Apparell’d in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
– William Wordsworth
This strand explores the relation between fashion and dreaming. If cinema itself has frequently been likened to dream, here we pursue more specifically its investment in the reverie as a realm in which fashion can truly flourish.
Slipping out of waking conscious time into the world of wish fulfilment or nightmare demands a different raiment. Not simply the sleepwear of pyjamas, or even the fantasy of nudity (Freud in his Interpretation of Dreams indicated that unusual clothing actually symbolised nakedness), the fashion of slumberland may invoke a projected fantasy of the future, or a sudden intrusion from the repressed past.
But the fantasy of fashion is not limited to the unconscious state. It is also a daydream, as suggested by the title of Elizabeth Wilson’s seminal 1985 book on fashion, Adorned in Dreams. In the cinema, the popular practice of costume transformations, derived from the theatre, has always been a major source of visual spectacle – a space for pleasure and escape: indeed, Hollywood films in the studio era often announced the number of costume changes a leading lady would go through as a major marketing device. Here fashion provided the medium through which dreams and fantasies could be projected.
