Arbiter of style - DIANE PERNET
The Founder Of ASVOFF Tells Us How The Convergence Of Fashion AndFilm Has Re-Ignited Creativity In Style Culture
The communication of fashion, at its very best, is an aesthetic communication of a unique cultural viewpoint through the lens of style. It has little, or nothing, to do with commerce but is about a pure expression of individuality – a celebration of an artistic adornment of the self that projects identity and delineates an alignment with an often subcultural mindset. The last ten years have witnessed a genuinely transformative era in the history of fashion, whereby that pure artistic expression, outside the realm of commerce or advertising, has boldly found its natural home in the film.
This transitional period has been championed in no small part by the singular vision of one woman – the black-clad front-row figure of inimitable cultural provocateur Diane Pernet. With her unmistakable personal style, Pernet is one of the fashion sphere’s most recognizable, multi-faceted, and enduring individuals, and she has almost single-handedly
pioneered the fashion film genre with her much-lauded film festival (ASVOFF) A Shaded View on Fashion, which has screened works by Steven Klein, Bruce Weber, Ellen von Unwerth, and Chris Cunningham; taking into its sway everything from transgender issues to surreal flights of fancy that Magritte would undoubtedly have loved to have had the technology to be able to create.
The festival is now firmly entrenched in the consciousness of the style community, arguably scaling new heights in 2015, being presented at Centre Pompidou, Paris, and presided over by the guest president of the jury, Jean-Paul Gaultier.
With the festival in its ninth year, the founder of ASVOFF tells AUTHOR exactly what she looks for when accepting submissions and why the key element that she seeks out in the work is whether it has something to say in the wider cultural context of the zeitgeist.
“I don’t think you could find
a designer today who doesn’t make fashion films”
-Diane Pernet
“Fashion and film are my two personal passions, but the idea behind ASVOFF was always to reward excellence in a young genre that needed a platform and an environment to nurture the talent behind it, along whatever path it should take. The festival format was important to me because it is a broader, fresher way to connect the fashion and film industries – there has always been a synergy between the two but they’ve never had a dialogue like this before, and there is something about projecting it on the big screen that lets you appreciate fashion film for its true potential. ASVOFF is now in its ninth year, but I actually started my first festival in Los Angeles with the precursor to ASVOFF called ‘You Wear it Well’ at Cinespace on Hollywood Boulevard. That was back in 2006 and, to be honest, it was a struggle to even find enough quality material to do an entire fashion film festival. All that feels like a lifetime ago now.
I don’t think you could find a fashion designer today who doesn’t make fashion films. The growth of fashion film feels exponential to me. To begin with, the technology behind filmmaking itself has become so much more affordable, so fashion film is an accessible genre for everyone – designers, creatives, directors, and photographers, young and old. Bigger budgets usually help, but with enough imagination, talent, and drive, you can still achieve something powerful; you can even make a successful fashion film on a mobile phone so, in that sense, it is such a level playing field.
The other tech dimension is that broadcasting has completely opened up thanks to the internet, so we can build critical mass audiences and even nurture niche sub-genre audiences all around the world for fashion films in a way that wouldn’t have been possible before. And let’s not forget that video-enabled social media is a perfect distribution channel for short film genres; they’re a natural fit for viral content. It’s really a perfect storm where technology has converged with the emergence of the fashion film genre.
Fashion film needs an annual festival like ASVOFF to chronicle and critique it – because it is such a dynamic genre that is constantly evolving in tandem with these parallel technologies that are evolving so fast. When we are judging the entries for ASVOFF the more important criteria is that the films have to be moving and touch us. I want to see something that takes my breath away. For the Grand Prize, I try to direct the jury to use the sort of criteria that we’d use assessing any good film – narrative, great acting, great camerawork, editing, the list goes on and on. I mean, we have to keep in mind that fashion should somehow be the protagonist in the film, but that doesn’t mean it should overpower the film. On the contrary, the fashion element can be extremely subtle and still be powerful.
We have different prizes, so we look for what moves us about the sound design, the art direction, the acting, the styling, and so on. If the film has been made by an emerging talent, then we ask ourselves what the film says about their future as well as what it says in itself. We also try to keep in mind the context and the purpose of each film – for example, how it fits into the wider cultural context or the state of the world. It is a matter of taking the whole package into consideration while leaving yourself open to feeling something visceral that points you in the direction of a particular film instinctively.
There have been so many high points so far, but for me, one of them has to be the whole family of Alejandro Jodorowsky doing a panel discussion after the screening of Dance of Reality. I’d wanted Alejandro for six years, and in 2014 it became a reality. Also, every moment spent with Jean Paul Gaultier was incredible. He was a genius President of the Jury and a great master of ceremonies for the closing two years ago. I cannot find enough words to express the total joy of working with him.”
CREDITS
By John-Paul Pryor
Pictures by Miguel Villalobos and Alan Gelati
