actress who was extraordinarily popular with women at a time when female audiences were seen as dictating, in various ways, the economic success of most cinematic releases (Berry 2000: xiv). Many of the most successful films of the decade were, in fact, examples of what later came to be called the ‘woman’s picture’, a staple feature of the 1930s and 1940s (see Basinger 1994 and Haskell [1974] 1987). The leading roles in such films were given over to female stars, who played strong women seeking to somehow control their own destinies. In these films – which were often melodramas and always had a romantic storyline – the heroines had various problems to contend with and important decisions to make.

The reason for the emergence and the popularity of such films in the 1930s can easily be found in the socio-economic circumstances of the decade. In this period of mass unemployment many women were forced to become family breadwinners in the aftermath of the Depression; most jobs to be found were in the service sector, traditionally a female domain (Berry 2000: xviii). Women’s lives became harsher, and there were often repercussions for working women now supporting seemingly redundant men (Berry 2000). The new screen heroines could act on their behalf as figures of fantasy that faced and triumphed over various seemingly impossible difficulties (Haskell [1974] 1987).

Garbo had shown herself to be highly effective as a woman in control. In Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933) she faced a clash between her royal duties and her desire for personal happiness with her Spanish lover. The film ends with her abdication; she alone makes this decision. She is seen in the last shot on the prow of a ship, leaving Sweden and sailing towards an uncertain future. Her role as Anna Karenina (Clarence Brown, 1935) presented filmmakers with questions around the portrayal of this very distinctive star at this particular historical moment.

Their task was to make an adulterous heroine, who abandons her son and subsequently leaves her second child motherless, into a sympathetic protagonist at a time when family values had been reasserted in a climate of uncertainty (Berry 2000). The second problem was Anna’s suicide; in the novel, this is seen as a muddled and impetuous act, not perhaps the choice of a strong heroine. These two problems were swiftly addressed. The narrative here completely omits the child she has with Vronsky, and her husband is rendered cold and reptilian from the outset. Basil Rathbone creates a vengeful Karenin for whom the audience can feel no sympathy. His self-presentation interestingly reinforces this: here, Karenin is as well dressed as his wife. He is dapper throughout, whether at a garden-party in polka-dot cravat and white gloves, or at the races in white dress uniform with a long jacket. The producers cast top child star Freddie Bartholomew as the son; scenes with him are designed to demonstrate Anna’s feeling for him. The film is handled so that Garbo is seen as a woman who escapes a punitive husband and is not simply a victim of passion. She also becomes a suitably tragic figure, with a suitable ending, altered so as to make it less unacceptable. Vronsky abandons her, joining a brigade of volunteers – and Anna finds that it is Princess Sorokhin to whom he bids farewell at the station. It is these two blows that prompt her to kill herself. In the novel, of course, he joins the volunteers only in his devastation of grief at her death.

The third problem here might have been how to dress Garbo as her fans wished, to remain in period and to appeal to contemporary taste. Her characteristic style was one of European elegance and sophisticated glamour conveyed in part through make-up, hats and accessories – Berry writes of her ‘pale exoticism’ (2000: 111). There was, too, the fact that she possessed a quality of androgyny enhancing her appeal, heightened by her penchant for wearing men’s trousers off-screen (Berry 2000: 97).

The real-life Paris fashions of the time were now more fluid and more romantic; in 1933 Chanel had heralded ‘a return to femininity’ and ‘a new luxury’ (Chanel quoted in Berry 2000: 159). A cover illustration for US Vogue in June 1935 shows a woman who might have strayed from the set of Anna Karenina, wearing a small straw hat, a corsage and long gloves, in the act of unfurling a parasol, while another illustration by Cecil Beaton in the same issue depicts a heroine dressed as if for the opera in St. Petersburg, her hair piled high and a velvet ribbon around her throat. Designer Adrian would be able to combine period fidelity with fashion – and hopefully to satisfy Garbo’s many fans.

Adrian, valued by MGM as the leading designer in Hollywood during the 1930s and early 1940s, worked with Garbo most notably on Mata Hari (Curtis Harrington, 1931) and Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932). In the first, she plays a mysterious spy with a penchant for turbans and skullcaps, who, in one memorable scene, wears head-to-toe gold lamé; in the second, she is a lonely dancer, drifting through the Art Deco hotel in sensual dresses cut on the bias like the Paris designs of Madeleine Vionnet. The highly elaborate, over-decorated dresses of the 1870s might be more problematic, and Adrian was very committed to period authenticity. Three years later, when preparing to dress Norma Shearer as Marie Antoinette, he travelled to France to make hundreds of sketches in order to ensure that the period detail should be as accurate as possible (Lavalley 1987).

Adrian’s designs would here be shown off against the lavish sets created by art director Cedric Gibbons, while their overall accuracy might be assessed by a descendant of the author, Andrej Tolstoy, employed on the production as ‘Period Advisor’. The film, overall, has the same production values as MGM’s lavish musicals of the same period. It opens with a close up of a vast, heavily laden banquet table in a restaurant where the Imperial Guard are conducting a drinking contest; there are gypsy singers and violinists on hand. At first Garbo’s clothes are very faithful to the period, and so for some earlier scenes she wears frilled and flounced garments with rather fussy hats. But for two vital scenes – the meeting on the station and the ball where Vronsky and Anna meet again – Adrian was able to create clothes that would be far more appealing to audiences.

Her Cossack-inspired fur-trimmed coat and hat, which she wore in all of the studio publicity shots, became synonymous not only with Anna herself, but with Garbo, Russia and ‘romance’. An outfit like this – which could be copied at different market levels – was memorably worn three decades later by Julie Christie as Lara in Dr. Zhivago (David Lean 1965). It subsequently became a permanent fixture in the vocabulary of fashion journalism, a referent for both Anna Karenina and the iconic Christie persona.

On screen in black and white, Anna’s famous black ball gown, with its simplicity of cut and its dark colour, forms a striking contrast to the light frocks around her, just as described in the literary text. Garbo wears a single long strand of pearls, a contemporary touch reinforcing the appeal of this scene. And later, after Anna and Vronsky escape to Venice, she is dressed in simple, less ornate garments, fluid gowns of satin and silk, reflecting the trend described by Chanel. The clean lines embody her characteristic ‘look’. For the final visit to the opera she wears a very simple strapless dress of white satin, with an unadorned capelet of white fur; a search through the Vogue archives shows the fit of this outfit with contemporary sensibility, and we can also find counterparts of the small black hat with veil and streamers that she wears in the very last scene. ‘Parisian’ or cinematic hats of the time were reproduced cheaply at mass market level (Eckert [1987] 1990) while the simpler clothes with their subtler edgings and trimmings were exactly the kind of thing to interest a female audience, many of whom made their own clothes if they could not afford a dressmaker (Wilson 1985). Anna here is a dignified victim, a melodramatic heroine, and her carefully created appearance pleased both fans and the film critics; there was no violation of period sensibility in this particular presentation of a ‘woman’s heroine’.

Figure 1: Another fur hat and cape reinforcing links between Russia and ‘romance’, 1935.

An Anna Karenina for 1948: Scarlett O’Hara, Christian Dior and Post-War Uncertainties

Cecil Beaton, who costumed the 1948 version of the novel directed by Julien Duvivier, is perhaps best known for his long career as a fashion photographer and for the clothes he created for Audrey Hepburn in the film version of My Fair Lady (Stanley Donen, 1964). He had discovered Vivien Leigh during the 1930s, when she first appeared on the London stage, and he immediately featured her in British Vogue in 1935, wearing a Victor Steibel gown. At this time, of course, the creators of fashion pages relied on socialites, stage actresses and a few select British film stars, for professional models were still anonymous figures who would not achieve recognition until the appearance of such well-connected models as Suzy Parker, Barbara Goalen and Dorian Leigh in the 1950s. Diana Vreeland was apparently also fond of Leigh, who continued to appear in Vogue for the next decade or more; she was known to have called her ‘a perfect English Rose’ (Vickers 2003).

In 1948, both heroine and film were cultural products of a complex period of post-war adjustment in Britain and elsewhere, a climate of uncertainty and continued austerity; everyone, in different ways, was coming to terms with the legacy of the Second World War. Women, once again, had been left on their own while men joined the armed services and, as with the First World War, many of them went out to work, finding a degree of financial independence (Haskell [1974] 1987). Men coming back after the trauma of conflict had their own adjustments to make, for in the turbulence of the war years both men and women often had extra-marital affairs. There was, as a result, a seeming lack of trust, which famously helped to create some rather duplicitous Hollywood heroines, the femmes fatales of 1940s ‘film noir’ (Kaplan 1978). Leigh had already played one unfaithful and tragic wife in the film Waterloo Bridge (Mervyn LeRoy, 1942). And she, like Anna, had left her own child behind with her husband after she fell in love with Laurence Olivier.

This background seems to colour her portrayal of Anna – waiting on the station at the end, Anna muses aloud. She seems confused, asking which of the events in her life could actually have happened, which of them might be her imagination. Here, ideas of forgiveness if not reconciliation seem particularly important. Ralph Richardson as Karenin is curiously sympathetic at times, particularly during the period when they share the same roof once more as she recovers after the birth of her second child.

At the start of the war, in 1939, Leigh was famously cast as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming and George Cukor, 1940), one of the most successful films ever made; she delivered a triumphant performance, for which she won an Oscar. She was also featured on the cover of US Vogue in the famous green barbecue dress designed by Walter Plunkett. The crinolines, cinched-in waists, sweeping skirts, wide straw hats and parasols of the antebellum South had an extraordinary effect on wartime audiences, designs for a historical war held safely in a vanished era. A contemporary journalist described the film as having ‘created a great stir in the pool of fashion’, one that would surely ‘have an influence on Paris and New York’ (Churchill quoted in Maeder 1987: 84). Certainly, there was an immediate ‘merchandising blitz unequalled in the history of period film publicity tie-ins’ as antebellum accessories were speedily made and marketed (Churchill quoted in Maeder 1987: 84).

I would suggest that Plunkett’s clothes and their rapturous reception could perhaps have acted as harbinger of the ‘New Look’, Dior’s radical and romantic collection of 1947. Another wartime film, which could have influenced a post-war revolution in dress, was George Cukor’s The Women, also released in 1940. Here, in the middle of a black-and-white film, a department store fashion show is shown in vivid Technicolor, while the Adrian clothes in the display become increasingly spectacular and impractical. The models wear tiny hats and wield parasols, while there is even a crinoline-type floor-length skirt. The women who watched these films, dressed in their practical, utilitarian clothes, could do little until the war ended. Scarlett had of course encouraged ‘make-do-and-mend’ in the famous scene where she fashions herself a dress out of old velvet curtains, but fabric was strictly rationed. The wartime films, however, must have whetted appetites, making these difficult-to-wear outfits seem immensely desirable and creating a favourable climate for the unveiling of the New