The Baroque imagination: Film, costume design and Italian high fashion

Abstract In the 2010s, feature films such as The Great Gatsby (Luhrmann, 2013) or The Grand Budapest Hotel (Anderson, 2014) and other audio-visuals like fashion films or video ads of Italian fashion houses’ collections reveal a convergence between narration and costume that renovates and adapts the cultural meaning of the Baroque. This ‘Baroque imagination’ has deep roots in the first centuries of European Modernity, when Italian cultural vectors dominated the arts and a few spheres of material culture, including clothing, architecture and garden design. Presently, it is sustained by fashion jargon’s exploitation of the word ‘Baroque’ and by the impressive visual impact of costume cinema (beginning with Marie Antoinette, Coppola, 2006). The author interrogates how some Italian high-fashion brands’ engagement with spheres of meaning connected to sumptuousness and sophisticated craftsmanship plays an influential role on an international scale, as revealed in big film productions based on a ‘sartorial film aesthetic’, which convey exclusiveness of tastes and spaces, blatant social inequality, and an oneiric projection into a decadent past. She explains cinematic vintage aesthetics against the backdrop of the fashion industry’s not-innovative production politics in the current end-of-fashion era. Drawing on some crucial traits of the historical Baroque, including the centrifugal phenomenon of French Rococo, she also underscores surprising similarities with the contemporary culture of celebrity: the rituals of power in a decadent democracy, a perception of economy as static, the fear of public and private debt accompanied by a cult of luxury and personality, the conflict between the exhibition of wealth and its condemnation.