Fashion Films: Reframing Storytelling in the Industry

A runway is a story told in twelve minutes. In 2023, the fashion industry’s storytelling ambitions have outgrown physical catwalks. Fashion films now contextualize collections with unmatched depth, signaling changing expectations for how stories are told.

One pivotal project is Martin Margiela’s Autumn/Winter 1995 collection. He rejected a traditional show for a documentary-style broadcast, blending process footage with models walking in everyday Parisian streets. Margiela aimed to highlight the wearability of his clothes. This experiment indicates that moving images can articulate fashion ideas distinct from editorial or runway formats.

The modern fashion film, emerging over the last fifteen years, owes much to advances in filmmaking and distribution. Platforms like Vimeo, Instagram, and TikTok have enabled short narratives. Louis Vuitton’s Nicolas Ghesquière embraced this medium for the Cruise 2021 collection. Filmed in the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the film juxtaposed architectural modernity with the house’s 167-year heritage, telling a story about time and innovation in design while showcasing garments.

For brands, the allure lies in the limitless stage of fashion films. Unlike traditional runways, these films manipulate time, space, and perspective. Products can be shown in close-up as art objects or activated through cinematic movement. Gucci’s Alessandro Michele explored this fluidity in GucciFest, a week-long series of episodic films released in November 2020. Produced by Gus Van Sant, the series situated Gucci’s collections within fragmented, surreal narratives, inviting spectators to derive meaning from visual and thematic synesthesia.

However, the medium faces challenges. Critics argue that fashion films risk becoming mere advertisements—slick but shallow. The question of authorship complicates matters. In a 2021 panel at the Institut Français de la Mode, Dr. Emilie Hammen remarked, “The fashion film sits awkwardly between two traditions: its roots in marketing and its aspirations to fine art. Who, then, is the author—the designer, the filmmaker, or the brand?” Hammen’s question highlights the medium’s unresolved status within both fashion and cinema. Conflicts between directors’ visions and brand interests often result in aesthetically unresolved works.

Brands that navigate this tension respect filmmaking as a collaborative art. The late Virgil Abloh exemplified this during his tenure at Louis Vuitton’s menswear division. His short films for the Spring/Summer 2022 collection, titled Amen Break, featured a narrative arc that served as a meditative commentary on the Black diaspora’s cultural contributions. Abloh’s films avoided overt branding in favor of layered storytelling, marking a high point for fashion films as cultural documents.

The economic dimension cannot be ignored. Fashion films offer brands a scalable way to reach audiences excluded from traditional couture spectacles. Consider Le Château du Tarot, a collaboration between Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri and Matteo Garrone. Released in early 2021 for €2 million ($2.3 million), it generated over 12 million views in its first month—engagement rivaling its €6 million ($6.9 million) Spring/Summer 2020 couture runway show.

The medium’s accessibility shifts creative power dynamics within the fashion industry. Independent designers unable to afford blockbuster runway shows use films to compete with global conglomerates. Thebe Magugu, a South African designer and 2019 LVMH Prize winner, debuted his Spring/Summer 2022 collection through a film titled Banyoloyi A Bosigo (The Rebirth of a Story). This seven-minute work celebrated ancestral stories embedded in his designs, reinterpreting familial and regional histories for a global audience.

Fashion films face a question of permanence. Runway photographs, street style images, and editorial spreads have archival value, studied in museums and auctioned at Christie’s. Yet, few institutions have established robust archives for fashion films. The Mode et Film series at the Centre Pompidou, inaugurated in 2019, screens annually as part of Paris Fashion Week, serving as a growing repository for this medium. However, the archival legitimacy of fashion films still lags behind that of physical artifacts.

This gap is significant. The survival of a cultural object often depends not on its initial reception but its capacity to be revisited and reinterpreted. Fashion films deserve this trajectory, but their ephemerality within the digital ecosystem makes the task urgent. Whether they will be preserved as industry documents or lost to the relentless cycle of social media remains an open question.