For a long time, the relationship between film and fashion has been a symbiotic one. The making of a film is a collaborative process, with set design, make-up and wardrobe often culminating in their efforts to create an evocative visual story. Designers who are perceived as legendary in the zeitgeist have been known to participate in the making of costumes for the silver screen. Most famously, Hubert de Givenchy designed Audrey Hepburn’s iconic black dress in Breakfast At Tiffany’s. There’s also Jean Paul Gaultier who designed futuristic garments for Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element, in which bondage-style bodysuits and cut out uniforms were seen to reflect a sensuality steeped in the otherworldly. Gaultier’s protégé, Martin Margiela, also followed suit—creating sheer and provocative clothes in Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book.
Films have in turn inspired many memorable moments on the runway. Raf Simons’s arresting spring/summer 2018 collection for his now-defunct namesake label took inspiration from the grittiness of Blade Runner, displaying distressing and futuristic elements both in tangent and in union at times. One of Jun Takahashi’s main references for his brand Undercover are films that he enjoys. Collections looked at cinematic classics from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria to even famous Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa’s Throne Of Blood, creating theatrical silhouettes that were equal parts imaginative and nostalgic.
From 18 January to 23 February, Asian Film Archive celebrates this intersectionality of mediums with a film programme titled Styled and Sutured: Fashion on Screen. The programme features films that explore tropes of fashion designers, everyday dreamers, otherworldly figures and stunted shopaholics—each exploring dress in different spectrums and contexts. Alongside these screenings, there is an accompanying installation and pop-up market creatively directed by indie publication Magazine For Young Girls, as well as a special night of poetry and film co-presented with Ethos Books, providing a layered understanding of fashion in cinema through mediums of text and environment.
Below, programmer Natalie Khoo shares her programming process, Southeast Asian films that embed notable fashion and more.
What was your curatorial process when it came to selecting films for the programme?
As we looked at films both in the archive’s collection and beyond, a few distinct threads emerged: fashion as identity-making, as obsession and as craft. The 19 films that we have selected for Styled and Sutured: Fashion on Screen range from 1929-2023, across various cultural landscapes that explore the connections, obsessions and tensions between ourselves and the identities we perform through fashion and styling. In these tales, we follow fashion designers and their inspirations: Wim Wenders trains his eye on Yohji Yamamoto in the diary film, Notebook on Cities and Clothes, while a 2004 film from the AFA’s collection, Happy Berry, traces early 2000s Bangkok-based designers cum pop stars who were themselves inspired by the iconic fashion anime Paradise Kiss by Ai Yazawa. We included films that featured the work of costume designers—Eiko Ishioka’s costume design debut is seen in both Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a 4K restoration of Francis Ford Coppola’s carnivalesque gothic retelling, and in Tarsem Singh’s The Fall, a monumental cult classic. We also see historical films with a painterly sense—Sergei Parajanov retells a Georgian folktale of baroque visual poetry in both set and garment construction, and in a local context we see Siti Zubaidah, a Cathay production merging both Malay and Chinese elements in its costume design. Elsewhere in the programme are everyday dreamers, otherworldly figures, and stunted shopaholics: from the minimalistic and moody Tony Takitani, an anti-fashion fable of addiction, to the Mieko Kawakami-inspired film Ice Cream Fever, which stars Japanese fashion model Serena Motola and others.
Take us behind the scenes of a film programming. How did the idea for this start and how did it develop into this?
The Asian Film Archive celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2025, and for the first programme of the year, we focused on materiality. Material culture is very much a cornerstone of our work—film is now often thought of as a digital experience, but we thought it was important to tie back to the fact that our archive is made up of film as a material artefact, in both celluloid and digital formats, which require thoughtful attention and care. One way to speak to this materiality is to look at fashion in cinema—with a fantastical, delirious focus on objects, costumes, and identity-making. Fashion and film are both drivers of memory work.
The focus is not so much the elusiveness of fashion as an elevated concept or standard to be achieved, but more about the beauty, chaos and bodily disasters we encounter in our quotidian act of choosing what to drape over our bodies. It’s the fundamental endeavour of choosing how we will reveal ourselves to the world, which is a highly convoluted affair entangled in our own inner complexities. We think of embracing our own sense of style as liberation, but the reality is that fashion will also fundamentally contend with its own issues of validation, compliance and conformity. It’s this push and pull surrounding fashion that this film programme is based around.
Tell us more about the activities outside of the film lineup. How do they tie into the entire programming?
We have two collaborations. Firstly, there is Faceri, a night of poetry and film, co-presented with Ethos Books, featuring a trio of shorts and four writers who will respond to these films. Tracing the lines of making and unmaking evoked by the etymology of the word fashion, from the Latin word faceri, is the act of doing, making, creating; the act of birth itself. Through the interweaving of film and the spoken word, Faceri will explore materiality, identity, and craft through three shorts: In Pursuit of Temples in the Sky by fashion stylist and art director Gagandeep Singh, a visual poem that touches on Sikhism and queerness; A Million Threads by Myanmar filmmaker Thu Thu Shein on a weaving competition known as Matho Thingan that brings together 30 women, whose task is to weave the finest robes for the temple’s Buddha images. Lastly, Roach Love by Jacen Tan is a neo-noir work on a creepy and unexpected fetish. The writers selected by the Ethos team—Shawn Hoo, Jennifer Anne Champion, Prasanthi Ram and Shivram Gopinath, will reflect and respond to these films.
The other is the Obsessions installation and pop-up market, a collaboration with Wong Wei Ting from Magazine for Young Girls. Their installation, located at the Oldham Theatre, brings together spatial designer Amirul Nazree, and local archive fashion collector brands, Dirt Fruits and Upstairs Garments to construct two halves of a bedroom, a time capsule of fashion cultures from the early 1990s to the late 2000s. One half are objects from Dirt Fruits, recreating a kitschy guro-kawaii dream world reminiscent of films like All About Lily Chou-Chou, and the other is a mid-century modern bedroom by Upstairs Garments, evidence of the quartet’s collection of archive clothing from designers like Junya Watanabe and Theseus Chan. The installation runs alongside the film programme, and is punctuated by a two-day market on 15 and 16 February 2025, a gathering of eight fashion booths selling archive designer fashion, carefully curated thrift, vintage magazines and related paraphernalia—including the Malaysian designer Shaofen and Sean’s Bookshop, a collector of fashion books and zines.
The events speak to the idea of obsessions and bring together creators and makers, both in fashion and beyond, to speculate and dream up worlds made manifest in both garments and on screen. Fashion is both performance and memory-making.
To you, what constitutes a fashion film?
A fashion film is a cinematic exploration of fashion not merely as aesthetic, but as a narrative force, a psychological undercurrent, a defiant act of identity-making that is set in various worlds not just high fashion, but in subcultures or within everyday neuroses of the mind. A fashion film is not so much a thing, but it’s a space where material culture meets craftsmanship—speaking, transforming, revealing. We construct fashion, but fashion, as with all material culture has equal power to change us. Of course, it has to be stylish too.
In films like The Fall, the story of the character is often communicated through clothes. Why do you think there’s such a strong focus on what characters wear in films like this?
A big part of the programme is a look into the sometimes under-appreciated practice of costume design for screen, and how it goes much further than just styling a person or aesthetic. These production and costume designers are also styling the character’s entire world, from their neuroses, hidden desires to even anxieties. A rich psycho-geography that is mapped out from under the surface with the combination of these reflections, which allows for world-building of epic proportions—only because it evolves from a psychological, internal place that is made manifest. Costume design is psychological architecture.
The Fall is one such film where costume design is tailored to each character. Every garment, designed by Japanese designer Eiko Ishioka, tells its own unique story. The film is a story about stories, about imagination and being lost in an intermingled fantasy that is shared between two people who are making up a story to kill time, but also to work through unresolved traumas. As a result, the costumes worn by the characters they invented may be monumental and otherworldly, but they hold subtle visual references to their anchors in the real world, both inner and outer. We see this in Ishioka’s costume design in Dracula as well. The costumes not only make the characters, but they literally constrain and define the actors’ movements both bodily and facially. For instance, Gary Oldman was famously transformed by prosthetics into various iterations of a centuries-old vampire, including with a Kabuki-styled hairpiece and later into a furry wolf-bat chimeric beast.
Which Southeast Asian films do you think had great fashion?
The Thai neo-noir film Last Life in the Universe by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang. We programmed this title during our Y2K DreamZ screenings in 2023. Bar hostess Noi’s velvet chartreuse nightgown is a dreamy, melancholic picture of the early 2000s, and Tadanobu’s middle-parted floppy salaryman look is well-cut despite drenched in soft boy tendencies. Some other titles. include Happy Berry and Siti Zubaidah that screens in our Style and Sutured programme.
What is your favourite film out of the lineup and why?
Tony Takitani by the late chronicler of melancholy, Jun Ichikawa, is a personal favourite. The film’s later cult following is owed to the fact of a slow unfolding of obsession—Tony Takitani is fascinated by Eiko, played by Rie Miyazawa. Eiko is obsessed with designer clothes, and when he tries to get her to resist her compulsions, the consequences are tragic. Painfully relatable and stylishly rendered, it’s adapted from the short story by Haruki Murakami. The sets and costumes are minimalistic but made with an eye for detail. The house set was entirely constructed in a large green field with clean lines and a sense of airiness even though the characters are so constrained and boxed in by their material realities. I remember screening it in 2012 when I started a film club then, and it blew my mind.
Asian Film Archive’s Styled and Sultured: Fashion on Screen runs from 18 January to 23 February and tickets can be found here.
