Cinematic Dressing
an approach to style inspired by cinema’s ability to create feeling through clothing, light, color, location, and atmosphere.
Placing Myself in the New York Scene
New York confronts identity. I felt somewhat assaulted the moment I disembarked the plane 8 years ago. This city asks who you are through neighborhood, pace, architecture, culture, and the sorts of people moving around you, and I did not know how to respond. Each scene demands a different version of the self.
My shell has molted numerous times, often within the same short season. Clothing has helped me navigate those changes, serving as a sort of armor that allows me to either disappear into the atmosphere or deliberately interrupt it, dependent on my desired audacity of the day.
The Anatomy of a Scene
Cinema became my framework. What started as a leisurely, somewhat mindless pastime transformed into seeking still shots of frames where women were expressed by wardrobe and props, with no script really needed at all. I became more drawn to foreign films, then, because I found dialogue to be both intrusive and unnecessary. Stills, music, tone, composition. That was my hunt. And this new lens forced me into a corner to explicitly define myself.
It took me years to fully grasp that I wasn’t drawn to the fictionalized characters as much as I thought I was. I couldn’t understand why my own designs often fell short. Rather, it was the notion that clothing is not experienced in isolation. Fortunately for my type-A brain, there is a formula (that may not be mathematically accurate; I continue adding elements as I go).
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wardrobe + prop(s) + setting + lighting + color + sound + movement + persona arc = feeling.
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Cinema can make a white t-shirt absolutely devastating. It can make a black dress sinister, erotic, lonely, sophisticated, or mundane. It all depends on the context in which it lives.
Cinematic Dressing
Let’s define it. Consideration of clothes as part of a larger, more cohesive atmosphere. Shaped by place, light, color, architecture, weather, memory, and mood. It’s less about dressing like a character and more about understanding how clothes exist and interact within a scene.
It’s why SoHo at midnight is millennia removed from day. Why a silk slip is fitting amongst wet pavement, sodium lights, taxis, dirty old brick, cigarette smoke, and darkness. Why that dress becomes far more evocative than that same dress against a white wall.
Props are a crucial component of the formula because they locate clothing within a life. A cigarette after dark. A coupe is reserved for LA, a martini glass for New York, and a rocks glass for the man who is paying for it all.
Soho Slip Dress - Audrey by Adrienne Capsule Collection
The Director of Your Own Life
Life is repetitive. Often painfully mundane. I give my best efforts to resist this; different routes, different neighborhoods, different versions of myself. Clothing has become my most reliable means of control, and sometimes even the only. I may not be able to change the setting, but I can decide exactly how I want to enter the frame and how I will participate. I’ve found this sort of performance to be quite authentic, ironically enough.
Cinematic Canon
Jane Birkin - Mythologized Her Actual Life
Of course, I had to start with her. Jane Birkin is a character herself, independent of iconic movie roles. She successfully mythologized her actual life, inspiring and puzzling fashion enthusiasts for decades to come. Jane dressed for motion rather than documentation, making her almost impossible to emulate in this modern digital era.
Nothing was resolved. Messy hair. Disheveled pants. Stretched out collars. Jeans unbuttoned. Unfinishedness. In modern vernacular: messy chic. She extended this disheveled image to Serge, too: stubble, long hair, pinstripe jacket with jeans. Disobedient to occasion. They always entered the environment incorrectly. Intentional disruption.
Jane’s repetition created her character with recurrent visual codes. Her body served as a constant, so much so it’s hard to fathom she was insecure about it. Bare legs, tiny hems, simple dress, flat shoes or boots. The clothes function solely as a frame for her body. Her high/low approach (oh-so relevant now) turned anti-luxury objects into symbols: cue her ever-famous wicker bag, on her arm when the event invited an evening clutch.
Place mattered. Paris, drinks at Maxims, the French Riviera, Le Club 55, simple pedal boats instead of a yacht. Her style would not read the same in a sterile environment. It required cigarette smoke, European architecture, and Serge by her side. The clothes were never the whole story.
Miss Jane Dress - Audrey by Adrienne SS27
From Jane Birkin to the women, films, and visual worlds that continue to shape the way I think about dress.