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ABSTRACT
This article focuses on how the study of costume contributes to the interdisciplinary nature of fashion studies and film studies. How vital the study of costume is as intersection of history, fashion, politics, art and culture, can be answered through exploring the costumes in Kinugasa Teinosuke's 1953 Japanese period film, Jigokumon (Gate of Hell) (1953). The reality that fashion, economies. technologies, inventions, identities and politics are inextricably entwined and that film costume must reflect that consolidation is complexly evident in the film.
KEYWORDS
costume
Japan
Heian
Kinugasa Teinosuke
film
fashion
kimono
juni hitoe
A vital question was posed at the 2015 Film and Fashion Symposium: Exploring the Intersection between Fashion and Film Studies - how does the study of costume contribute to the interdisciplinary nature of fashion studies and film studies? How vital the study of costume is, as an intersection of history, fashion, politics, art and culture, can be answered by exploring the costumes in Kinugasa Teinosuke's 1953 Japanese period film, Jigokumon (Gate of Hell). The reality that fashion, economies, technologies, inventions, identities and politics are inextricably entwined, and that film costume must reflect that consolidation is complexly evident in Gate of Hell. In unexpected understated ways the film reveals how widespread the meaning of fashion is and how far and how deep into national consciousness fashion reaches. The film conveys the power of fashion with polemical directness and uses costume design's adaptation of historical dress to convey a political message. Set in twelfth century Japan, at the fall of the Heian period, an era spanning almost 400 years from 794 to 1185 and known as the Golden Age, this lavish film uses its costumes to convey something the script, in a censored post Second World War Japan, would not or could not reveal.
Gate of Hell's costume designer Wada Sanzo created designs that precisely reflected the original Heian fashions, but he used two inaccuracies, both associated with the kimono, Japan's iconic garment and so strong a living part of its material culture that, as kimono historian Liza Dalby notes, 'clothing and wearer merge' (1993: 4). The kimono was not known in Heian times, not appearing as what became recognized as the true kimono form for another three centuries but, through the...