Sian Stone : Style
Hey, don’t send a film critic to review movies, send the fashion editor. Nicholas Cage and John Travolta were just fine in John Woo’s Face/Off. Yes, the plot is rather entertaining. But none of it is a patch on the elegant sophistication of the Donna Karan outfits.
This is the movie as clothes horse – as was The Fifth Element. Even the director Luc Besson acknowledged that the film belonged as much to Jean-Paul Gaultier bras as himself.
Likewise, what do we remember aboutBarry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black – the plot, Tommy Lee Jones’s acidic asides, Will Smith’s one-liners? No, we remember the shades. The Ray-Bans to be exact. Men in Black will go down in history as the most successful extended commercial in the history of advertising.
So what are we supposed to make of all this? Is this another crude form of product placement? Yes, to an extent. Movie-makers, drinks purveyors, car producers are all in the same business – selling product. And film-makers are in a unique position to help fellow entrepreneurs.
But with clothes it’s more complex. If anything, it says more about a paucity of imagination than the venal nature of capitalism. The three films are hugely stylish, but what the directors have done is buy a look wholesale.
It’s not new – Audrey Hepburn shamelessly saw her way through numerous Givenchy wardrobes. And looked fantastic. But here the clothes were an adornment, they weren’t’ the film in toto.