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All of a sudden, fashion in cinema is a burgeoning field – something that would have been considered highly unlikely just two decades ago. Once a peripheral interest shared among a handful of film scholars, it is now a robust area of research with frequent conferences, seminars, publications and public-facing events. No longer limited to film and media studies, the field today is located at an intersection of a great many disciplines, including fashion studies, cultural and visual studies, film costume study, exhibition curation, film festival programming and contemporary fashion image-making practice. This recent expansion has undoubtedly coincided with the meteoric rise in fashion’s cultural prestige, sanctioned by high-profile museum exhibitions in major global cities, and resulted in the blossoming of fashion studies into a fully-fledged academic field. But equally key has been a set of media shifts resulting from the digital turn. Since the new millennium, short-form fashion film has become an increasingly pervasive form for the display and communication of fashion. Encountered mostly online but also at fashion shows, cinemas, shops and other urban public spaces, its success has been part of a larger transformation of fashion face-to-face with contemporary screen culture. At the same time, film digitization and digital modes of display have made available a wealth of historical film heritage, with unprecedented volumes of filmic and textual archival material released across numerous specialist and open access platforms. Taken together, these phenomena have spurred a restoration of fashion to the study of cinema and that of cinema to the study of fashion; just as importantly, they have given impetus to a wide-reaching reassessment of the significance of both within broader historical enquiries.

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