How to apply time in fashion design like a filmmaker
What cinema teaches fashion designers about memory, references and building across seasons.
By Rosalind Jana
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In the previous instalment of Film as Method, we asked how cinema could teach designers to think about character. Who is the person inside the clothes, and what do those clothes reveal or betray each time they are glimpsed on screen? This chapter goes deeper, exploring the medium that character inhabits: time.
Fashion has always had a double relationship with time. On the one hand, it is shaped by time – specifically, by schedule. The seasonal calendar dictates when something must appear and, implicitly, when it expires. The rhythm this produces can be relentless: the new becomes current, the current becomes passé, and the designer must navigate between staying recognisably themselves and saying something that feels urgent. On the other hand, fashion borrows from time. It is its greatest material, always inviting you to pull from the past, respond to the present, and anticipate what comes next. The academic Elizabeth Wilson observed that fashion resembles photography: both are “poised ambiguously between present and past,” fixing a moment even as that moment begins to recede.
The philosopher Walter Benjamin captured this push and pull with a wonderful image: the Tigersprung, or tiger’s leap. He argued that fashion doesn’t move forward in a straight line. Instead, it leaps – suddenly, often surprisingly – backward into the past, seizing something and plucking it out to give it new life in the present. What he was describing was neither copying or quotation but a productive collision of past and present. Think of the way a particular shoulder line from the ‘40s can arrive in a contemporary collection and feel not dowdy or historically dutiful but oddly right. It holds all its past lives (feminine power meets pragmatism; padded silhouettes rehashed in the ‘80s) whilst being charged with a meaning it didn’t have the first time around. That collision is the tiger’s leap.
Chronology in film, as with the novel, is a decision that shapes everything. Where a story begins, what it withholds, how it layers one moment over another – these decisions form the backbone of its creativity. Perhaps it is useful to think of a collection as a short story and a brand as a longer one built across seasons and, eventually, years. Each instalment sits in conversation with everything that came before and lays the ground for everything yet to come. The three films below each offer a different tool for building that story.
Durée: Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)
Resnais opens his film with two entwined bodies. Are they glittering or covered in ash, or both? You cannot tell, at first, whether what you are seeing is beautiful or horrifying, dreamily erotic or devastatingly destroyed. Times, places, intimate moments, and global horror all collapse into the same image, and the immediate disorientation sets the tone for this melancholy meditation on memory’s continual intrusions into the present.
There is a concept philosophers call durée: lived time, as opposed to clock time. Henri Bergson argued that the past does not disappear into history. Rather, it saturates the present, erupting unpredictably. Resnais’ French protagonist, an actress visiting Hiroshima, falls into an affair with a Japanese architect. Their intimacy unlocks a series of buried memories: a German lover, killed at the Liberation; the punishment she suffered at the hands of both her parents and the wider community for the relationship; and the grief she tried to survive by forgetting. She recounts it at first haltingly and then compulsively, but the telling doesn’t resolve the pain. It just reignites it. By the end, she names the Japanese man after her dead lover: new shape, old grief, patterns playing out again and again.
For designers, the charge in the work, the thing that makes it feel electric, doesn’t come from the reference itself. Rather, it sits in the actual relationship you develop with it through active interrogation: why this, why now, why you. The mood board is the way in, but the work happens when you sit with the material long enough to understand what instinctively drew you there.
Exercise: Take a reference – historical or personal – that feels genuinely alive for you right now. Don’t start with what it looks like. Start with why it matters at this particular moment: what has changed, in the world or in your own work, that makes it mean something new?
Palimpsest: Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983)
At around forty minutes into Sans Soleil, Marker begins to pass his footage through a video synthesiser. The images are processed, distorted, rebuilt and layered over themselves in bright globs of colour and abstracted shapes, creating something that is at once faintly familiar and wholly alien. The point it makes is that every image is already an interpretation, filtered through a dizzying kaleidoscope of memory, desire, taste, bias and cultural habit.
Marker’s documentary essay veers between Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland and San Francisco. He films everything he encounters: television close-ups, brash advertisements, the tidal currents of public transport, processions, protests, Catholic relics and temples devoted to cats. Across years and continents, he accumulates thousands of images. But the film never feels scattered or diluted because it’s seen through one set of eyes and absorbed by one brain. Marker’s sensibility is curious and obsessive, returning again and again to the question of what it means to look, record, and remember. “We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten,” the narrator observes. Later, Marker revisits the San Francisco locations of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, compelled by the idea of time as a never-ending spiral.
For designers producing six or more collections a year, Sans Soleil provides an eloquent answer to a frequently raised problem. Volume is not the enemy of quality, but it can all too easily dilute your point of view. One must develop a strong filter, and an ability to ask the right questions about what you’re seeing and producing. Work fast without that filter and the references accumulate faster than you can process them. The collection starts to feel like a synthesiser with no one operating it.
Exercise: Write a single sentence that states what your current work is actually about – not what it looks like, not its references, not its customer, but the underlying question driving it. How would you articulate it?
Anachrony: La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, 2023)
Arthur, the protagonist of Rohrwacher’s film, moves fugue-like through ‘80s rural Italy in a grubby white suit. He is a British archaeologist turned grave robber, and what makes him valuable to his band of tombaroli is a gift he can’t explain or control. He has a dowsing instinct that locates Etruscan tombs buried beneath the fields.
Arthur is, in the film’s own mythological terms, an Orpheus figure: a man descending repeatedly into the underworld in search of his lost Eurydice. The red thread that runs through the film makes this explicit. It appears first in a dream, taking the form of a loose thread from the dress of Beniamina, his dead lover, which snags on the ground and gets stuck. The thread is an exquisite embodiment of grief in textile form, the perfect image for someone clinging to a person they have lost and will never be able to find again.
What Rohrwacher shows, with great tenderness, is that access to the past is one thing, but you also have to know what to do with it. Arthur’s companions are tomb robbers: they extract objects from the ground, assess them on the basis of their value rather than their meaning, and sell them on. Here we might draw on anachrony: the condition of existing across multiple moments at once, out of sync with a single timeline. For designers, the fast version produces the tomb-robbing outcome. History is extracted without understanding, the aesthetic lifted and the meaning left behind. But Arthur is paralysed by the same problem, even if it arrives clothed differently. His relationship with the past is so consuming it has cost him his present, let alone any idea of a future. A brand with a strong narrative is aware of these potential pitfalls, building something that neither plunders the past nor is held hostage by it.
Exercise: Look at your last three collections – or three consecutive seasons of a brand you admire – as if they were chapters in a longer story. What did each one open up that the next developed? What threads were dropped? What, if anything, is being built toward, still hovering on the horizon?
The tools these three films offer are distinct but cumulative. Durée asks what you feel the pressure of right now, and whether you’re letting that genuinely complicate the work. Palimpsest asks whether your point of view is strong enough to hold a large body of work together. Anachrony asks what you are building across time, and whether each collection knows its place in that longer story. Separately they are methods; together they describe a disposition towards time as something you work with deliberately, rather than something that happens to you one season at a time.
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