How many ways can you define an artist? By describing his training, his artistic intentions, his journey to arrive at a certain type of vision. Whatever the art form chosen, numerous elements show its evolution, the generative starting point which determined this vision, without necessarily being linked solely to one’s own artistic credo. Very often, when we analyze the evolutionary and artistic journey of a directorwe forget, like what happens in music, to consider to what extent the aesthetics and use of personal clothing influenced his periods, his themes, the expression of what he really wanted to show in relation to what his imagination communicated to him at that moment. Just as an original soundtrack highlights and shows the non-verbal language that a director chooses to reveal to his audience, a journey even more internal than the narration itself, fashion, with its multiple facets, offers new visions social and artistic, rooted in popular culture, to the point of becoming the perfect synthesis of his artistic genius. If among contemporary directors, it is an element that we constantly find, a form of thought resulting from the ever greater fusion of the arts where music, cinema and fashion come together in an aesthetic and sensory unity, the father of this fusion is none other than David Lynchin the representation of an American dream where the terror and fragility of contemporary society emerged through a unique and controversial style.
A few hours before the death of the most influential cinematic genius of our time, we remember David Lynch by tracing his style over the years. From his personal wardrobe to the colors of Blue Velvetinfluences of Twin Peaks in the collections at collaborations mode signed Lynch.
David Lynch’s personal style
As Chris Wallace told Esquire, the septuagenarian director dresses with the modesty of a worker from his hometown of Missoula. “The proportions of his puffed sleeve cuffs (too long) and the cut of his Miles Davis coat (too wide for today’s standards, cut short) are a perfect illustration of the American rural style. The look is severe and distinctive. It is a uniform, and the fact that Lynch adopts it testifies to Flaubert’s principle that an artist must be regular and orderly in life in order to be violent and original in his work.. Perhaps this is why his appearance, with his button on the collar, is in perfect opposition to his films, which are so wildly unbridled.
Colors in Blue Velvet
The panoramic view that opens Blue Velvet with the bright colors of the bright white fence, the artificial blue sky and the bright red of a freshly picked rose, perfectly illustrates what David Lynch represented America in the 90s: externally perfect but internally dark and menacing . And this opposition, just like the musical choice to reinterpret Bobby Vinton’s classic, has been an ideal source of inspiration for many stylists and artistic directors, among whom are surely Raf Simons et Rei Kawakubowho knew how to draw out its multiple facets.
In their different ways of understanding Lynch’s work, they exploited the different function of sound that the director manipulates between silence and musical introspection. On the one hand, Like Boysin the SS16 collection entitled Blue Witchesinterpreted, through the imagination of Blue Velvetthe configuration of women misunderstood and avoided by society – not unlike the character of Dorothy Vallens, played by Isabella Rossellini – and on the other, Raf Simons designed his FW 2019 men’s collection in Paris by integrating the distressing silence, encouraging the viewer to get involved in the underground unknown that the blue velvet curtain seeks to reveal.
Costumes in Twin Peaks
Each David Lynch film is filled with multiple scenic elements that manifest its metaphorical purpose, such as the evil plasticity of Los Angeles and the world of Hollywood in Mulholland Drivemagnified by the costumes by Amy Stofsky, or the “romantic” representation of the road trip in Wild at Heartwith studs and python jackets. But it’s the fashion to Twin Peaks which truly marked and continues to mark American pop culture and beyond. As Professor Catherine Spooner analyzes in Return to Twin Peaks: New Approaches to Materiality, Theory and Genre on Televisionthe rebel, the cheerleader, the prom queen, the FBI agent or the eccentric hippie, all have a recognizable look that helps define their role within the community. Even the anonymous Scottish fisherman gear worn by Pete Martell indicates his lack of an identifiable role.
-There is often something slightly strange and dark about Patricia Norris costumesjust like in the apparent tranquility of the town of Twin Peaks, where each element serves to explain the clues left to discover Laura Palmer’s murderer. “The look created was intentionally timeless, showing the universality of life in small-town America, and highly specific, reflecting David Lynch’s particular vision. The style of Twin Peaks is both highly recognizable and intensely strange, highlighting what we think we know but disrupting it all at the same time. Recognizable archetypes should reassure us – the biker, the truck driver, the waitress – but they end up destabilizing us. And the most influential costumes on contemporary fashion are the strangest, like the mysterious Miss Twin Peaks, whose layered tweed and oversized glasses seem to blend perfectly with Prada’s style..
This iconicity has become a key narrative element for numerous fashion shows, among which we undoubtedly find the always eclectic work of Raf Simons, who for his FW 2016 men’s collection, Nightmares and Dreams, dedicated an unconditional homage to Lynch’s work. , not only through the formation of clothing that incorporated the American aesthetic elements that costume designer Patricia Norris had designed for the series, “destroying the norms and ideals imposed on young people in small-town America”but also through the construction of the decor in which the models walked through a maze of twisted and rotating wooden walls, reminiscent of the entrance to the Black Lodge, where only the voice of Angelo Badalamenti, the director’s favorite composer, guided the flow, explaining the creative process that leads to the composition of Laura Palmer’s theme, without dissociating Lynch’s cinematographic vision from his sonic ideal.
Lynch’s collaborations with the fashion world
If the fashion world has used his aesthetic, the director of Missoula entered it gradually, contributing to the creation of certain campaigns that have become iconic. The direction of the dreamlike short film Lady Blue Shanghaicentered on the iconoclastic imagination of Diorin which the protagonist Marion Cotillard lost herself in the night of Shanghai, in perpetual conflict between dream and reality, just like the advertisement for Gucci in 2008, without forgetting the artistic direction of Kenzo’s FW fashion show in 2014, where he designed both the set and the soundtrack. Although his aesthetic style seems sober, almost closed in his rural American vision, his idea of production and sound has always been daring, multimodal, fitting perfectly with what the fashion industry expresses today through its collections and its missions, in an ever more interconnected artistic marriage.
