Luca Guadagnino’s On-Going Film Affair with Fashion

If you’ve ever caught me in conversation about the 2009 film “I Am Love” – it’s never really a quick discourse. I always feel compelled to go on and on about the artfully presented sensory overload by Luca Guadagnino. You simply cannot talk about “I Am Love” without about talking about the performance of the beautifully clothed Tilda Swinton. And it comes at no surprise, the entire film had been costumed by Raf Simons for Jil Sander – which now upon his exit will live forever in vaults of fashion history. Guadagnino’s strong suite is leaving a vision behind for his viewer to understand the intricacies of emotion in image, aesthetics and fashion.

I’ve always been fascinated about the idea of what makes watching strong fashion in film so appealing to me. It’s been this obsession of mine that I can’t seem to quit for quite some time now. Silvia Venturini Fendi, the producer and stylist of “I Am Love” said in an interview once that “There is a sort of osmosis between fashion and cinema, there’s give and take. So we designers are often inspired by films and we also collaborate with films. Both our jobs [are] to create strong emotion. The difference is that a movie remains impressed on film and the fashion work is destined to pass very quickly.”  But even still there’s a synchronicity between fashion and film that cannot be denied.

Putting down the last puzzle piece of the interlocking relation between fashion and film, Guadagnino puts his best foot forward with a newly released short film for Sergio Rossi’s Fall/Winter 2012 collection. Evoking that sense of discovery into one’s self, he explores the body of a woman and the sexuality that steams from the eroticism of her shoes. She dresses and undresses in Sergio Rossi, which conveys a sentiment: wearing Sergio Rossi will give you the sexual power to desire and be desired. Although through advertising, Guadagnino permits us to look deeper – to interpret the things we wear, into how we perceive ourselves.