Fashion Movie

A movie — a motion picture — is a story or event recorded by a camera as a set of moving images and shown in a theatre or on television. A fashion movie is a motion picture relevant to fashion: clothing, footwear and fashion accessories are central to its story, its setting or its look, and the best of them have shaped how the public imagines the fashion industry itself.

Movies Versus Fashion Videos

A fashion movie is usually a large production with a director, cast members, editors and a sound crew, typically running at least an hour and a half — though length is not a requirement — and costing considerably more to produce than a video. A fashion video can be a few seconds or feature length: anyone with video capability can make one, from a photographer filming a model on a runway at fashion week to a person filming themselves trying on outfits from their wardrobe to post as an OOTD — Outfit of the Day — video online.

The distinction matters because the two forms do different work. Movies build the industry's mythology — its workplaces, characters and dramas — while videos carry its daily commerce and commentary. Fashion documentaries, covered in their own summary linked from this page, sit between the forms: full productions, but made to inform rather than to dramatise.

The Fashion Films People Actually Watch

The widely loved list mixes workplace drama, biography and comedy: The Devil Wears Prada inside a fashion magazine; Coco Before Chanel on the designer's early life; Breakfast at Tiffany's and its little black dress; Clueless and Pretty in Pink — in which the heroine famously makes her own dress — for fashion as teenage self-invention; Confessions of a Shopaholic and Legally Blonde for comedy; Sex and the City and Zoolander, the industry's own satire of itself; and Kinky Boots, where footwear saves a factory.

Alongside them sit the industry portraits: Prêt-à-Porter on the Paris collections, Valentino: The Last Emperor as documentary biography, Gia on the modelling world, and Garmento inside the garment trade. The fashion movies directory linked from this page catalogues the genre properly, and the fashion videos summary covers the shorter form.

How Fashion Movies Shape the Industry's Image

Most people's picture of fashion work comes from films rather than from the industry, which gives fashion movies a quiet power. The magazine editor of The Devil Wears Prada, the ateliers of the Chanel films, the factory rescue of Kinky Boots — these become the public's working model of jobs that hundreds of thousands of people actually do in less cinematic forms. The industry lives with both effects: glamour that draws talented newcomers toward fashion careers, and expectations those careers then have to correct. Watching the classics with that double effect in mind is the most instructive way to enjoy them.