Fashion and cinema share a language that recounts the time, style and tensions of an era. Between iconic costumes and memorable shots, clothing becomes history, the body becomes scenery, and vision becomes experience. It is on this common ground that the story of Cinemoda Club took root in Milan
by Domenico Casoria
During Fashion Week in September, the dialogue between fashion and cinema entered the city’s historic cinemas with a retrospective curated by Gian Luca Farinelli, critic and director of Cinema Modernissimo and Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, and promoted by Vogue Italia and Kering. This initiative celebrated the narrative power of clothing and the evocative force of the screen, intertwining stories, desires and identities in motion.
The story of Cinemamoda Club
The exhibition literally occupied three symbolic locations of Milanese culture – the Cinema Arlecchino, the Mexico and the Palestrina – with a selection of 36 titles that redefined the relationship between fashion and costume. From auteur masterpieces to generational cult classics, from independent documentaries to more radical visions, each film showed that clothing is never just decoration but language, gesture, and statement. In Antonioni’s “Le Amiche”, for example, fashion becomes an emotional and social landscape, a mirror of a changing Turin. In other films, clothing is a mask, armour, a dream. A device that tells us who we are, who we would like to be, and who we can no longer be.
The same language
Valeria Golino, actress, director and patron of the initiative, emphasised this very point: ‘Cinema and fashion speak the same language: that of imagination, transformation and desire’. And Cinemoda Club was able to give substance to this statement, involving experts, directors and the public in a shared experience, where each screening was also an invitation to look beyond the surface, to read the fabric of images as one reads a plot.
Fashion at the centre
Born after the success of Nouvelle Vogue in Bologna, Cinemoda Club once again put fashion at the centre, not only as an industry or trend, but as a living archive of gestures, bodies and eras. And cinema, with its ability to fix and reinvent time, became the ideal accomplice to bring it to the stage. Among the films screened were “Vacanze Romane” by William Wyler, “Cosetta” by Clarence G. Badger, “Tacchi a spillo” by Pedro Almodóvar, “Mademoiselle C” by Fabien Constant, “Pretty Woman” by Garry Marshall, and “8 ½” by Federico Fellini. Cinemoda Club was just that: a space for viewing and discussion, where fashion was able to express itself not as a surface, but as depth. And in an era of rapid images and fast consumption, it slowed down time, inviting us to look, remember and imagine. Because every dress, like every frame, can hold a story.
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