Few designers and couturiers have been interested in giving artistic polish to the fashion parade video. The upshot is that in many cases the format stays the same: a frontal, linear rendering of an unvarying scenario in which mannequin follows mannequin.
But if the fashion video is not the equivalent of the music version, it remains a tool designers cannot do without. Being less static than photography, it allows observation of the garment’s relationship with the body, and retains the music that plays just as important a part in the overall atmosphere. The genre tends to put the emphasis on direct observation of the garment, to the detriment of artistic considerations; only in a very few, isolated cases does the image itself take on a creative aspect.
Prior to the 60s a handful of fashion parade reports shown on the TV news point up the taste of the time, but few of them use the garment in motion to trigger a fresh, filmic scenario.
Marcel L’Herbier’s La Mode Rêvée (Fashion Dreaming, 1938) is a brief, atypical survey of the latest fashions, for which the director came up with a fictional story set in the Louvre.
In the 40s and 50s TV news programmes occasionally decided to liven up their presentation of haute couture collections with short, fanciful stories whose naive spontaneity now draws indulgent smiles.
It was not until the 60s that a TV genre focusing specifically on fashion and the image began to gather momentum. Rightly famous and with no rivals in its own time, France’s Dim Dam Dom (1965–1971) offered trial runs to such upcoming directors as Jean-Christophe Averty, Peter Knapp and Just Jaeckin.
Presented by Daisy de Galard, these programmes also provided early opportunities for big photographic names like David Bailey, Jeanloup Sieff and Jean-François Jonvelle to work on the actual language of the TV camera. Together they shaped a new vocabulary. Clothing was going democratic and this was reflected in the use of fiction and journalism to communicate the fashion message of the moment.
Attempts to embellish fashion videos in the 80s were few and far between, but worth citing all the same: Jean-Luc Godard turned out a film/essay for designers Marithé & François Girbaud (On s’est tous défilé, 1988) and Jean Paul Gaultier was behind numerous fashion clips commissioned by Télélibération – concentrates, as it were, of the spirit of ready-to-wear collections.
It was in the 90s that designers began from time to time to make creative use of what they saw as a new medium. Martin Margiela’s videos, for example, avoid identification with the fashion show context in which the collection was originally presented; this Belgian brought an urbanely poetic eye to bear on clothes-led strolls in which the catwalk was no longer the sole presentation/atmosphere context. Shot in the street or imitating the training film model, they accompanied the latest collection without reproducing it literally. For houses including Balenciaga, Vuitton, Lanvin, and Yves St Laurent, director Séraphin Ducellier developed a matter-of-fact tone in videos that complemented the designer’s approach to the garments. Ducellier set out to match his fashion films to the medium in which they would be used and so regenerated the long-unchanged format of the classical parade.
The first retrospective of its kind, this History of the fashion video is the result of a partnership involving France’s National Television Archive (INA) and the Rencontres d’Arles. Sheer dizzying quantity means that there is no intention here to include all existing fashion parade videos; instead the focus is on directors and designers who have added an extra artistic something to ensure creativity in terms both of subject and medium. Thus does the exhibition put together the singular and so far untold story of fashion in moving pictures.
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