Fashion in Film Festival: If Looks Could Kill will open at New York's Museum of the Moving Image on May 4th 2012. Find out more here.

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Full programme for Fashion in Film Festival 2012 in New York released. Find out more here.

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Fashion in Film's Kinoscopes available to tour. Find out more about their London and UK installations.

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Limited edition catalogue
The 2nd Fashion in Film Festival If Looks Could Kill limited edition catalogue is selling out fast. Available online, and in store at Tate Modern book shop, BFI Southbank Film Store and Cinéphilia.

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Texts now published online
All texts from our first catalogue (now sold out) are now available here.

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credits, sponsors and partners

Design Museum Holon
Thursday 27th October 2011
10:00-11:30

The notion of clothing as ‘enigma’ in film was first explored as part of the inaugural edition of the Fashion in Film Festival in 2006. This programme revisits these themes, taking its cue from the current explosion of ‘fashion film’ as a form of significance within the fashion industry.

The experience of fashion on film is not equivalent to a first-hand experience of clothing. However, through various filmic techniques, new modes of display or digital technologies, film allows clothes to assume new shapes or spin off into abstraction - arguably superseding the vernacular experience of fashion.

A mix of commercially and artistically oriented productions, each of these shorts finds new means to articulate fashion or clothing through the medium of film. These films engage with different artistic practices including sculpture, dance, theatre and, most recently, with technology, exploiting their expressive potential.

In these films, clothes and cloth are presented in rituals such as folding and unfolding, stretching and pulling. The body within takes on a performative role: it is integral as a means to animate the clothes on film, yet it is anonymous, allowing the clothes to take centre stage.

By obscuring the immediate function of dress, focusing instead on qualities of form and performance, the films in this programme portray clothes as estranged, dreamlike, playful and elusive. Fashion is revealed as a potent source of fascination, desire, emotion and sensual pleasure.

Cygnet, 2011. Courtesy of SHOWstudio.com

The Egg, the Monk and the Warrior, 2008. Courtesy of Vilsbøl de Arce.

Emak Bakia
France, 1926. Dir. Man Ray.

Kinetic Art and Paco Rabanne (L’Art Cinétique et Paco Rabanne)
France, 1967. Dir. Henri Champetier.

59 Positions
Austria, 1992. Dir. Erwin Wurm.

The Egg, the Monk and the Warrior
Denmark, 2008. Vilsbøl de Arce, Kasper Astrup Schröder, Louise Boserup, Louise Midjord and Caroline Bentzen.

One and One Now Make Two While Before It Only Made One
(Un et un a present ca fait deux avant ca ne faisait qu'un)
Brussels, 2000. Dir. Marie-France and Patricia Martin.

Cygnet
Paris, 2011. Dir. Nick Knight. Featuring Ming Xi in couture.

Scalpel/ Stradivarius
New York and Paris, 2011. Dirs. Jason Last and Jaime Rubiano.

More...

Holon Fashion Week
Vilsbøl de Arce
SHOWstudio.com
Jason Last