Film is indissociable from the narratives carried by clothes and costumes. Throughout their careers, great filmmakers and artists have maintained intense and productive collaborations with important costume designers and fashion designers, creating dialogues in which the device of clothing contributed decisively to the development of their cinematic language, as well as to visual trends that have defined modern and contemporary culture. Fashion and dressing as themes in themselves have also been central to films that have left a profound mark on cinema.

On-dressing considers the codes of apparel and its intimate connection to actions of exposure and concealment of identities, visibility and invisibility of people, and the vibrant expression of communities who use ideas about dressing as a starting point for aesthetic creativity, contesting the status quo and reclaiming their rights.

Each introduced by short exercises about fashion, the ten screenings aim to illustrate the importance of wardrobe in the construction of film genres (from horror to period drama), the work of designers whose creations have left an indelible mark on a number of filmographies (such as Jean Paul Gaultier, Yohji Yamamoto and Emi Wada), and the way that clothing is used to express conflicts — between traditions, customs and cultures. From the beautiful to the frivolous, the market and the art world, we will reveal the tensions that fashion entails, as well as how its development allows us to sound out, with particular clarity, the ongoing metamorphosis of our ways of life.

Curated by Guilherme Blanc, Hanayrá Negreiros and João Sousa Cardoso.
Curatorial support by Sofia Lemos Marques.