Donkey Skin (Peau d’Âne)

France, 1970. Director Jacques Demy. 89min.

Jacques Demy’s Donkey Skin adapts Charles Perrault’s eponymous fairy tale into a surrealist musical that interrogates taboos, agency and cultural mythmaking. Like the director’s earlier film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the film’s candy colours belie its subversive examinations of sex and class, with a young woman caught at the centre.  A young princess (played by Catherine Deneuve) is dressed in magnificently gaudy gowns, yet in a bid to escape her father’s marriage proposal, she dons a donkey skin before running away from her kingdom. She is enrobed by the shame and degradation of her circumstances – but there is freedom to be found at the edge of her hybrid existence. The film offers a fantastical slant on the transformative effects of what we wear, the complexities of fur, and how our proximity to animality can liberate us from the bounds of conventional fashions. 

With Catherine Deneuve and Jean Marais.
Costumes by Gitt Magrini. 

Past screenings

Grounded: Fashion’s Entanglements with Nature – London
Tuesday 20 May 2025, 18:30 | Central Saint Martins
Introduced by Harvey Byworth-Morgan.

Grounded: Fashion’s Entanglements with Nature – UK Tour
Saturday 25 October 2025, 18:00 | Plymouth Arts Cinema