Description
Working across film, photography, advertising and performance art, the Anglo-Scots performer Tilda Swinton is represented in fashion media and journalistic discourses as a transnational creative collaborator with an artistic vision, rather than yet another manufactured celebrity-influencer whose raison d’être resides in their image. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach drawing upon film, fashion, media and cultural studies, this paper will critically examine two examples of Swinton’s cross-media representation: her costuming for her dual performance as Julie and Rosalind in Joanna Hogg’s film The Eternal Daughter (2022), and her styling for the ‘Personal History’ shoot by Tim Walker for American fashion publication W Magazine in October 2023.I will argue that within her transmedia representation, past and present, myth and reality intersect. Heirloom garments, luxury fashion, and costume design combine to create fantastical visual narratives in which the ghosts of Swinton’s ancestors haunt the explorations of ageing gendered identities. Through costume, fashion, the body and performance, Swinton is enmeshed in a material connection with her mother on and beyond the screen. Through the cross-media visual narratives of doubling and duality, wearing heirloom garments offers a particular resonance to the structures of feeling that pervade the film and the editorial shoot. Bodies and intergenerational identities become symbiotic as the haptic engagement with clothing offers a balm for the dislocation that pervades loss and grief. Whilst Swinton’s privilege places her in a unique position personally and professionally in terms of her access to and consumption of garments and accessories, such representations raise pertinent questions about the items that signify our connections in a context of loss; of what is kept, worn and treasured, versus what is discarded.
| Period | 5 Sept 2025 → 7 Sept 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Transcultural Fashion/Costume Narratives |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | HungaryShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |