Fashioning Film Stars

Book excerpt: Fashioning Film Stars brings together work by established and emerging scholars in the field of film costume and star studies, to address the significance of the relationships between fashion, dress and star image. While studies of individual stars have often commented on the importance of style to the construction of their persona, such work has until now remained largely focused upon the female Hollywood, or occasionally European, star. This scholarly and readable volume redresses that balance, offering close analyses of the detail and significance of male and female star style in Hollywood. European, Asian and Latin American contexts. It brings together a range of theoretical and methodological frameworks from textual analysis, archival research and audience study to offer, for the first time, a detailed consideration of the importance of the fashioning of film stars. Fashioning Film Stars asks: how does dress operate in relation to stardom to articulate particular identities - gendered, national, classed, ethnic, sexual? How, precisely, does film costume operate, and how is it understood, semiotically, socially, culturally? Does star dress 'disappear' against the body as 'clothes', or speak out performatively as 'costume' or 'spectacle'? It answers them in an engaging and accessible volume which will be of interest to film scholars and film fans alike.