Cinematic Style: Fashion, Architecture and Interior Design on Film

Published in 2022
340 pages

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Jess Berry is Senior Lecturer in Design History at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research is concerned with fashion and the interior, the fashion city and intersections between fashion, art and new media. She is widely published in peer-review design journals and edited books, and is editor of Fashion Capital: Style Economies, Sites and Cultures (2012).

What is this book about?
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.