Sobre-vestir: Stories Crossing Film and Fashion explores, in an illustrative manner, a vast field of relational possibilities between the practices of cinema and fashion. Yet, in the end, this series of films does not limit itself solely to the discipline of fashion. The programme seeks to analyse how the act of dressing can open the door to understanding the cultural narratives and vocabularies of cinema, from the archive to contemporary works. We can even say that this programme attempts to demonstrate the idea that a film is indissociable from the intentions with which its subjects appear dressed or undressed: the wardrobe as a central tool in the construction of visualities, dramatics, concepts and ideologies.

Dressing, fashion and garments inhabit our daily lives and frequently become associated with profound memories. Just like cinema, fashion often reflects social circumstances and plays with the past, present and future. It evokes concepts of beauty that are far from reality and encourages us to explore the subconscious. It demarcates ways of being and living in the world, driven by the desire to belong to a community or to stand out in one.

In such a broad and complex field of connections, Sobre-vestir chooses to focus on pivotal names from the history of design and their work in film. It understands the wardrobe department as both the driver and mirror of cultural and political tensions, and highlights fashion as a central factor in the creation of cinematic genres, namely horror and period drama.

The selection of films in the programme reflects on the sociological importance of codes of dressing in the expression of cultural communities who are considered minority, peripheral or stigmatised, and on the affirmation of new aesthetic, symbolic or relational values — which cinema can help to expand. And it also explores the aesthetic break represented by collaborations between fashion designers and filmmakers in the construction of a new perspective on visual material — the movements and understandings between bodies in films that invariably mirror the subtle currents of social change in a particular moment in history.

The programme opens and closes with the genius of Jean Paul Gaultier, who brought the deconstruction and disdain of vanguard fashion to auteur cinema, such as with Peter Greenaway, and to the world of the music video, such as in “Nothing Really Matters”, by Madonna.

With Jubilee (Derek Jarman), Shrines (Jacolby Satterwhite) and Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger), we show how by placing dressing and undressing in tension, queer aesthetics have the power to speak to politics, capitalism and propaganda, often in dialogue with other artistic disciplines such as music — Scorpio Rising, by Anger, was indeed pioneering for its use of original music in film. Feminism and critique of the patriarchy are the topics guiding Jubilee, while Teknolust (the first foray into mainstream cinema by Lynn Hershman Leeson, who was awarded a special mention at the last Venice Biennale) is a hilarious, absurdist sci-fi exercise about power over men, whose exuberance is reflected in the outfits worn by Tilda Swinton, designed by the masterful Yohji Yamamoto.

Afrodiasporic themes are integrated through the clothing used in the films Ôri (Raquel Gerber and Beatriz Nascimento) and Touki Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambéty), whose narratives decentralise references from the Global North and evoke different ways of thinking about fashion and style through Black perspectives. In both works, fashion can be understood as a driver of those corporealities, while dressing becomes a statement of memory and culture, revealing the meeting of and, often, tension between tradition and modernity, dislocation and ancestrality.

A surprising connection arises between Vanitas (Paulo Rocha) and Qui êtes-vous, Polly Magoo (William Klein), two films made almost forty years apart, but which both speak to the unsettling fictions of fashion, the cliquey-ness with which the making of clothes and the spectacle of vanity are burdened, and the barely hidden connections between ephemeral beauty and the death drive.

For families, we present Breakfast At Tiffany’s, in which the duo of Hepburn and Givenchy immortalised the classic combination of a black dress worn with gloves, dark glasses and a pearl necklace. The character of Holly Golightly was an inspiration for a generation who saw in her an example of elegance and sophistication, demonstrating how cinema has always managed to inform taste — and consumption.

And we also suggest watching Ran (Akira Kurosawa), with a particular eye on the wardrobe and outfits designed by Emi Wada (who won an Academy Award). This film is an illustrative example of the importance of dress in the development of period dramas.

Every screening in the Sobre-vestir series will be introduced by short works related to style, which prominently encompass canons of clothing and fashion and navigate between art film and advertisements. With these, we aim to show how the moving image has always been in dialogue with fashion design, creating space for film objects that can be confusing, difficult to define and are often misunderstood. This demonstrates further how fashion can be one of the most interesting vehicles for understanding how “promotional film” has, over time, broken down both formal and ethical barriers with what we know as “art film” or “auteur film”.

This programme invites you to think about the sensations and memories, the conversations and silences, which are inherent to the processes of dressing and undressing. And to think further about how these relationships, woven between the worlds of fashion and the moving image, can express messages and stories — beautiful and original, and at times polemical and promiscuous.