This dossier, edited by Caroline Evans and Marketa Uhlirova, is the first English-language publication on the French film director Marcel L’Herbier, to whom we devoted last year’s festival season.

Growing out of the 4th Fashion in Film Festival, this dossier examines L’Herbier’s unique position in French cinema – and cinema more generally – as a driving force behind many significant artistic collaborations, with an emphasis on the interwar period. The publication celebrates L’Herbier’s fascination with various design fields, with a special focus on fashion and film costume.

This book explores cinema costume as a form of opulent visual spectacle. Looking at the medium of film in parallel with wider cultures of urban popular spectacle and entertainment, especially fashion, dance and the theatre, the contributors to this book explore how dynamic displays of costume and splendour have helped visualise certain key concerns of modernity, such as movement, time, transience and gender identity.

It would be a crime to miss out on the 2nd Fashion in Film Festival “If Looks Could Kill” Catalogue, which features new essays exploring the relationship between fashion and crime in cinema.

Looking at the work of four diverse directors who dared to turn the camera on that sub-species of “fashion aliens” who exist within our own society.