Fashion

Fashion's relationship to film is characterized by two factors: how film has influenced fashion and how fashion and the work of specific fashion designers have been used in film. These are not mutually exclusive but parallel trajectories. The extrovert couturier Elsa Schiaparelli (1890–1973) once remarked that what Hollywood did today, fashion would do tomorrow, but it could be said equally that what fashion did today, cinema would do tomorrow. Hollywood, for example, instantly dropped its hemlines following the vogue for longer fashions set by Jean Patou (1887–1936) in 1929. More commonly, a monolithic institution like Hollywood has not always been swift to change; once it has found a fashion it likes, it tends to stick with it, as was the case with Patou's long, bias-cut style, which prevailed with few exceptions throughout its films of the 1930s.