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Fashion & Film Feature

Badlands at 50: Timeless and Still Timely

Holly is a 15-year-old girl living in a South Dakota town with her father. “Little did I realise,” she narrates in voice-over, twirling her baton on the street, “that what began in the alleys and back ways of this quiet town would end in the badlands of Montana.” What begins in the alleys and back […]

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Fashion & Film Feature

Impossible Not to Think of Her: Catherine Deneuve in Mississippi Mermaid

Catherine Deneuve graces this year’s poster for the Cannes Film Festival and in its honour, we are revisiting François Truffaut’s La Sirène du Mississippi (1969). It was the first time when François Truffaut depicted a genuine couple. “In Jules and Jim and in The Soft Skin, scenes involving two people are always presented with reference […]

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Fashion & Film Feature

Solveig Dommartin Wears Yohji Yamamoto in Until the End of the World

Until the End of the World (1991) begins with a grim end-time scenario. A nuclear satellite threatens to crash through the ozone layer and wipe out the world’s communications system. It is said to be circling above like a bird of prey. Watching the film now, in 2023, it’s daunting to realise that the unrestrained […]

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Fashion & Film Feature

Fashion & Film: Nina Hoss in Barbara

East Germany, 1980. Barbara is a doctor who works in a hospital in a small provincial town. This is her punishment for attempting to emigrate to the West. She used to work in the biggest hospital in Berlin. Now she is kept under constant surveillance, secluded in the country, with nobody to trust. She does […]

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Fashion & Film Feature

Fashion & Film: Sigourney Weaver in The Year of Living Dangerously

There are few things I appreciate about a film more than its sense of place. That’s what Peter Weir achieved in The Year of Living Dangerously (1982). The mood and the recreation of the Indonesian locale are so extraordinary (he used Manila and the Philippines as a stand-in for Djakarta and Indonesia) that they give […]

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Fashion & Film Feature

Emotionally Caged and Extravagantly Clad: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) is at its 50th anniversary this year and it deserves to be celebrated. It’s one of the films that made me aware of the creative process that is filmmaking, one of the films that made me love cinema. It remains my favourite Rainer Werner Fassbinder film. Seductive […]

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Fashion & Film Feature

Very, Very Natural and Herself: Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby

Is Katharine Hepburn playing herself in Bringing Up Baby (1938)? And if so, why not? Katharine Hepburn turned Hollywood on its head. She fearlessly and uncompromisingly set out to become a star in an industry that wanted greatness on its own terms, an industry that often tried to destroy the original few. She wanted greatness […]

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Fashion & Film Feature

The Lost Daughter: An Interview with Costume Designer Edward K. Gibbon

In one of the best films of last year, The Lost Daughter (2021), Maggie Gyllenhaal, in her directorial debut, explores the complexities of motherhood. The film is an adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel by the same name and has as center character a terrific Olivia Colman as Leda, a middle-aged university professor in Cambridge, Boston, […]

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Fashion & Film Feature

Fashion & Film: Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor

I’ve made a habit of watching Three Days of the Condor (1975) over the holidays. It’s a Christmas classic. But the word Christmas doesn’t even spark a line of dialogue. The jolly music heard over the radio or on the streets is the only indication of the time of year. Even the snow-barren streets, although […]