Great British Fashion

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August 2013

Suzanne Fraser

To coincide with Melbourne Spring Fashion Week, ACMI is screening a series of three documentaries showcasing the finest homemade talent of modern British fashion, served-up with a customary dollop of ‘London cool’. Focussing on the careers of several key figures of the last four decades– including Twiggy, Paul Smith, and Vivienne Westwood – these films are brimming with the eccentricities and excellences that have made British fashion what it is today: the dog’s bollocks.

In 1966 a young London girl called Lesley Hornby had her shoulder length hair chopped short and her photograph taken; with these two actions she became not only someone else, but also something else. As one of the documentaries screening in this series at ACMI informs us, she became Twiggy: The Face of ’66 (2012). With her new do, her buttery complexion, her androgynous frame, and her large eyes, the newly styled Twiggy represented a fresh era in women’s style that extended well beyond the year in which she was ‘discovered’. Even today her image has an aspirational allure in the fashion industry, with designers and stylists eager to rephrase the Twiggy look for a contemporary audience.

In another documentary to show as part of the Great British Fashion series at ACMI, the menswear designer Paul Smith is represented as a dandy-maker for post-punk Britain. Having initially learnt his craft at night classes and later by working in London’s legendary Savile Row, Smith started his own label in the 1970s with his future wife Pauline Denyer. In his classic and neatly tailored designs, which nevertheless disclose a far-out aesthetic in their bright little details and silken linings, Paul Smith reinstated creativity in the established silhouette of men’s fashion. Director Stéphane Carrel traces this contribution by Paul Smith up to the present day, at which point we hear suited-up men on the street interviewed about the label and saying such things as “you don’t want to be boring, you don’t want to be normal, you want to be something different”.

This inclination for ‘something different’ is taken to the next level in the designs of Vivienne Westwood in the third film of the series British Style Genius: Breaking the Rules – Fashion Rebel Look (2009). In this documentary we hear Westwood explaining to an audience of media preview types how she used fabric that was meant for cleaning car windows to make the outfit in front of them. This is high fashion at its most grunge, yet possessing a glamour and sophistication that validated Westwood’s rebellious tendencies in the eyes of the industry. Like John Galliano and Alexander McQueen (both of whom are also featured in this documentary), Westwood aimed to shock the mainstream fashion establishment off its comfortable dogmatic throne and install ‘differentness’ in its place.

From hot totty to the industry’s scallywags, this film series at ACMI displays some of the downright coolest players in British style over the past forty years. With a new fashion festival about to rear its beauty-filled head in Melbourne, it is good to be reminded that this industry is not simply about being really, really, ridiculously good-looking. It is also about the styles we create and why we create them.

Great British Fashion On Film screens at ACMI, Federation Square, from Saturday, August 31 to Saturday, September 7. It is presented as part of Melbourne Spring Fashion Week and Great Britain Arts 13, with the support of the British Council.

acmi.net.au

thatsmelbourne.com.au/Whatson/Festivals/MSFW/MSFW2013

Images:
1. Twiggy: The Face of ’66 Courtesy: ARTE France
2. Paul Smith. Courtesy: ARTE, France
3. Twiggy. Courtesy: ARTE, France
4. British Style Genius – Vivienne Westwood. Courtesy: BBC Worldwide